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All That Breathes director Shaunak Sen's next tells the story of his own cancer battle: ‘A way to displace the terror’
Shaunak Sen, whose film All That Breathes, earned an Oscar nomination in 2023, has been battling renal cancer since last year.
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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.
Shaunak Sen on dealing with ‘terror’
In an interview with AFP, the 39-year-old filmmaker opened up about his upcoming untitled documentary. “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's All That Breathes follows two brothers running a largely self-funded clinic for birds falling victim to Delhi's polluted air. It won top documentary prizes at Sundance and Cannes in 2022 and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2023 Oscars.
“Whenever you ask most oncologists why this happened, or why this current giant spike in cancer rates is occurring, a lot of them would talk about environmental factors like toxins or chemicals or the air,” he added.
About Shaunak Sen's new film
Shaunak says the protagonist in his new film is not him, but his doctor. “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 Sen's cancer diagnosis
In January 2025, the filmmaker opened up about his cancer diagnosis on social media. 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. 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. 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.
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