Shaunak Sen, the Oscar nominated filmmaker behind All That Breathes has returned with a fiction short this year with Termite. The story begins with showing us the lives of migrants and roommates Ajith (Valavane Koumarane) who is a termite exterminator and Saud (Faisal Malik), who is a Xerox shop owner. Their companionship is built less on declaration than on routine: shared meals, silence, domestic labour and the practical business of getting through the day. Sen frames them as a fragile household, though neither man fully names it as such. Their bond has the intimacy of family without its security. It takes a turn when Nadeem (Vipin Sharma), an anxious father, comes to ask for Saud’s hand in marriage. Set against the everyday landscape of Old Delhi, the film draws a parallel between the termites, their intricate social organisation and the people who inhabit the city. The film uses the insect as a metaphor for friendships, ecological sensitivity, and plays the idea in many other ways interpretive to the viewer. There is something striking about the idea of termites as workers in a maddening metropolis, existing within a larger ecosystem, each performing a role that sustains the whole. The termite mound begins to also resemble a family, an interconnected structure held together by interdependence. It is an idea that quietly extends into the film’s central relationship, making friendship its emotional centre. This interconnectedness is also with the earth. Ajith never kills the termites, he’s a whisperer of sorts who just nudges the insects to leave. He has a sense of wonder for the natural world – he gets lost while gazing at a termite mound, he’s befriended a cat and a goat in the neighbourhood. Still from Termite. Photo: Screengrab from YouTube.Male lonelinessBut beneath its seemingly ordinary observations lies a meditation on male loneliness. Both Saud and Ajith help each other as friends in filling space and time with their presence and more. There is a tenderness to the companionship at the heart of the film, but also an unmistakable sense of pain, the kind that comes from attachment, uncertainty and the possibility of losing a friend. Sen approaches this relationship with considerable restraint, allowing silences, gestures and everyday moments to carry as much weight as dialogue. The performances in the film add greatly to the film with a lot being communicated via movements, pauses, and glances. Koumarane gives Ajith a watchful, almost wordless presence. His performance works through attention: to insects, animals, Saud and the spaces around him. Faisal Malik makes Saud more guarded, caught between affection for Ajith and the expectations represented by Nadeem’s visit. Vipin Sharma brings an uneasy urgency to Nadeem, while Shilpa Shukla’s Tabassum adds another layer to the film’s negotiations of family, desire and social obligation. Visually, Sen’s treatment is attentive rather than showy. The 31-minute film is stylistically similar to Sen’s earlier films. His frames are carefully composed with textures and rhythms of Old Delhi. The setting is similar to his earlier films. Ben Bernhard and Saumyananda Sahi’s cinematography makes Old Delhi feel less like a backdrop than a pressure system. The film favours dim interiors, narrow lanes, damp walls and enclosed domestic spaces, giving the city a nocturnal, almost subterranean quality, however the colour grading occasionally feels a little too dark. For instance, in the library sequence, the familiar city briefly becomes strange and dreamlike, as though Ajith’s interior world has begun to spill into the spaces around him. The soundscape deserves equal appreciation, adding another layer to its atmosphere and emotional resonance. The score used an oboe in the beginning as Ajith closely observes a termite mound. While a piano is used later, on several occastions the city’s ambient noises, and the termite’s sound serves as just enough. Considering that the film was shot in just four days – as mentioned by the film’s producer Aman Mann – the cohesion of its visual and narrative language is remarkable.Despite its short runtime, Termite doesn’t feel like a 31-minute film. Its transitions are fluid and its observations so absorbing that time seems to move differently within it. There is a balance of love and pain, intimacy and distance, the human and the ecological.Siddhant Vashistha is an independent journalist.