At first glance, Shadowbox (Baksho Bondi) seems to carry the ingredients of a thriller — a disappearance, a murder investigation, a traumatised ex-soldier, the looming presence of the police and the military.
Yet the film, which premiered at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival and screened recently at IFFK, consistently sidesteps sensationalism. Instead, Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi ground the film in the ordinary, built around routine.
The film, which received applause at IFFK, follows Maya played by actress Tillotama Shome, a working-class woman in suburban Bengal whose life is all about labour and care. She juggles multiple jobs, manages a household, raises her teenage son, and looks after her husband Sundar, a former soldier living with PTSD.
Rather than tracking the moment of collapse, the narrative begins in its aftermath, when damage has already been absorbed into daily life.
“While writing the synopsis, we realised how dramatic the material actually was,” says Saumyananda. “But from the beginning, we wanted to look at this family, years after the most intense moments of their lives and explore how the emotional weight of those events continues to exist.”
The duo chose to approach it through ordinary moments, telling the story from the woman’s point of view, where her life is governed by routine. “Seeing the world through her meant staying away from overt drama. The challenge was to make something emotionally resonant while remaining rooted in the everyday and the domestic,” says Saumyananda.
That sense of repetition and exhaustion shapes the film’s entire story. Maya rarely speaks about her suffering; instead, it is registered through her body, her labour, and her silences. For the directors, this quietness is both a political and cinematic choice.
“Silence creates space,” Tanushree says. “If you say something very solid, it fixes the meaning. Words do that. But if you leave gaps, you create bubbles where the audience can find their own dialogue.”
Shadowbox is built around such gaps within scenes, within characters, and across time. Ellipses, she remarks, are also a form of silence. “There are parts of the story you don’t see. But that doesn’t mean they are missing. They become yours,” she says.
For Tanushree, Shadowbox is intimately tied to her own life. Parts of the film were shot in Barrackpore, in the same neighbourhoods she grew up in, and traces of her childhood home, which was later demolished due to financial pressures, remain embedded in the film.
During the years it took to make the film, she was witnessing similar processes of loss and displacement within her own family. This closeness, she suggests, shaped how she approached the story. “I was Debu at some point in my life,” she says, referring to the film’s young protagonist.
Visually, Shadowbox maintains a restrained intimacy. Saumyananda, who also served as the film’s cinematographer, says the camera “was not as a narrator but as a witness”.
In several scenes, including one of Maya’s most vulnerable moments at a railway station, Saumyananda recalls rolling the camera himself.
“There was no one there except the actor and the camera. That invisibility was important,” he says.
The result is a film that feels less composed than observed, allowing situations to exist on their own terms rather than moulding them into drama.
The film’s emotional precision also travelled beyond its own cultural setting. Saumyananda recalls a screening in Berlin where a brief outburst from Maya as she snaps at her son and asks why her hunger should matter less than everyone else’s made an audible response from women seated behind them.
“Despite living very different lives from someone in Barrackpore, they recognised what she was feeling,” he says. “At a Berlin Q&A session, a soldier spoke openly about his experience of PTSD after seeing Sundar’s struggles reflected on screen.”
The journey of making Shadowbox was neither quick nor easy. Like many independent films, it took years to come together, but the directors are clear that they are prepared for the time such journeys demand.
“Independent cinema has always taken this route, and audiences have always found their way to these films,” Saumyananda says. As Tanushree puts it, every film requires a new way of thinking, not just creatively but also in how it is produced and shared. Completing the film, they say, is only the beginning of its journey.