From Ethnography to Sensory Cinema

From Ethnography to Sensory Cinema is an in-person event about documentary filmmaking and ethnographic research.

Drawing on his debut feature, As Light as Air, which premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival, filmmaker and educator Umair Bilal reflects on a filmmaking process shaped by years of ethnographic research and immersion in Pakistan’s Sufi devotional traditions. Through excerpts from the film, he discusses how encounters with these spaces changed the way he imagined the film, and how immersion itself began to shape its cinematic form. He also reflects on how this process continues to inform his filmmaking and teaching.

Speaker: Umair Bilal, Filmmaker; Lecturer of Filmmaking Practice, NYUAD