Indian film director Shaunak Sen began work on a new documentary as a way to cope with the shocking cancer diagnosis, yet it retains themes of environmental degradation and patient care characteristic of his previous works.
Sen's new project, which is untitled for now, focuses on a surgeon rather than the director himself. The film continues the line of his work by addressing issues similar to those that cause hundreds of birds to die annually due to Delhi's polluted air.
Sen, who is 39 years old, told an interview from his home in New Delhi that creating the film became a kind of coping strategy or a way to distance himself from the horror he learned about his health. He noted that the diagnosis brought him the same risks as those threatening birds in New Delhi's 'suffocating' air, but now these risks concern his own body.
He mentioned that many oncologists attribute the rise in cancer incidence to environmental factors such as chemicals, toxins, or air quality. New Delhi and its vast metropolitan region of 30 million people regularly appear on lists of the world's most polluted capitals due to emissions from power plants, heavy traffic, and the burning of waste and crops.
According to a study published in The Lancet Planetary Health in 2024, approximately 3.8 million deaths in India between 2009 and 2019 were linked to air pollution.
Sen emphasized that he did not want to create something that was 'solipsistically inward-turning.' His new film resonates with his picture 'All That Breathes,' where the central emotional theme is caring for others. He highly praised the surgeon's ability to fully immerse himself in the present moment, which feels like a meditative and contemplative process that allows one to discard everything superfluous.
Furthermore, the film reflects Sen's relationship with New Delhi—the city where he grew up, studied, and where all his creative work takes place. He called the city the 'wallpaper of this film,' noting that in this case, this 'wallpaper' affects him, and he reacts to it through a more personal lens than before.
Previously, in 2016, Sen released his debut documentary 'Cities of Sleep,' which examined the issue of homelessness in the city through the prism of sleep. Sen also plans to present his first fictional short film 'Termite' at the Toronto International Film Festival in September; the plot is based on two pest controllers in Delhi.
Nevertheless, due to the nature of his latest project, it inevitably differs from his previous works. Sen's ethnographic approach to cinematography involves prolonged observation of characters to, as he put it, 'obtain or slowly release certain answers.' He admitted deep pleasure in this process, adding that time rewards chance, and it would be foolish to claim that he 'gave this film time.'
Despite having undergone surgery, Sen continues a long recovery journey. Filming the movie became for him a way to 'not look directly at the terrible thing' and to 'aesthetically transform it into a project so as not to stare at it in the grim eyes of what it actually is,' calling it 'sort of fraudulent.'