The scholarship on South Asian pandemic cinema that has emerged since 2020 has been disproportionately occupied with the migrant on the highway, the drone shot over the empty city and the mass cremation scenes. This work has largely bypassed the cinema of the household, of changing familial and interpersonal dynamics, the queer relation, the caregiving body and the way pandemic confinement reorganised intimacy itself into a register of harm that only occasionally, and unevenly, found its way into public and cinematic discourse.

This seminar examines how South Asian pandemic films make visible the hidden structures, emotions, and relationships that shape contemporary life across the region. Bringing together scholars from film studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, gender studies, and South Asian studies, the seminar explores the aesthetic, narrative, and affective strategies through which cinema represents intimacy, everyday life, and the often invisible operations of power in pandemic films. The lockdown did not only produce a crisis of mobility and labour, but also a crisis of proximity. Confinement intensified domestic and intimate-partner violence, exposed the invisible labour of caregiving and domestic work, and pressed queer and non-normative relationships into newly precarious forms of cohabitation or separation. 

This seminar is interested in exploring how South Asian pandemic cinema offers unique ways of understanding experiences that frequently escape public discourse and conventional political representation. In doing so, it demonstrates how film functions not merely as a reflection of social realities but as a powerful mode of perceiving, interpreting, and reimagining the ordinary worlds through which people experience both constraint and possibility. 

Possible areas of focus include, but are not limited to:

• The aesthetics of confinement
• Emotional abuse, coercive control, and intimate violence
• Domesticity, caregiving, reproductive, and affective labour
• Beyond the Hindi-language frame
• Affect, embodiment and the unevenness of ‘everyday violence’
• Masculinities, femininities, and gendered subjectivities
• Grief, loss, loneliness, and vulnerability
• Aging, disability, and dependency
• Migration, displacement, and belonging
• Silence, shame, and the politics of recognition
• Narrative and aesthetic strategies for representing everyday violence
• Queer and non-normative intimacy in confinement
• Spectatorship, affective engagement, and public discourse