End Date :
CSDS, Seminar Room. Times are IST (India Standard Time)
Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI)
ICLS; Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape (South Africa); Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (Delhi); Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Study, Tsinghua University (Beijing)
Please note that the Global Institute “Global Racisms” events are closed to the public.
This presentation examines the nonhuman ensemble of lives in urban spaces, and the ways in which cinema has imagined it. Looking outside the catastrophist film narratives that routinely configure popular ecotopias or ecodystopias, we look at how nonfiction cinema marshalls its indexical charge to foreground questions of relationality,and multispecies entanglement. Drawing out of my own practice in making All That Breathes (2022), I speculate on how cinema’s geomorphic tendencies get increasingly negotiated in the contemporary creative documentary. How does nonfiction take on a renewed valence today in contemplating the ‘more-than-human density of the world?
Shaunak Sen is an Academy Award nominated filmmaker and writer based between Delhi and Berlin. His film All That Breathes, received nominations at the 2023 Academy and BAFTA awards. The film won the Golden Eye at Cannes Film Festival 2022, the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival, and awards at the Griersons, The Gotham Award, BFI London, American Society of Cinematographers, IDA, Cinema Eye and 24 other film festivals. Cities of Sleep (2016), his first feature-length documentary, was shown at various major international film festivals and won 6 international awards. Shaunak holds a PhD and has published in journals including Bioscope and Widescreen. Shaunak was invited to be a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures in 2023.
