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Umair Bilal spent months in Sehwan, Pakistan, trying to direct a documentary. Then he gave up.
“Every time I tried to impose that logic onto Sehwan, it felt like I was working against the place rather than with it,”
the Pakistani filmmaker tells Variety of his debut feature, “As Light as Air,” which premieres in Semaine de la Critique at the 79th Locarno Film Festival. What began as an attempt to find characters and structure inside the Sufi shrine town instead became a 65-minute surrender to its rhythm – no plot, no protagonist, just pilgrims, malangs – wandering ascetics who have given up conventional life to devote themselves to the shrine – and the ecstatic communal trance of the dhamal.
Bilal traces the project’s origins to sensory fragments rather than plot. “What stayed with me was not a sequence of events, but a series of sensations: people praying in deeply absorbed, almost transcendent states, the smell of burning incense, the glow of oil lamps, devotional music, and the feeling that these places operated according to a different logic from the outside world,” he says.
Sehwan quickly overtook whatever nostalgia had drawn him there in the first place. “My childhood may have opened the door to Sehwan, but once I arrived, Sehwan gradually replaced those memories with its own reality,” he says. “By the end, I realized the emotional and visual world of the film belonged far more to Sehwan than to my childhood memories of it.”
The shift from filmmaker to participant happened gradually, not in a single moment. Bilal describes an improvised method he developed with co-cinematographer Konstantin Stell: standing at intersections and asking which street was “calling” them, then following it without rationalizing the choice. “Quite often we would spend the next eight hours filming whatever unfolded there,” he says.
That same instinct carried into the edit with editor Siddhant Sarin. “We began with an initial structure guided by emotion, letting images and sound dictate their own rhythm,” Bilal says. “Rather than simply watching people engage with spirituality, we wanted to reinterpret the footage so viewers could move closer to a feeling of immersion and journey through those emotions themselves.”
“I was no longer standing outside Sehwan trying to explain it,” he says of the moment the project stopped feeling like a film he was making. “I had become part of its rhythm.”
Bilal resists categorizing the film for audiences used to character-driven documentaries. “I don’t really pitch the film by saying, ‘It’s an experimental documentary.’ I think labels can sometimes create unnecessary distance,” he says. He compares its structure to music rather than plot. “It moves through repetition, variation, tension, release, and emotional progression rather than cause and effect. The film asks audiences to inhabit a place instead of constantly asking, ‘What happens next?’”
The post-production team spans Berlin and Mumbai – composer Sui Sofie Heinz and post-production supervisor Philipp Schmeelcke in Berlin, sound designer Sudarshan Sawant and colorist Mahak Gupta in Mumbai – alongside Sarin’s editing. Bilal says the international makeup wasn’t a plan. “I didn’t consciously set out to build an international team. Looking back, that is what it became, but it was never a strategy,” he says. “None of the collaborations felt strictly professional or transactional. They developed through friendship and long conversations about life, cinema, and how we understood the material.”
Heinz began composing only after immersing herself in raw footage and long conversations with Bilal about his years in Sehwan. “We never wanted there to be a clear boundary between the field recordings and the score,” he says. “We wanted the music and the recorded sounds to flow into one another so naturally that the audience would stop thinking about where one ended and the other began.”
On the ethics of filming a spiritual community that isn’t his own, Bilal describes weeks spent without a camera – sitting with pilgrims, shoe-keepers and flower sellers before ever shooting. “I have my own relationship with Sufism, but I would never claim the experiences of the malangs or pilgrims as my own,” he says. “The relationship had to exist before the film. The camera came after the human connection, not before it.”
One remark stuck with him: a Malang once suggested it was Qalandar, not Bilal, who had called him to Sehwan. “A Malang said that to me very early on, and I found it interesting because it reflected how many people in Sehwan understand their relationship to the shrine and spiritual nature of the city,” Bilal says. “It reminded me that the film wasn’t simply the product of my own intentions.”
The film also makes a deliberate omission: it never directly addresses the 2017 ISIS suicide bombing at the Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine. “The bombing is part of Sehwan’s history, but I didn’t want it to become the lens through which audiences understood Sehwan,” Bilal says. “I tried to ask a different question: where does Sehwan’s resilience come from?”
Asked about Pakistan’s place in his identity as a filmmaker based between Abu Dhabi and Berlin, Bilal points to lineage rather than distance. He names Dziga Vertov, Mani Kaul and Gianfranco Rosi as touchstones. “I don’t think of them as influences to imitate. I think of them as filmmakers I continue to learn from,” he says. “If ‘As Light as Air’ adds even a small voice to that ongoing conversation, I would feel incredibly fortunate.”
