Roundglass Sustain’s short film A Spring Against All Odds opens with a poignant couplet by 18th-century Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir: “My heart and my Delhi may both be in ruins; There are still some delights in this ravaged home.”

Centuries later, the words still ring true, setting the tone for this layered, deeply introspective film, one of the 48 films selected for Film SouthAsia (FSA), an international documentary film festival to be held in Kathmandu from November 27–29, 2026. Based on a story and script by Radhika Raj and directed and edited by Samreen Farooqui, both associated with Roundglass Sustain, the film captures the three years Radhika spent obsessing over the red silk cotton tree, or semal, outside her window in her Delhi home.

A Spring Against All Odds features an eclectic cast: Radhika, her partner Saptak, house help Swati, and cats Chutney and Chikki, plus the semal tree itself and the pair of grey hornbills who inhabit it. Opening in 2021, when Radhika and Saptak move into a new home overlooking this tree, the film shows how the tree becomes a constant witness to multiple crises, including a mismanaged pandemic, a winter thick with pollution, a monsoon of floods, an oppressive summer, a political shift, and a personal loss, as the film’s release states. “It was a very difficult time. My life was unravelling in many ways, along with the city. I was struggling emotionally…grieving,” says Radhika, who believes that the tree outside her window held her together during this challenging period. “It became an antidote to what was happening in my life,” she says.

For Samreen, the idea for the film originated from Radhika saying she had moved into this house with a tree and was looking at hornbills all day. “She was just ecstatic and couldn’t believe her luck.” It got them talking about making a short natural history video about the semal and the birds nesting in it, recalls Samreen. But the more she heard Radhika talk about the tree, the more she realised it could become a full film, not just a video. “We started to think about the tree and the city and decided to expand on that idea, because the city is full of red silk cotton trees,” she says. As Radhika’s life, too, went through ups and downs, it became clear that “there was no escaping or separating her from the tree or the city,” says Samreen, a firm believer that a film makes itself. “I think that is what happened. The film directed us towards it. And then, it started to unpeel and unfold; various layers came in.”

Radhika, who thinks of the film as almost “accidental, started by doing what Samreen had told her to do: put a camera on the window and capture what was happening. “Every time I told her something new was happening, she would tell me to get that as well. And this just kept going on,” says Radhika, recalling how they just could not look away from the tree after a point. “So, it very naturally expanded into this unintentional three-year project.”

While the tree is central to the film, it does not just remain about the tree. Instead, it became “a microcosm of everything happening in our lives, the natural life of the city and the city itself,” says Samreen. While politics is different from nature, as is our inner life from the tree outside a window, “it is all really interconnected, and all comes together. That is what the film became: it is about the tree, but also about everything,” she says, adding that as a filmmaker she has always tried to explore what holds us together in the kind of world we live in today. “I think I am exploring that in the film, too.”

The film is also an unusual exploration of Delhi, a city filled with these trees and one that both Samreen and Radhika hold dear, in very different ways. “I am not from Delhi, but from Mumbai, and came here for college, work and then got married to someone from here,” says Radhika, who ends up falling in love with the city, though she agrees it is a difficult place to live in. “In a way, the tree offered an alternate lens to look at the city, experiencing it through trees, time and seasons. It allowed me a second chance to love Delhi.”

Samreen, on the other hand, grew up in Delhi and lived there for most of her life. “But now I have left it and live in Bengaluru, which is increasingly becoming my city. But Delhi has kind of made me, so I have a complicated, love-hate relationship with it,” she says. The film helped her witness the city again and, in the process, find the city she wanted, she says. “Radhika would throw all her research at me, and it really struck me that Delhi is also the city of the 17th-century poets, and Delhi became their muse. So the poetry became very pivotal to the film.”

While she agrees that much has gone wrong in Delhi — the pollution, political uncertainty, and public apathy have made it a shadow of what it once was, it also refuses to be undone by them. “That became very clear to me while I was editing the film,” says Samreen, who began editing in 2024 and took nearly a year to finish it.

In her opinion, A Spring Against All Odds is not just an intimate narrative of South Asia highlighting the relationship between a tree and a woman, but “really the story of cities all over South Asia,” says Samreen, pointing out that they wanted an international premiere because the film resonated at so many levels and needed a diverse audience. “We are really thrilled that it is going to be screened in Kathmandu. We couldn’t have asked for a better premiere.”

Published – October 12, 2026 06:36 am IST