In late 2024, Shaunak Sen—Academy Award-nominated director of All That Breathes, one of the most acclaimed documentaries out of India in recent years—was diagnosed with early-stage cancer. A routine scan threw up a 'shock diagnosis' of a malignant tumour in his kidney. He underwent partial nephrectomy (kidney surgery) and the cancer was excised from his body. He has since been in survivorship care in Delhi. And while the crisis derailed a project Sen was meant to shoot next—a film set in the Sundarbans—it also led him to his next documentary.
"My only way of coping and disassociating with all that was happening was to start filming everything," Sen recalled during a masterclass at the Monsoon Film Festival, joining via Zoom. He described the experience as 'stumbling into a film at gunpoint'. The endeavour has since ballooned into a major production, he disclosed, set in a New Delhi hospital and exploring Sen's recovery through the perspective of the doctor treating him.
"It started with an incipient interest in what was happening to me and soon became a portrait of the interior life of a surgeon in a bustling hospital in New Delhi. It's essentially a two-hander between myself and a surgeon in a vascular surgery team, shot over two intense years of filming at a giant hospital."
Initially filming on his own, Sen was joined by his steadfast team of collaborators and associates from his previous films. "It was obviously gobsmacking to get this diagnosis, that too asymptomatically. The team that has worked with me all these years started capturing everything, including my mother's reaction when she first heard of it."
As you'd expect to hear from the maker of All That Breathes and Cities of Sleep—Sen's 2015 portraiture of impoverished sleepers in Delhi—the new film is not a work of 'self-congratulatory martyrdom' or introspective overindulgence.
"There is a consonance that runs through all my films. If All That Breathes had to do with the toxicity in the city becoming a suturing thread between human and non-human lives, this has now become about that same thing—the toxicity—literally coming into my own body."
Despite the gravity of the context, Sen insists he is not making a 'grim' film.
"A hospital is really not just a place of grimness," he disclaims. "It's as much a place of fortitude as it is a place of the absurd, the comical, the banal and anticlimactic. Furthermore, my protagonist being a surgeon is someone who has a unique vantage point into the human body. So it's that kind of a world and mental process that I am interested in capturing."
Sen has a clutch of other projects, both as director and producer, that will be announced soon. He was recently named as a mentor for a ₹40,00,000 co-production fund for independent filmmakers in India. He is also executive producer on Yashasvi Juyal's The Ink Stained Hand & The Missing Thumb, which had its world premiere at the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in July.