Oscar-nominated Indian director Shaunak Sen (All That Breathes, 2022) discusses Nocturnes with filmmakers Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan. Nocturnes world-premiered at Sundance 2024 where it won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award (Craft).
The synopsis of Dutta and Srinivasan’s film reads: In the dense forests of the Eastern Himalayas, moths are whispering something to us. In the dark of night, two curious observers shine a light on this secret universe. Together, they are on an expedition to decode these nocturnal creatures in a remote ecological “hot spot” on the border of India and Bhutan. The result is a deeply immersive film that transports audiences to a rarely-seen place and urges us all to look more closely at the hidden interconnections of the natural world.
At the beginning of their conversation, Shaunak Sen praised the film. “Nocturnes is a hypnotic, lyrical, poetic take on the fragility of workers who are doing deep work with the biosphere, and sidesteps a lot of the usual pitfalls of the regular environmental or ecological film,” he says. “It is not proscriptive, it is not pedantic, and aesthetically unfolds an argument given the composite of sound and images that works on very many subliminal levels. I, for one, still fully remember the tone, texture and aesthetic persuasion of the film, especially the marvellous soundscape that has still imprinted itself on my [consciousness]. This is a film I deeply cherished and is broadly the kind of direction that I hope the environmental film takes in the coming years. For me it is an extremely important and a cinematic film. A film that doesn’t believe in image being information, but in documentary as cinema.”
Click on the link above to watch the whole conversation between Shaunak Sen, Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan.
