For me I was interested in the air, the experience of the air, this vague sense of being on the brink of some kind of collapse, like how we all feel with the environment. When you begin, what happens is that you have a conceptual scaffolding that is undergirding everything that you are doing. Shaunak Sen: These things always seem bigger in prospect but suffer in retrospect. Once you begin, it is a freefall.Īlso Read: “Biased Metrics, Biased Weights”, Says India As It Ranks Lowest In Environmental Performance Index 2022, Experts Agree What were your thoughts on making them the main subjects of your film and what angle to take in the story?
I shot them nonstop for three years while also shooting the wildlife in the city. but they have a rye resilience and a ‘put your head down and get to work’ kind of an attitude, which felt very refreshing to me. The brothers are the kind of front row seats to the apocalypse, literally treating birds falling off the sky. A lot of environmental discourse is either saddled with sentimentalism or has a reek bloom and gloom narrative towards the inevitable apocoplsype that we are heading towards. The sheer bipolarity of those two places, I got very interested in those brothers because they have a philosophical disposition towards climate change that felt to me very refreshing and different. Once you have gone to their house and their damp basement, it is very inherently cinematic. That’s when I encountered the work of the brothers. I started looking for people who have a deep or profound relationship with the sky or birds. Apart from that, I was also very interested in the human-animal relationship, as a sight philosophical query, I was conceptually interested in it. I was interested in this figure of the world that’s falling off the sky and it felt, in the first instance apocalyptic, but above and beyond, it is some kind of a metaphor for the ecological malaise of the city.
In this sky, there are small black dots, which are the black kites. Apart from that, you have this hazy grey monotone sky that is laminating the city entirely. I was interested in that kind of finding that sort of decennial quality in the air. The air is a kind of heavy, concrete, tactile.
Firstly, I was interested in this texture of greyness that one encounters in the city constantly. Before that, the girl sort of started with the triangulation of three things. Shaunak Sen: The brothers came eventually. What made you zero in on telling a story about these two brothers and their work with Kites. Your last documentary Cities of Sleep focuses on seeing Delhi through the prism of sleep and the mafia around it, you have traveled quite a bit since then, In All That Breathes, you focus on wild creatures living in Delhi and a rehabilitation center dedicated to saving them. The Delhi brothers become the central focus of Sen’s film and their story documents a larger snapshot of the city, where the air is toxic and the ground is on a slow burn of social turmoil. The 90-minute long documentary follows siblings Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, who have devoted their lives to rescue and treat injured birds, especially the Black Kites. Also called The Golden Eye, it is the biggest documentary award at the festival. New Delhi: Delhi-based filmmaker Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes has bagged the prestigious L’OEil d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival 2022.
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