Saumyananda Sahi

Bio

Born in Bangalore, Karnataka, in 1986, Saumyananda Sahi was the youngest participant in the Talent Campus India (2004), and the Berlinale Talent Campus at the Berlin International Film Festival (2005).

Over the last ten years Saumyananda has directed many short films, and worked as a cinematographer with eminent directors including Anne Aghion, Kamal Swaroop, Deepa Dhanraj, Gitanjali Rao, Bani Abidi, Sunanda Bhat and Vasant Nath.

Reflection

Sacred is a celebration of the connectivity of human experience at a time when our politics is doing its best to divide, demarcate and exclude.

Further, I feel Sacred is an extremely important documentary in affirming a new method of working. The fact that in each country the crew was always local has made possible a narrative that feels universal and at the same time so deeply rooted. I do not know of any other film made quite in this way.

The making of Sacred reminded me of a passage from one of Ingmar Bergman’s essays on film:

“There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed — master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.”

I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil — or perhaps a saint — out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts.

Working on Sacred gave room for exactly this: a sense of satisfaction while carving out a small detail of a Cathedral I couldn’t even imagine. For this I thank the architect, Thomas Lennon.