'Shadows of the Moonless Nights' by Mehar Malhotra follows a young warehouse worker trapped between night-shift labour, cramped urban living, and chronic sleep deprivation, using his spiralling exhaustion to examine the physical and psychological toll of working-class life under capitalism. Selected for the La Cinef section at Cannes Film Festival, the short film moves through insomnia, alienation, economic vulnerability, and dissociation, framing rest itself as something inaccessible within systems built around constant productivity and survival.

I’m a different person when I’m sleep deprived. Not only do I feel like the undead, I’m also grumpy, surprised by my own evil thoughts against whatever it is that’s an obstacle to my sleep. The sunlight feels painful, every noise is a little too loud, not unlike a hangover, and as I’m trudging along my chores, counting minutes to when I can get some shut-eye, I understand how, in those thriller films, an insomniac can be compelled to commit crimes. Bryan Johnson, the famous longevity nut, claims that drugs, alcohol, processed food aside, lack of sleep is the worst thing you can put your body through. It’s the one thing that’s killing you slowly. 

However, knowing that little health fact isn’t enough to change the conditions that deprive one of sleep, especially for the working class. In Mehar Malhotra’s new short film Shadows of the Moonless Nights, which was just selected for the La Cinef section at Cannes, she looks at both the systemic exhaustion produced by wage labour and urban living, and the psychological disorientation that comes from never fully being able to rest, switch off, or exist outside the routines of work and survival.

Shadows of the Moonless Nights follows Rajan, a 26-year-old warehouse packer stuck inside the loop of a night-shift job and a home where sleep is constantly interrupted during the day. Under flickering factory lights, conveyor belts and endless boxes blur together as the supervisor’s waking whistles and repetitive work slowly wear him down. Dawn brings him back to his sister's cramped two-room flat, shared with her husband, daughter, and niece, where clinking vessels, dragged buckets, child chatter, and errands leave no space to properly rest. 

After a drunken night sparked by a coworker’s liquor ritual throws the household into conflict, Rajan wanders through Pune’s pre-dawn streets past graffiti-covered subways, sleepy café workers, bridge-dwellers, and empty roads before ending up in a remote coastal village where even the sound of the sea starts echoing the unrest in his head. The film moves through exhaustion, shame, insomnia, and taxing demands of urban life with despair, following a young man trying to hold himself together while the city around him never slows down.

Mumbai-based filmmaker Mehar Malhotra, who’s originally from Ludhiana, Punjab studied Film Direction at the Film and Television Institute of India. Her work is drawn to the emotional and political layers hidden inside ordinary life, which is central to Shadows of the Moonless Nights as well. Through the unrelenting interruptions that keep Rajan awake to a point where his experience of waking life itself becomes tinged with hallucinations and dissociation, Mehar touches upon man’s deep state of unrest; an existential fatigue in the modern world.

The working class life under capitalism, where a person’s body and time don’t belong to themselves and the economic conditions under which most of them live and the challenges that come with it, are some of the deeper themes from the film that stay with you. After drifting along the entire film, Rajan finally gets to sleep in the waiting room of a hospital after he has cut his hand at work due to his hazy cognitive fog. Through a protagonist we have a lot of empathy for, the short film directs that concern for a society that has strayed so far from its values of well-being that a person is granted rest only once their body is hurt, shuts down, and cannot be put to use. 

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