In Shadowbox, Tillotama Shome plays a working Indian woman pushed beyond her limit

However, through all this, Maya never breaks down. It absorbs the chaotic disturbances of life with quiet resilience. The expressive face of Shome, which transmits fear, exhaustion and despair with a simple contraction, strengthens this restraint. She clings to hope. “His resilience is shaped by experiences beyond what is shown in the film,” explains Sahi. “From his clandestine love story with Sundar to the management of childbirth to navigate his return from the army, Hope won. This is not his first rodeo.

This hope is tempered by the realities of being an Indian woman who works – a unique position that requires everything together. When Maya learns the disappearance of Sundar, the police insist on accompanying them to find him. She refuses because she has to go back to work. For directors, it was crucial to to show rather than say– There is no apti on oneself, no great monologue on the way it is stretched or why it cannot simply exist. Instead, it is distilled in a single piercing question: “Am I not a human?”

During the screening of the film in Berlin, Das remembers hearing a collective sigh of three women behind her when Maya delivered this line. “Because Kolkata is my house, we realized that the more personal you become, the more universal it becomes.” The film resonates far beyond its setting – its themes of exhaustion and solitude in an increasingly chaotic world are deeply familiar. “A woman told us that it reminded her to grow up with her mother in a village in Eastern Europe.”