The Delicate
The cost of Delhi’s noxious ecology is starkly visible in the multitude of patients crowding the city’s busiest hospitals. The Delicate is a lyrical portrait of a surgeon at the frontlines of this unprecedented public health emergency. Early in filming, the surgeon notices the film director is rapidly losing weight, and a cancer diagnosis follows. Through a poetic (and often absurd) account of the surgeon, the hospital and the director-patient, the film explores the terrifying toll of Delhi’s raging toxicity.
The film is set in Delhi’s famed Ganga Ram hospital, a relic from the 1940s. Ambarish Satwik, a brilliant vascular surgeon sits in a tiny room, counselling patients. Hundreds of patients camp in a park outside the hospital, many travelling across the country for 15-minute consults with a desperately overworked doctor. Amidst this chaos, Dr. Satwik performs the meditative craft of surgery. The poetry of these moments hides the physical toll on Dr. Satwik. The long exposure to radiation is shortening his career.
In the middle of filming, the film’s director, Shaunak Sen, receives a shocking kidney cancer diagnosis. The diagnosis, surgery, recovery and Shaunak’s own meditations on sickness, the body, being inside the medical system and Delhi’s climate — form a secondary thread of the film. Through the story of one doctor and one patient, we get a glimpse of the ecosphere of one of the world’s most toxic cities.