The Arabian Sea is mystique, livelihood, filth and divinity in Sudarshan Sawant’s visually and aurally rich short film Songs of Sundari, set largely in the crowded waterways of the Versova-Madh creek — a film that particularly resonates today, when the construction of a bridge costing ₹2,395-crore connecting Versova, Mumbai’s northernmost island, to Madh Island, is underway.
A still from the short film Songs of Sundari.
The bridge will slash travel time from Versova to Madh from 90 minutes to 5 minutes, and it will transform the Koli fisherfolk villages around it — their ferry businesses are expected to take the biggest hit. The Kolis are the original inhabitants of the island city, and their presence in the city’s margins continues to fray, with Mumbai’s frenetic and all-pervasive travel infrastructure upgrades.
Like everything that promises convenience and beautification, progress has a cost. How are the Kolis going to face their future? Songs of Sundari doesn’t have a direct message; there is no preaching. It is rather a lyrical, cinematically stylised mediation on the sea’s fading majesty and benevolence. As we hear a young resident of Versova village say in the film in a riveting voice-over narration, “When nature changes, it doesn’t betray itself.”
Sawant, 36, is a 2017 graduate in Sound Recording and Design from the Film and television Institute of India (FTII) and lives in Madh Island with two fellow filmmakers. “The ferry has been my mode of transport from home to work for the past few years, and in 2022, I decided to shoot the universe around it. I had the story in mind, and as I went along, the film really developed,” says Sawant, who is the writer, director, cinematographer and sound designer of Songs of Sundari, the first of a Boat trilogy. Sawant is at work on the second, set in Thane Creek. The backdrop of the final film will be another creek in Navi Mumbai.
Sawant has been a documentary filmmaker ever since he began his journey as a filmmaker after he graduated from FTII. The sea and the earth are his muses so far. “For my final project at FTII, I lived for eight days with a cow-herder family in rural Maharashtra that lives in a cave. My biggest takeaway from that experience was that the cave-inhabiting family is really so happy!”
The protagonists in Songs of Sundari are the sea and the overworked, resilient boats that ply every day across the creek, carrying people to and fro in wind-lashed, huddled swarms. For Kolis, ferrying and fishing are the primary means of living, and with cranes above it and mechanical fishing trawlers in it, the sea in Mumbai today braves a lot.
Sawant says he consciously avoided direct interviews because he wanted audiences to make their own conclusions and more importantly, feel the story. Without a story arc or characters, Songs of Sundari has a very deliberate visual language to express the tension between development and nature-dependent livelihood. Nights are mysterious and foreboding; days are in hues of black-and-white, smoggy, loud and always overwhelmed by roaring and screeching construction machinery. “I decided on the name ‘sundari’ because a lot of development is about beautifying or prettifying,” Sawant explains. Here, the undulating, creaking, but forever-at-work boat named Sundari represents the sea and people the sea protects and feeds.
At the heart of the film is a story of a woman, narrated soulfully and in baritone by Marathi actor Smita Tambe. It goes: There was a woman who ferried people across every day. Her enchanted boat was called Sundari. And then something happens to Sundari.
The other human voice over the visual tapestry is that of a young boy who talks in a matter-of-fact way about what changes he has seen in the sea. “I didn’t want an expert opinion or a judgement. I wanted a child’s point of view, which is unfiltered, spoken just as he sees things,” Sawant says. “You won’t find any fish here because of the cranes, the boy says, and in the same tone, he adds, “ It’s like if you talk underwater I can hear you…These stones and walls kills the waves.”
Set to haunting music including an evocative hum by Sneha Sundar in the film’s poetic closing scene, Songs of Sundari leaves the viewer with a sense of wonder as well as unease. Sawant’s film, made with the support of the Charles Correa Foundation, has travelled to several film festivals around the world, which includes to Vision du Réel 2025, an internationally renowned documentary festival in Nyon, Switzerland, and Beijing International Short Film Festival.
DETAILS:
Budget:₹3 lakh
Language: Marathi with English subtitles
Running time: 9 minutes
Short Stream is a monthly curated section, in which we present an Indian short film that hasn’t been seen before or not widely seen before but are making the right buzz in the film industry and film festival circles. We stream the film for a month on HT Premium, the subscription-only section in hindustantimes.com.
Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and film critic. Write to her at sanjukta.sharma@gmail.com.
