Discover how DP Sverre Sørdal FNF captured director Karan Kandhari's macabre Mumbai-based comedy 'Sister Midnight' on KODAK 35mm film

Captured on KODAK 35mm film by DP Sverre Sørdal FNF, director Karan Kandhari's macabre comedy, Sister Midnight, presents an altogether different take on lower-caste life in modern urban India.

Part-funded by the British Film Institute and Film4, the action follows Uma, a listless wife trapped in both the confines of an arranged marriage to her reluctant husband Gopal and a suffocating one-room wooden shack that represents their home.

Uma is bored by her mundane existence and marital expectations, until she's bitten by a bug at a wedding and then collapses during her job as a janitor. She soon finds herself preferring night to day and transforms into a ruthless feral force with bloodthirsty cravings.

The film, Kandhari's feature debut, premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, during the Directors' Fortnight section, and was lauded as 'a feminist fable delivering a whole lot of bite', and a 'punk' alternative to classic Bollywood fare.

"The story was certainly different, and I was excited about it from the beginning," says Norwegian Sverre Sørdal FNF, who lives in London and whose credits include County Lines (2019, dir. Henry Blake) and the 35mm film-originated Unruly (2022, dir. Malou Reymann).

"This was the sort of script you hope to get as a cinematographer, one that doesn't follow a formula. It yelled expressionism, and the idea of it being a dark comedy really stirred something inside me. Also, it gave me the chance to shoot in India, where I had never worked before, and I relished the idea of shooting on 35mm film, which I absolutely love.

Sørdal reveals he first met British Indian director Kandhari in a London pub, where the pair spoke about the ardor they both share for cinema, especially American cinema in the 1970s.

"Karan told me he had storyboarded most of Sister Midnight, and wondered if I was OK with that. I could see that his work was more artistic than anything else, but the ideas about what he wanted – like the layout of the shack, and the position the bed and the cooking area in relation to the window light – were clearly there, and those storyboards were good conversation starters.

"We both agreed that the visual language of the film, particularly the lighting, needed a toned-down color palette with an expressionistic presentation in order for the comedy, the darkness and the absurdity to work, and that's essentially where my work became largely focused."

Sørdal says Sister Midnight was always going to be shot on 35mm film, and there was never a question about shooting it digitally.

"Initially, Karan told me we were going to film widescreen in 4-perf Anamorphic, although this later changed to 3-perf spherical, cropped to widescreen format. Either way suited me, as I had just shot Unruly on 35mm film and was eager to continue the analog experience. I love film and, in an ideal world, I would prefer to only shoot on film. I knew it would enable us to tell this complex, intricate and emotional story in the way we envisaged it."

References included the rough and gritty neo-noir crime thrillers The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, dir. John Cassavetes, DPs Mitchell Breit, Al Ruban and Frederick Elmes) and Le Samouraï (1967, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, DP Henri Decaë).

Sørdal had seven weeks of prep on the film before commencing 40 days of photography, often in 40° C (104° F) heat, between February and April 2023. Apart from the movie's short Samurai warrior sequence that was shot in Scotland, filming took place entirely on-location in Mumbai, India. The street where the terrace of wooden shacks was constructed was chosen to optimize the direction of the sunshine, and Uma and Gopal's shanty was constructed with floating walls to help accommodate the camera and the crew.

The DP worked with Panavision in London to select his camera and lenses – comprising Panavision Panaflex Millennium XL2 cameras and Panavision Primos, including a 24-275mm zoom – before the package was shipped to Mumbai.

"Panavision cameras and lenses were a natural choice for both me and Karan," says Sørdal. “They, and specifically Lee Mackey, have been of utmost support to me since the day I stepped into the industry. When we first arrived in Mumbai, word got round that there was a Panavision film camera in town, and many people made special pilgrimages to see it and take selfies with it. Along with being a special attraction, the Millennium XL2 proved an absolute workhorse during production, and it performed beautifully in the blazing heat.

"As for the lenses, the Primos, for me, scream classic cinema, and combined with 35mm film, were the first of many hairs on the brush we needed to paint this film. They have a perfect balance between sharpness and warmer color rendition, and at T2.0 they are quite fast, which meant I would be able to shoot our many night scenes without too much trouble."

Sørdal went with Tungsten filmstocks for the shoot – KODAK VISION3 500T Color Negative Film 5219 for the night interior/exterior scenes, and KODAK VISION3 200T Color Negative Film 5213 for the day interior/exterior scenes. The Samurai sequence was filmed in B&W on EASTMAN DOUBLE-X 5222 35mm negative.

"From the very start, Karan and I were agreed that Sister Midnight should not look like most of the films that come from India, which are typically rich and warm with color," Sørdal explains. "For the beginning of the film, I push-processed all of the night interior and exterior scenes that we shot on the 500T by one stop, to raise the contrast, texture and color saturation in the image, and thereby reflect Uma's discomfort with the night.

"But after she collapses, whilst washing the office floor, and goes through her transformation, I stopped the push-process and had all the 500T negative processed normally. The image was a little less punchy and with smaller grain, to convey how she has become more comfortable and at-ease with the night.

"I shot all of the day scenes using the 200T but processed the interiors normally and pulled the exteriors by one stop. I did this as I wanted the colors of exteriors to be more pastel."

Film processing was done at Film Lab Mumbai, with dailies scanned in Scanity at Prasad in Chennai. The files were then transferred to Cinelab in the UK, where the dailies were supervised by Paul Dean, before the graded rushes were made available for Sørdal's review in Mumbai. The film had a final 4K ARRI scan at Cinelab.

"It was quite a complicated process, but well worth it, as it was clear to see how special and beautiful the end-result was going to look."

Sørdal operated the camera throughout the film, assisted by 1^st AC Vlassis Skoulis and loader Leo Windslow. The key grip was Ravi Shah, with Kamlesh Prabhudas Saadrani the gaffer and Jigar Dawande as best boy.

"The hard, expressionistic lighting style we adopted for Sister Midnight is far removed from most Bollywood and independent Indian films. It was all about white light and expressing the loneliness of the characters," he says.

"I went with a traditional, old-school lighting package, pretty much all Tungstens and HMIs, although we did sometimes use a few Astera tubes to boost shadowy areas or create a colored accent, like the rooftop elevator. In the shack we never lit from above, and just pushed light inside through the doorway and windows that Karan had put into the set design, and we went with the way the light fell from those."

As for shooting in India, Sørdal says it was a different experience entirely from the norm. "Mumbai is a big, bustling city, with lots of people, noise and dust. It was incredibly hot too, especially when we shot the interiors of Uma and Gopal's tiny shack, which we nicknamed 'The Tandoori Oven' as we felt we were being cooked most of the time. I even got scratched by a cat, and had to have rabies shots, just in case. I had a big crew, especially in the lighting department, and all of that felt a little overwhelming to me at the beginning.

"But India has an incredibly rich history in filmmaking, and I soon came to realize just how good my team were. Although we had 40 days, and the script was less than a hundred pages, we actually had to shoot 350 scenes, and this meant lighting seven or eight scenes every single day.

"We could shoot not in story order and filmed the shack interiors first over the course of 19 days, before the madness of travelling around Mumbai to film the remainder of the scenes at over 100 different locations. I have to thank my crew for being so professional, positive, enthusiastic and willing, and it was down to them that we got through the demanding schedule."

Looking back on the production overall, Sørdal says, "Although it was a physically-demanding shoot, I loved working in India with my crew. It's hard to sum up in a few words how film helped us to tell this story. It's absolutely beautiful how film deals with hard light and the different colors we created through normal, push and pull processing, as the story progresses. I might have gone a bit too far in places, but I would rather do that than to play it safe. Safe is boring and why would anyone want to be boring? A lot of the films and series you can watch on streaming platforms look so similar. Film helped us to give this production a really distinctive look."