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Writer-director Shaunak Sen channels personal low into TIFF-bound Termite: I’m interested in human and animal ensembles
Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Shaunak Sen’s fiction debut Termite had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on September 11.
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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.
Featuring Faisal Malik and Valavane Koumarane as termite exterminators, Shaunak started working on his projects after he was diagnosed with kidney cancer soon after the Oscars.
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.
He tells HT City, “I'm interested in human and animal ensembles or human-animal entanglements, especially in urban areas and the ways in which non-human life kind of intertwines with not just human sociopolitical life but also emotional lives. And, being a Delhite, almost all my projects are set there.”
On how it all started, he says, “Like not long after the Oscars, I accidentally got a shock diagnosis of kidney cancer. Obviously that kind of completely gobsmacks you and my way of coping with it was to start filming everything that was happening with me also shooting this one team of surgeons whose work I was very interested in.”
In that period two of his friends got married. "My closest friend and business partner was getting married the week before my diagnosis and another very close friend was getting married separately. I was very happy for them but alongside I had this strange feeling that my life was kind of falsified and kind of static while everyone else is moving ahead. That made me think a lot about male friendships, but also about urban male loneliness."
He explains, "There are many studies that suggest that something happens in the late 40s or early 50s, especially with men, where a lot of their close friendships loosen. It’s an extreme version of depression and the sense of being on your own. Either your work or your family takes so much from you that you don't know how you're going to cope in terms of, work in terms of friendship.”
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. 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.”
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."
Sen says he would like to take it to the Oscars. “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. I don't know what the journey will be. 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. “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.”
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. 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”
The film also stars Shilpa Shukla. The film follows two friends (Faisal and Valavane) whose lives are disrupted by an unexpected marriage proposal.
