Locarno Sufi Trance Doc ‘As Light as Air’ Director Umair Bilal on Surrendering to a Pakistani Shrine Town: ‘I Became Part of Its Rhythm’

Pakistani filmmaker Umair Bilal's debut feature documentary, "As Light as Air," premieres in the Semaine de la Critique section at the 79th Locarno Film Festival. The 65-minute film abandons conventional narrative structure entirely, instead immersing viewers in the atmosphere of Sehwan, a Sufi shrine town, focusing on pilgrims, wandering ascetics known as malangs, and the ecstatic communal trance ritual called the dhamal.

Bilal explains that months of trying to impose a plot and characters onto Sehwan failed, prompting him to abandon conventional documentary logic and instead let the place dictate the film's rhythm. He developed an improvised filming method with co-cinematographer Konstantin Stell, choosing streets intuitively and filming for hours without a set plan, an approach carried into editing with Siddhant Sarin to create an immersive, music-like structure of repetition and emotional progression rather than cause and effect. The international post-production team, spanning Berlin and Mumbai, included composer Sui Sofie Heinz, who blended field recordings with the score after long conversations with Bilal about his time in the town.