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.”
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. “It was a very difficult time. My life was unravelling in many ways, along with the city. “We are really thrilled that it is going to be screened in Kathmandu. We couldn’t have asked for a better premiere.”
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.
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. 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.
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. 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. The film poster | Photo Credit: Designed by Hariom 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. “I think that is what happened. The film directed us towards it. And then, it started to unpeel and unfold; various layers came in. “So, it very naturally expanded into this unintentional three-year project. it does not just remain about the tree While the tree is central to the film. as is our inner life from the tree outside a window, “it is all really interconnected, and all comes together While politics is different from nature.
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.
“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. 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. Instead, it became “a microcosm of everything happening in our lives, the natural life of the city and the city itself,” says Samreen. “I think I am exploring that in the film, too.”
