Birdwatching

Directed by Aditya Varma and written by Ritwika Pal, Birdwatching is a short, diary-style film that captures the fragmented experience of time and urban isolation in Mumbai during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through an observational camera style, the film juxtaposes vast cityscape, using the motif of birds in flight to contrast the confinement of domestic life and vanished freedom. Often framed from within a room or an aerial viewpoint, the visual narrative aims to depict Mumbai’s urbanity—dense and metropolitan, but also dominated by unfinished buildings, squatter houses, and industrial elements. Using the city as a backdrop, such imageries reinforce the feeling of stagnation and desolation during lockdown. The narration by Pal, delivered in diary form and a detached tone, does not follow a chronological sequence, mirroring the temporal disorientation of self-isolation. “Day 11. Don’t know what date it is. Or what day. Probably a Tuesday or a Saturday. All of them seem like Sundays merging into Sundays. Some are 27 hours long, some only 13. Days are melting into each other. Don’t know when one begins or ends” (0:25–0:39), the first sentence already implies how the rhythms that normally structure our experience of time have collapsed, creating a sense of existing in perpetual present confusion without clear transitions.

Pal also describes repetitive lockdown routines, for example, “Day 8, 3^rd April, Friday. I get my best ideas when I clean the dishes. But, spoons and forks take too little time, and I tend to go blank” (02:06–02:18); “Day 5, 31^st March, Tuesday. When you sweep the floor, you must tame the dust. They are fickle creatures. You must win them over from the wind” (03:18–03:30). Such observations and reflections reveal how lockdown amplifies the existence of minor rituals, the anxiety and monotony of prolonged isolation allow ordinary tasks to become sites of introspection and meaning-making. The absence of any interior shots, despite the narration’s focus on domesticity, creates a deliberate dissonance between what is spoken and what is shown. This refusal to depict the domestic interior heightens the feeling of psychological distance and alienation. Everything is cyclical and a hollow performance while the birds are moving effortlessly between urban architectures, under the boundless sky. They are metaphors for unattainable liberation as the city is frozen in inertia due to the COVID-19 pandemic.