Cinema VinesAcademy Award‑nominated filmmaker Shaunak Sen has turned a personal health crisis into a cinematic statement with his first fiction short, Termite. The 15‑minute piece premiered on September 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) as part of the Short Cuts programme, marking Sen’s debut in narrative filmmaking after a celebrated career in documentary.
Sen’s journey began after a surprise kidney‑cancer diagnosis that followed the Oscars. “It completely gobsmacked me,” he told HT City. “My way of coping was to start filming everything that was happening with me, including a team of surgeons whose work I was very interested in.” The diagnosis forced him to pause his work in Denmark, where he was editing his next documentary feature, and to confront the sudden fragility of his own life.
While dealing with the illness, two close friends married, which made Sen reflect on the shifting dynamics of male friendship in middle age. He noted that “in the late 40s or early 50s, many men experience a loosening of close friendships, an extreme version of depression and a sense of isolation.” This introspection became the core theme of Termite, a film that explores the delicate emotional currents that underlie male bonds in urban settings.
The story uses the metaphor of termites to illustrate entropy and decay, drawing on Sen’s previous research into termite‑pest control. In his earlier documentary, All That Breathes, he had filmed a character who was a termite exterminator, but the role was ultimately left out of that film. In Termite, the characters—played by Faisal Malik and Valavane Koumarane—are termite exterminators who navigate the complexities of friendship, loneliness, and the intertwining of human and animal lives.
Sen, who describes himself as a “Delhite,” says that most of his projects are set in his hometown. “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,” he explained. The film’s premiere at TIFF follows a brief visa delay that kept him from attending the festival immediately after the diagnosis, but he is now set to arrive in Toronto to showcase the short to a global audience.
