The Berlin Film Festival (February 13-23) will see the world premiere of the Bengali-language Shadowbox (Baksho Bondi) by editor Tanushree Das and cinematographer Saumyananda Sahi. Das and Sahi, who are married to each other, are Film and Television Institute of India alumni who have collaborated on several independent projects, including Sahi’s documentary Remembering Kurdi), Prateek Vats’s Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019) and Kislay’s Aise Hee (2019). Sahi’s credits as cinematographer include the streaming series Trial By Fire (2023) and Black Warrant (2025).
Apart from Das and Sahi, other Indian titles are making a strong showing at Berlin this year, including Natesh Hegde’s Vaghachipani, a haunting tale of vice and ambition in rural Karnataka. Kush Badhwar and Vyjayanthi Rao’s installation Beneath the Placid Lake is about the displacement from a dam project in Telangana, while Ruse is a short film by Rhea Shukla.
Shadowbox is the sensitively observed, intimate story of a working-class woman’s heroic efforts to keep her household from falling apart. Maya (Tillotama Shome) is married to Sundar (Chandan Bisht) a former Army soldier from Uttarakhand with severe anxiety. Maya juggles several jobs to ensure food on the table as well as keep her teenaged son Debu (Sayan Karmakar) at school. When Sundar goes missing, Maya’s precariously ordered existence is seriously threatened.
Set in Barrackpore, Shadowbox draws from Das’s memories of her parents. In an interview, 44-year-old Das and 38-year-old Sahi traced the origins of Shadowbox, their stylistic choices and the challenges of creating a cinematic project together. Here are edited excerpts.
How did Shadowbox come into being – was the inspiration an image, a conversation, or something else?
Tanushree Das: It was a dream image. The story was initially titled Mother. Kalbaisakhi [a nor’wester] has come, and all the clothes are flying. My mother is struggling to grab the clothes. I’m a small kid and I’m running after her. Though we’re trying not to get drenched, she starts playing with me and we get entangled in the clothes. It becomes this embrace, and then the rain comes.
It was a combination of watching my mother work all the time and the love that we share, the love I feel from her. I told Saumyananda about this image, and we fell in love with it.
But this evocative dream sequence isn’t there in the film.
Saumyananda Sahi: We did have dreams in the film. There were discussions about what Maya’s dreams could be. This was a very fertile conversation between us, Tillotama, the producers. Until the time of the shoot, we had dream sequences. Then we realised that we didn’t want them.
Tillotama often talks about how the ghosts of all the drafts helped her. In this case, we are glad we had those discussions and some residue of that stayed on.
The film is realistic without being gritty, hopeful while acknowledging the family’s problems. How did you crack the tonality?
Tanushree Das: In 2018, after we had arrived at a certain story line, my father passed away. This film is inspired in many ways by my parents’ love story and what they went through. It was a hard love. My father had depression, which we came to know much later. We didn’t understand his behaviour as kids. By the time we did, it was too late.
While the love was very hard, I saw my mother stick to it like a rebellion. For me, making the film dark wasn’t enough. I wanted to understand where that hope, that resilience, that kindness comes from.
Although Saumyananda is my partner, he was also one step removed. That gave me the distance to study the situation.
Saumyananda Sahi: The story came from Tanushree’s life. We shot it in her hometown, in a language that I was just beginning to understand. The writing process was about untangling our knots, of understanding each other, understanding her childhood.
For the longest time, we didn’t write out the script. We had scenes written on postcards, which we would work on over and over again. In each scene, we tried to collapse a life, in a way. We tried to bring in things from Maya’s history, such as the rebellion of her marriage, or Sundar leaving the Army.
We were keen on using the device of ellipsis. The linearity wasn’t so important.
Maya’s house is like a character in the film – it’s where we see the magnitude of her situation, but it’s also a kind of refuge from the outside world.
Tanushree Das: For us, who lives in which house became very important.
Maya’s house has a sense of being separate, being different because she lives in it. She doesn’t have the time or means to take care of her house. Her brother's house has colours and lots of things because he can afford it since he’s middle class.
We have the Haldar household where Maya works, which is a classic bhadralok house with a past glory that is slowly waning. Each person’s house is an extension of who they are. We meticulously actually curated this since we’re not saying so many things. Everything in the mise en scene should indicate something.
Saumyananda Sahi: The process of location scouting was parallel to casting. Since we were using ellipses, not going into backstories or explaining many aspects, it was important to key these things into the locations. It was also a way to talk about character.
Saumyananda, tell us about how you approached Shadowbox as a cinematographer.
Saumyananda Sahi: One choice was in terms of using a widescreen aspect ratio. We didn’t shoot with shallow focus. We kept a lot of the background visible, which was to make the space part of the story.
As the film progresses, we narrow into faces, into the conversation between husband and wife, into the events that have caused a certain shift between them. For this main conversation, we took out the background completely and lit only the faces.
We wanted to do something similar with the sound. The opening minutes of the film has much more layers of sound in terms of the neighbours’ houses, the arguments going on down the road. We worked on the details with sound designer Gautam Nair to make us feel that we are in Barrackpore.
The film is also a portrait of a suburb. We wanted to reference many aspects of that in the background. I don’t know if anyone will notice, but we had actors dressed as soldiers.
Tanushree Das: Barrackpore is the oldest cantonment, and is a training centre for soldiers. It’s a place where this story could have happened, where a Bengali girl could have met a chap from Uttarakhand.
You are on level with the characters, and then you move in on them.
Tanushree Das: We were dealing with mental distress, and we were very clear that we wanted to understand it from the emotional point of view. We are not experts. We wanted to understand the situation that Maya and Debu go through as caregivers, and see this man with love through their eyes and never judge his position.
Saumyananda Sahi: We didn’t want to take a clinical angle. We’re trying to take a leap of understanding, but we also cannot explain or presume anything.
You studied at the Film and Television Institute of India, whose curriculum exposes you to the vastness of world cinema. How do you carve out your own paths while being steeped in cinephilia?
Saumyananda Sahi: Our documentary background saves us, because in documentary, you don’t go with a preconceived idea. You hope for a conversation with reality that is always new. We lived in Barrackpore for a year before we shot the film, so we didn’t go in with a palette.
Tanushree Das: A lot of magic happened to us during this film, including our producers. There’s some magic in the climax scene too. It took several takes. I will give the credit to the actors, with the acting workshop by Anamika Haksar.
By this time, Tillotama had stayed with the script for very long. Sundar too is a very spontaneous actor, who brings these little flares now and then and you have to catch them because they are innocent and beautiful. It was the first take that we used. We had plans to do other things. This is what the couple had from many years ago.
Saumyananda Sahi: The flowers in Maya’s hand in that scene – we didn’t write it. Tillotama plucked the flowers and said, can I use them?
Tanushree Das: This is again from documentary, because the beauty of documentary is that it’s full of accidents.
Why did you cast Tillotama Shome as Maya?
Tanushree Das: I remember watching [Mira Nair’s] Monsoon Wedding. Can I use the word shock? I was like, how is this person 3D? Tillotama was three-dimensional, she was real.
Saumyananda Sahi: If you speak to Tillotama about it, she will say that there was so much of her own life as a caregiver, other aspects that were personal to her, which she brought to Maya. The more we worked with her, the more unimaginable it was to cast anyone else.
What we realised with Tillotama during the shoot, and which we started doing more of, was that often when a scene ended, she would give a performance for 10-15 seconds after. There were many shots like that. So staying on the face worked with Tillotama because she had so much interiority.
When we organised a screening, Tillotama was shocked at how much her face was moving. It’s like ripples on water, when you know that there’s something underneath but you don’t know what it is.
Tell us about Sayan Karmakar, who plays Debu.
Tanushree Das: Sayan hasn’t acted before. Suman Saha, who plays the cop Ripon in the film, is the casting director and has also translated some of Saumyananda’s English dialogue into Bengali.
I have known Suman for at least 20 years, we have done theatre together. He’s extremely talented and dedicated. He won’t be in Berlin because he has promised to be at a play for somebody else.
Apart from the amazing work that was going on with Tillotama and Chandan, we brought Sayan to Bombay to do a workshop with Anamika. We didn’t do the script at all. We explored what it is to be a family, how do you find a safe place in each other.
Sayan is a very intelligent boy. He would watch and learn. Tillotama and Chandan really took care of him, as his parents. He slowly became comfortable and they became like a family.
As a couple, are you able to tell each other if something is working and something isn’t?
Tanushree Das: We have been working together since our first professional project. I used to assist him as a gaffer. We have always sort of treaded this path together, as husband wife but also as collaborators.
Being technicians helps us to know where the demarcations are. Of course we have fights, we disagree.
Saumyananda Sahi: On this film, we had clear demarcations between my responsibilities and hers. There does need to be a final say. I had a final say on some things and she had a final say on others. We both didn’t have the final say on the same things.
For example, casting and performances – those are hers. How we designed scenes, the shot-taking, the structuring of scenes in the script which, of course, she could change in the edit – in each of these stages, we had some kind of understanding that this was my domain and that was hers and then we would discuss.
Tanushree Das: In life, you need friends to stay sane. Our primary producers Naren Chandavarkar, Shaunak Sen, Prashant Nair weren’t just putting money into the project. If we couldn’t take a final decision ourselves, we would listen to them too.
Also read:
A previous interview with Saumyananda Sahi
In Kannada film ‘Vagachipani’, a rural hotbed of greed and vice
