Indian filmmaker Shaunak Sen is turning his lens inwards for his new documentary after the Oscar-nominated All That Breathes.
In a recent interview, the filmmaker said that his next film began as a “coping” mechanism after a shock cancer diagnosis, but continues the motifs of environmental degradation and caregiving from his previous work.
About Shaunak Sen’s new film
In an interview with AFP, the 39-year-old filmmaker opened up about his upcoming untitled documentary. In January 2025, the filmmaker opened up about his cancer diagnosis on social media. October end, during a checkup for an autoimmune thing, I got a shock diagnosis: a routine scan revealed a small malignant tumour in the kidney.
“I did not want to make something that was solipsistically inwards folding. 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. It’s a kind of melting away of everything extraneous, and you’re in the pinprick of the moment,” he added. The film is also about Sen’s relationship with New Delhi, where he grew up, went to school and university, and where all his work is set. The filmmaker called the city a ‘wallpaper’ for the film. Shaunak took to Instagram to talk about the health scare. He also shared several pictures of the hospital. One showed him in a hospital bed, and others featured his friends who visited him in the hospital, including director Mira Nair and Tillotama Shome. “Bit of an absurd update. Utter bolt from the blue. No kidney-related symptoms, no hereditary history, no big history of drinking/smoking. Urgent surgery was advised,” Shaunak wrote in the note.
“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,” he said, adding that his 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”. Shaunak says the protagonist in his new film is not him, but his doctor.
