Indian Oscar-nominated filmmaker turns camera on his cancer
The untitled documentary centers on Sen’s surgeon and links his recovery to Delhi’s pollution, which a 2024 study tied to 3.8 million deaths in India.
- Indian filmmaker Shaunak Sen began an untitled documentary project as a coping mechanism following a shock cancer diagnosis, and he has had surgery while continuing his long road to recovery.
- New Delhi, home to 30 million residents, is regularly ranked among the world's most polluted capitals, and Sen said his diagnosis brought home the "same risks" that make birds fall from the city's polluted skies.
- Sen's surgeon serves as the central protagonist in the work, whose ability to "completely lose yourself" during operations provides meditative focus; Sen said filming was a "way to not look directly at a scary thing."
- While continuing his established motifs of environmental degradation and caregiving, this project marks a departure from his acclaimed documentaries "All That Breathes" and "Cities of Sleep" by adopting a more personalized lens.
- Sen is also preparing to screen "Termite", his fiction short film about two termite exterminators in Delhi, at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
12 Articles
12 Articles
Indian Oscar-nominated filmmaker turns camera on his cancer
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 about his as-yet-untitled project, in an …
Indian director Shonak Sen turned his experience with cancer into a new documentary project in an effort to deal with the shock of diagnosis and to address his fears through the camera while continuing his research on environmental and health issues that had been the focus of his previous work. A 39-year-old Sin said that the film that had not yet settled on his title had begun... an Indian director who documented his fight with cancer behind th…
The Indian director named to the Oscars for a documentary about birds victims of pollution has decided to film his disease. One way of... Read the article Shaunak Sen filmed the sick birds of New Delhi, he now tells his own cancer appeared first on The Singleer.
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