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Cities of Sleep is a documentary that profiles how Delhi’s impoverished sleep. The film tracks the city’s informal sleep settlements, how the homeless deal with the problem of finding a bed every night, and the socio-economic pressures that sleep exerts. There are two narratives in the film: one of Shakeel, from Old Delhi’s Meena Bazar, who struggles every night to rent a bed run by a sleep mafia of sorts. The other story looks at the commune built under Loha Pul, where people gather to watch films and share sleeping space. Director Shaunak Sen, 28, a PhD student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, talks about how sleep changes everything.
How did this film come about?
I had an academic interest in sleep. It has been looked at through the lens of psychology and science, but I was interested in trying to investigate the socio-political pressures that sleep exerts and the informal structures around sleep that permeate the city.
What made you structure the film the way you did (one segment is a sleep biography of a person, the other on a place)?
Initially we wanted to situate it in Meena Bazar, because it is richly varied. A bustling market in the day, it transforms into a sleeping space at night. It can also erupt into violence in the tussle over space.
Shakeel [one of the main characters] kept following us around, claiming that he could share a lot of things. He is an outcast even in a space constituted of economic outcasts. He has a conflicted relationship with Jamal [who runs one of the shelters]. How does sleep exert pressure as a socio-political vector? For Shakeel, sleep changes everything. [A Hindu, he even changes his name to Shakeel, to fit in a Muslim-dominated locality.] Ranjit [the other main character] was an automatic choice; he had a certain sophistication of thought. The main premise of the film was that the city is partitioned into spaces. There are different kinds of informal set-ups that come up in the night and disappear in the day. My film shows two different circuits of sleep. One, more of a community congregation, the other a better set-up, well-oiled machinery.
How long did you take to film? You must’ve spent many nights out.
We shot over two years, and it took a year to edit. We’d leave after dinner around 9pm, stay out till 4am.
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