Academy Award-nominated documentary All That Breathes (2022) director Shaunak Sen ‘s fiction debut Termite has premiered as an official selection at Toronto International Film Festival 2026 (TIFF) in the Short Cuts Programme.
We have seen him (Faisal) in coming roles, and he keeps joking around but he is a very serios person and actor. An actor’s point is to act, what he is like in real life is irrelevant. I have co-write the film with my assistant Pew Banerjee.
Most of my team members are working with me for 10 years and none of them have gone to a film school” On zeroing on the cast, he says, “ I knew Vipin’s (Sharma, actor) work and my team members were fan of Faisal’s work in Panchayat while I had seen Tamil actor V’s film so that’s how they came on board.
“I was lucky last time as my film won at Sundance, went into Cannes and won a prize at Cannes and then had Oscar (for Best Documentary Feature in 2023) and BAFTA nominations. During All That Breathes , I’d actually filmed a character who was a termite exterminator, but subsequently I kind of lost touch and he didn’t make it into the film. Sen, who is currently in Denmark editing his next documentary feature film, will be reaching TIFF soon after he got stuck due to some visa issues.
Thus arrived his subject. “So, I was very interested in the sense of the really fragile, precarious emotional subtleties that male friendships go through and in this I was interested in the metaphor of termites. He brought that research into play. “I already had research on termite pest control people and that felt like it was an adequate metaphor for a sense of entropy – not just physical entropy or decay, but also, kind of an invisible emotional entropy – and that’s how this film kind of developed. I don’t know what the journey will be. “ One doesn’t think of any awards or festivals. We make it with as much authentic integrity as one can. If I think about it will be a path towards unhappiness, right? It was like my first fiction, so it was like an experimental dip. The film also stars Shilpa Shukla. The film follows two friends (Faisal and Valavane) whose lives are disrupted by an unexpected marriage proposal.
Sen says he would like to take it to the Oscars. We will try a campaign for Oscars but whether it’s this year or next year is not sure,” he says and explains, “Once you get into the festival circuit you understand the global market and the myopic certitudes about Mumbai being the be all and end all dissolves away and we can be speaking to both (markets). The filmmaker says chasing awards never comes to his mind.
