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There Is Something In The Air is a call from the periphery of sanity. This documentary essay is a series of dream narratives, and accounts of spiritual possession as experienced by women ‘petitioners’ at the shrine of a Sufi saint in north India. Drama unfolds via dreams, and appearances of djinns and disappearances of women. The shrine becomes a space of expressions of longing and transgression. The film invites the viewer to a fantastical world, where fear and desire is experienced through dreams and 'afflictions of air'. The shrine is a space where performance becomes the only rule of engagement, and one can begin to think of the possibilities that 'insanity' produces. 

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Key credits:
Cinematography: Kashif Siddiqui | Location sound: Pratik Biswas | Sound design: Ashish Pandya | Music: Da Saz [Lionel Dentan, Gennady Lavrentiev, Andrei Demidenko] | Editing: Iram Ghufran |  Assistant Director: Pallavi Paul

Executive Producers: Tulika Srivastava with Ridhima Mehra and K Padmanabhan

Producer: Rajeev Mehrotra,  Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT)

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Technical details:

Duration: 29 minutes | Format: PAL/ 16:09/ Stereo Mix/ Col & Bw/ | Year of Production: 2011

Languages: Hindi‐Urdu-English | Subtitles: English

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