Pallavi Paul distinctly remembers the first time she saw Shamim Khan’s photo in a newspaper as the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. “He was in a half unzipped hazmat suit, smoking a cigarette standing by a grave,” says Paul. Khan was burying bodies of Covid victims week after week. The powerful visual stayed with her and ultimately proved to be an ideal subject for a film. She spent the next two years hanging out with Khan and his co-workers at the Delhi Gate cemetery and translated her research in How Love Moves, currently showing at Project 88 in Mumbai and at Sharjah Biennial. Divided into five chapters symbolising the five daily Islamic prayers, the film is not an easy watch—it deals with death, loss, mortality, grief and isolation while also contributing to a broader conversation about abuses of power, political violence and rising Islamophobia. Despite the grim landscape that it traverses, the 63-minute feature-length film is visually arresting and occasionally, punctuated by ecstatic notes of Sufi poetry. The act of breathing serves as one of the philosophical mechanisms.
The film is being screened at Bait Al Serkal, a former hospital in the city of Sharjah in UAE, as part of the 16th edition titled To Carry of the Sharjah Biennial. Natasha Ginwala, one of the five all-women curators, describes How Love Moves as among “the most powerful and tender” cinematic experiences to have emerged from South Asia in recent years. Paul explains, “During Covid, what we experienced was not just a medical catastrophe. It was a metaphysical, ecological and a spiritual catastrophe. The virus was a respiratory disease that suddenly made us aware of our breathing. At a time when breath was literally under threat; and to choose to breathe in certain places was, in a sense, an act of defiance,” she says.
