Sufi Trance, No Plot, No Protagonist: 'As Light as Air' Heads to Locarno
A 65-minute documentary with no plot and no protagonist will screen in the Semaine de la Critique section of the 79th Locarno Film Festival on August 11. The film is 'As Light as Air', the debut feature documentary from Pakistani film-maker Umair Bilal, and it drops the viewer into the Sufi shrine town of Sehwan, Pakistan, where pilgrims and wandering ascetics known as malangs gather for the dhamal — an ecstatic communal trance (Variety).
Bilal shot the film with co-cinematographer Konstantin Stell using an improvised method: they chose streets by intuition and filmed for up to eight hours at a time. The result, in Punjabi and Urdu, moves between colour and black and white, presented in DCP 2K — the standard digital cinema format (Locarno Film Festival). Siddhant Sarin edited the film. The post-production team spans two cities: composer Sui Sofie Heinz and post-production supervisor Philipp Schmeelcke worked in Berlin, while sound designer Sudarshan Sawant and colorist Mahak Gupta worked in Mumbai (Variety).
A trailer for 'As Light as Air' was released in late July, ahead of the Locarno premiere (The Hollywood Reporter). The film has also been selected for the 2026 Busan International Film Festival, giving it a second major festival berth before it has played its first public screening (Dawn).
What makes 'As Light as Air' unusual is what it refuses. No narrative spine, no central character, no conventional arc — just sustained immersion in a place and a ritual. The Semaine de la Critique, or International Critics' Week, is a festival strand dedicated to first or second features that take formal risks, and Bilal's film fits that brief squarely.
For a Pakistani production to land premieres at both Locarno and Busan — two of the world's oldest and most respected festivals — puts Bilal on a short list of film-makers from the country whose work has reached that tier of the global festival circuit. The film's running time, just over an hour, places it in the documentary feature category rather than the short-film programme.
The 79th Locarno Film Festival runs in Locarno, Switzerland. The Semaine de la Critique section runs within it, programmed by the Swiss Association of Film Journalists.
