Earlier this week, director Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (Sideshow and Submarine Deluxe, HBO Documentary Films) earned a Gotham Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature as well as inclusion on the shortlist for the IDA Documentary Awards. This adds to an honor roll which already includes winning a World Cinema-Documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival followed by a Golden Eye Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film has resonated with critics and audiences in part because it defies categorization. While introducing us to three men’s efforts in New Delhi, India, to protect and save black kite birds in a changing ecosystem, All That Breathes is not a wildlife documentary, nor is it a preachy chronicler of our environment and the blight of pollution. And as sectarian violence spreads through New Delhi–centered on the conflict between India’s Hindu nationalist government and the country’s large Muslim population–All That Breathes does not take on a sociopolitical bent.
Rather Sen observed that finding the form that the film would take, a kind of mishmash of all this and more, was among the prime challenges that All That Breathes posed to him.
All That Breathes focuses on all that breathes–people and birds–and the city itself. There are two brothers, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, who formed Wildlife Rescue, and a volunteer, Salik Rehman, integral to the organization, as well as the birds that are falling out of the sky at an alarming rate. Like the men and the birds, the city too is a character in the film. While pollution, political unrest, the precarious nature of wildlife are all parts of the story, they are unveiled in the context of the resiliency and what Sen describes as the “quiet courage” exhibited by Shehzad, Saud and Rehman–and the birds themselves–in the face of profound stress and adversity. Sen characterizes the men as Don Quixotes, tilting at windmills–still, they are making a positive impact in their little corner of the world.
For Sen, the genesis of this film sprung in part from the air itself in New Delhi which is “tactile, heavy, optic,” fueling a lot of conversation. It’s a little like what the air is in Los Angeles when wildfires are rampant. “I was vaguely interested in this texture, which laminates our lives,” said the New Delhi-based Sen who found himself drawn to the triumvirate of “birds, humans and air.” When he came across the brothers trying to rehabilitate regal birds in a dank, damp industrial basement, Sen found the underpinning of a film that was inherently cinematic.
Sen embraced a visual balancing act of “extreme compression and decompression.” There’s the “compressed space” of the brothers, working in a tiny, claustrophobic, cramped basement, juxtaposed with the skies of Delhi. “Vacillating between compression and decompression is part of the dance,” observed the filmmaker.
The prime entry on that dance card, though, for Sen, is the brothers’ “wry resilience,” their “unsentimental” approach–namely to “put your head down and soldier on…even in the face of such overwhelming ecological collapse.”
Shehzad, Saud and Rehman “traffic in micro miracles,” related Sen. Their small acts are “a life raft for optimism.” But as accurately captured in All That Breathes, it is an optimism that, noted Sen, “is not simple-minded or saccharin.” At the same time, though, there is something spiritual about Wildlife Rescue’s dedication to and co-existence with the black kites, birds of prey that are essential to the city’s ecosystem.
In some respects, Sen’s approach had to mirror that of the bird rescuers–to persevere when encountering problems, to be patient and soldier on. “You learn to listen to the small voices in your head,” said Sen, which include not feeling the need to stick to the conventional or accepted, to make a film that doesn’t fit into existing slots.
Sen made his feature-length documentary debut with Cities of Sleep (2016) which made its mark on the festival circuit (including DOK Leipzig, DMZ Docs and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival) and won six international awards.
All That Breathes hit New York theaters last week and is being released today (10/28) in Los Angeles theaters. The documentary won the Firebird Award at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and in addition to Sundance was an official selection at this year’s New York Film Festival, London Film Festival and Hamptons Film Festival.
