24/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Indian filmmakers Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi’s first feature is a small, subtle film about family love, dedication and courage

Indian editor Tanushree Das (the Locarno 2021 entry Shankar’s Fairies) and cinematographer Saumyananda Sahi (the Sundance 2022 prizewinner All That Breathes [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Shaunak Sen
film profile]) are a married couple who have now joined creative forces to make their first film as writer-directors. Shadowbox has premiered in the Berlinale’s Perspectives strand.

Living in the Kolkata suburbs, Maya (Tillotama Shome) is working three jobs to support her teenage son, Debu (Sayan Karmakar), and her PTSD-addled husband, ex-military officer Sundar (Chandan Bisht). In between cleaning houses, ironing laundry and working on a chicken farm, Maya is trying to find Sundar a job, which he keeps resisting. And when she is away from home, Debu has to be his father’s parent.

There is very little back story, and the viewer is invited to construct it themselves. We know that Sundar was discharged dishonourably from the army eight years earlier, but we never learn why. Now he spends his days catching frogs that he supplies to colleges and drinking. He perpetually looks lost and frightened. When Debu takes him to a barber before a job interview, Sundar is scared by the razor and jumps out of the chair, crying to his son and pleading with him not to leave him there.

On Maya’s side, through rare interactions with her own family, we gather that she had married Sundar against their wishes, so she gets little support from her brother, while her mother won’t speak to her at all.

People in the neighbourhood provide a sort of Greek chorus that passes venomous comments on the family, and Sundar, with his drunkenly clumsy aggressiveness and backpack full of frogs, is a laughing stock even for Debu’s friends. The kid is torn between embarrassment and love for his father, in one of the film’s many fine, emotional touches. The boy finds a creative outlet in dance routines that he rehearses with his buddies, often forsaking school.

Sundar seems useless except when helping Maya solve a crossword puzzle, as this is the only instance when we see him calm and collected. In this situation, more tenderness emerges as he gives his strung-up wife a back massage. Running from chore to chore, always counting money and carefully taking stock of bills in her little notebook, Maya is the embodiment of dedication, courage and love, but also frustration and exasperation. When Sundar goes missing one night and his drinking buddy is found murdered, she has to defend him in front of the police and goes searching for him.

It is a tightly told story with many small details that we can glean some information from, but we are always asking ourselves what happened to Sundar. The way Bisht plays him, with his eyes always looking down and a traumatised kind of body language, he elicits sympathy in the viewer. Meanwhile, Shome has created an indomitable character out of Maya, a role that carries the film.

The camerawork, editing and music are all very classical and are always executed with a clear purpose, just as there is a clear purpose to the varied selection of exterior locations. The colours reflect the film’s main theme – family love – but also the shifts in the dynamics, with changing nuances in their home after certain plot points. It is a small, subtle film which tenderly pulls on the strings of our emotions, but we may often wish the timbre was more substantial.

Shadowbox is a co-production between Indian companies Moonweave Films, Kiterabbit Films, Wonderful Entertainment, Andolan Films, Jugaad Motion Pictures, Bridge Postworks, Criss Cross Content and Anahat Films, US outfits honto88 and Gratitude Films, France’s Shasha & Co Production, and Spain’s Nomad Media & Entertainment.