Shaunak Sen’s documentary ‘All That Breathes’ will premiere in the Special Screening segment at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. The 90-minute-long documentary follows siblings Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, who have devoted their lives to rescuing and treating injured birds, especially the Black Kites. Working out of their derelict basement in Wazirabad, the Delhi brothers become the central focus of the film and their story zooms out to document a larger snapshot of the city, where the air is toxic and the ground is on a slow burn of social turmoil. ‘All That Breathes’ talks about climate change and how humans should adapt to it. It deals with different layers of themes
Talking about how the idea came to his mind, Shaunak explains, “At its most initial stage what happened was every time I looked up at the gloomy grey sky, I saw the tiny dots in the sky of the black kites. I developed this vague interest in looking at the sky and spotting the black dots and this made me think of the human-animal relationship. This human-animal relationship is kind of an interesting zone for me.”
Shaunak had gone for a fellowship to Cambridge. In the department of geography of Cambridge University, he came across researchers working on human-animal relationships. He participated in a discussion on his relationship with the skies and the toxicity of the sky and the ground at various levels. Shaunak says, “I started looking for people who have a deep and profound relationship with birds and that’s when I came to know about the two brothers who are there in my documentary and the remarkable work that they do with the black kite. And once I went to their house, I realised that the basement in which they work and their house I found to be very cinematically related. I started visiting them more often and then the desire of making a documentary on this gathered momentum.”
He was interested in finding an intimate family story that somehow reflects broader ecological malice and also by looking at the family of the brothers alone, the thought of a story came to his mind regarding the social turbulence in the city in the last few years which got reflected in the documentary. “One can sense the turbulence in the city through the documentary, maybe not in a direct way. Even in the film, you don’t directly encounter it ever, but you can sense that there is turmoil outside the house of the two brothers, while they continue doing their work. The broader layer is of ecological malice where you have a clear indication of another kind of complexities and tension.” Shaunak shares a personal relationship with the skies. Anybody who live in Delhi know that there is a collision with the hostility of the environment. And he was deeply moved by the ecological toxicity of the city. He says, “There is a grey monotone diffused lamina that coats the entire city. There is a sense of ecological devastation which is fairly conspicuous to most people. But it never struck me to make a film on the environment and pollution. But something broader on the city and a bigger conceptual work about investigating the human sky relationship and the human bird relationship was what I was looking at.”
In January, this year ‘All That Breathes’ won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, a film gala that promotes independent cinema and filmmakers. ‘All That Breathes’ is Sen’s second directorial after the acclaimed 2016 ‘Cities of Sleep’, which was about the homeless scouting for places to sleep in the capital. But what if Shaunak had to explain the title of the film ‘All That Breathes’ in one line, what would it be? He explains, “The title gestures towards questions of kingship, interrelationship and entanglements between different life forms which includes human and the non-human.”
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