Turning The Camera

Indian filmmaker Shaunak Sen's new documentary began as a "coping" mechanism after a shock cancer diagnosis, but continues the motifs of environmental degradation and caregiving that drove his previous work. Sen's "All That Breathes", which follows two brothers running a largely self-funded clinic for birds falling victim to Delhi's polluted air, won top documentary prizes at Sundance and Cannes in 2022 and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2023 Oscars.

"It became a kind of coping strategy, or a way to deal or dissociate or displace the terror of what you've just been told," Sen, 39, told AFP. The diagnosis brought home "the same risks" that make hundreds of birds fall every year from New Delhi's throat-burning polluted skies -- this time on "my own body".

The city as wallpaper

The central protagonist in Sen's new work is not the filmmaker himself but his surgeon. "I did not want to make something that was solipsistically inwards folding," he said. "What I loved in a surgeon was the ability to completely lose yourself, to be immersed in the absolute present. That feels meditative and contemplative."

The film is also about Sen's relationship with New Delhi, where he grew up. "The city is the wallpaper of this film. In this case, the wallpaper is doing things to me, and I'm kind of reacting to it." A 2024 study in The Lancet Planetary Health estimated that 3.8 million deaths in India between 2009 and 2019 were linked to air pollution. Sen is also heading to the Toronto International Film Festival to screen "Termite", his first fiction short.