Mumbai breathes in a language of horns, footsteps, and the faint hum of distant trains. Sudarshan Shetty’s A Breath Held Long, screened at the Serendipity Arts Festival, 2025, in Panjim, Goa, listens to this rhythm, translating the pulse of the metropolis into a cinematic meditation. In its 20-25 minutes, documentary, theatre, and music fuse seamlessly, forming a flowing tapestry that captures not just the sights, but the smells, the textures, the very air of the city. The film does not merely show Mumbai—it inhales it, exhales it, and asks the viewer to do the same.
“The video forges an intersection of voice, body, and city, with breath as the metaphor for life woven into, so to say, shades of chaos. The long, unpunctuated passages challenge actors to speak without conventional pauses. This calls for breath as the intimate universal thread, its rhythm etching presence amid ceaseless motion,” says the 65-year-old artist.
In Shetty’s lens, sunlight falls in slanted shards through narrow lanes, catching the dust in suspended motes. The sudden monsoon showers darken the asphalt, as incense smoke curls out from a temple doorway. A child’s cry pierces a crowded street, and somewhere a bicycle bell rings, slicing through the warmth of the air. A taxi horn blares, a single raindrop lands on a tin roof, and the camera moves in sync with this living choreography. “The video acknowledges the impossibility of silence within the city. It becomes part of the fabric of a narrative that collapses the boundary between the city’s collective roar and the performer’s internal state of being,” says Shetty.
Breathing in A Breath Held Long is never just physiological; it is elemental. The film slows to the subtle rise and fall of chests, the barely audible whisper of air through lips, the reverberation of voices in open courtyards. “Breath is fragile, but it is relentless,” Shetty reflects. “It measures the span of our days and the depth of our resilience.” In these moments, one feels the weight of countless unrecorded histories, layered invisibly into every street corner, every doorway, every hand pressed to a railing.
The film’s sculptural objects extend this meditation into the tactile. Rusted metal frames glint with the sun; glass vessels catch stray light, refracting the city into shards of reflection. Suspended strings tremble as if stirred by invisible winds. Each piece holds silence in its form, echoing the pauses between the actors’ lines.
Watching the docu-film is a full-bodied experience. One feels the humidity clinging to skin, the heat rising off asphalt, the faint taste of salt in the air by the docks. The voices ebb and swell with the cadence of Mumbai itself. “I hope viewers carry the experience of the emptiness within the abundance of what the city has to offer—or to see oneself as a performer playing a part in this great drama that one can watch from a decisive distance or to question what is real and what is not,” says the artist.
As the film draws to its close, one does not simply leave the theatre; one carries the city, the breaths, the silences, the pulse. Shetty’s work insists on presence, on attentiveness to the ordinary miracles of life: the subtle intake of air, the gentle exhalation, the imperceptible movements that mark the passage of time and space. A Breath Held Long is not just a film—it is a poetic insistence that to hold a breath is, in itself, an act of devotion to the fragile.