Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes has been nominated in the Documentary Feature category at the Oscars 2023. The docu-film has screened at film festivals around the world such as the Sundance Film Festival, the Valladolid International Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival.
The critically acclaimed documentary traces the lives of two brothers who dedicate their lives to rescuing and treating injured birds. It is his devotion to a black kite that serves as a vibrant contrast to the bleak backdrop of Delhi’s gloomy gray air.
In an exclusive interview with News18 when the film was shortlisted for the Oscars, director Shaunak Sen threw light on how the film came into existence and how the documentary circuit is thriving at the moment.
How do you feel about the official selection, has it all sunk in? What was your initial reaction when you first saw the list?
I think drowning is a long-winded process and given that the dates are announced much in advance, the person is constantly playing alternate timelines in their head, so it’s sunk in, but still a long one. There’s a way to go, still some time to go and many hoops to jump through.
My initial reaction was – relief! It came at around 2 am our time and it was a completely and utterly sleepless night but apart from that one is completely beside myself full of joy and thrill as the film played a major part of all our lives have taken. I think in the beginning it’s just phone calls for all the crew members and it’s going to be very happy. I’ve always been a little skeptical about happiness, so for me it’s often a calculation of what needs to be done now for next steps.
Let’s talk a bit about the film, it traces the lives of two siblings who have dedicated their youth to rescuing and treating birds. So, how much control did you have in terms of the creative aspect while filming this as well as trying to portray his life on screen? How did you practice?
So, first of all when someone strips it down to that kind of logline, it kind of presents an anemic and the wrong kind of representation, it’s a tough movie to present in a logline. I’ve always felt that it’s better to talk about it as a broader, ecologically philosophical, emotional and socio-political investigation of the relationship between a family and a bird called the black kite. In the same relation we tell the story of Delhi.
In terms of control of the characters, in creative non-fiction, your base is observation where life unfolds itself and you’re there to shoot it and we shot for three whole years, so we had a mountain of footage and it 90 minutes were to be spent. it was very difficult. Having said that, it doesn’t sound like a typical, conventional, Variety Observational Documentary, is a creative treatment of reality and we have used poetic, lyrical styles to further some of our ideas. At its center is a kind of radical embrace of the unwrittenness of the world but at the same time a creative treatment of things. The treatment is creative in a way but at the end of the day, we were changing every day and shooting a family for three consecutive years.
How did this story come into being, how did you meet the two siblings?
When you live in Delhi, the air takes on such a palpable, intimate, heavy, grey, tactilely alive and embodied feeling that you are always aware of the medium in which you are suspended, i.e. the air. So, I wanted to do something on the tone and texture of life, the kind of silliness around Delhi and I was philosophically interested in human-nonhuman relationships, so I was interested in how human-non- What does one think of the junction between the human – human bond. So, it was Sensorium initially, I was interested in the abstract triangle of wind, birds and humans – that’s how it started.
Once I started researching people who had a close or deep connection with birds or the wind, I learned the kind of work the brothers were doing. And, once you’ve met him and seen the singularly remarkable work he’s done and seen how inherently cinematic his basement is where he works, the film is like a free-fall, it’s like a fever. Is like a dream and I think that’s how it initially started.
In your last interview, you mentioned that it’s a common joke among documentary makers about how it is exactly when the subject starts yawning, where the real action begins and the camera starts filming. With regard to your film, how long did it take for this to happen?
To begin with, how do you get real, everyday natural behavior in front of the camera? If someone comes over to your or my house, initially we’ll be very alert and the camera will be a very intrusive, big presence, so initially, what happens in the first month that you’re going through that rite of passage Where you are earning trust and people are getting used to you.
Over time, boredom is the strongest weapon in your toolkit, the ambition of the documentary is to get a daily mundane, mundane texture to life, that’s what you want your content to get soggy and that’s only when the first yawn Useful stuff starts coming in when people get bored of your presence.
There are three cinematographers in your film and yet the frames and scenes are tied together so seamlessly. How did you ensure this?
That’s a good question, so the thing is there are two main DOPs, Ben Bernhard and Riju Das and the thing is when you’ve shot for three years it’s very difficult, especially for the guys who are doing the camera Are and are used to doing small jobs and moving from one project to another and when the pandemic is coming and going in between. So, there are long hauls in between when everything is closed and long hauls where everything reopens, so it becomes lax and it becomes very difficult to get a commitment for three long years.
When Ben came in and the pandemic happened, he had to go back to Germany and then it was difficult for him to come back and we had to move on, but in terms of your question about maintaining a cohesive voice, we had very strict grammar in the film. The language of the film is these slow slow pans, slow slow tilts, tracking etc., which we initially developed with Ben and then developed with Riju. So, we tried to stay within that range and more than that it was me and the director team who were constantly on it and there’s a lot of editing. Cohesion was something that our editors Charlotte Munch Bengtsen and Vedant Joshi worked really hard on.
in the documentary circuit India has thrived and seen so many achievements in the last 1-2 years. What is your overall outlook?
I am asked if we are really in the ‘Golden Age’ of Indian documentaries and of course, this is highly exaggerated and exaggerated but what is worth some analysis is how it is that in the last two years, the Indian Documentaries have done really well on the global stage. Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas’ ‘Writing with Fire’ which was at Sundance and was nominated for the Academy Awards last year, Payal Kapadia’s ‘A Night of Knowing Nothing’ which won at Cannes and another new film going to Cannes There is, of course, a moment where it is undeniable that Indian documentaries are certainly doing much better than our fiction counterparts.
Clearly a pattern is emerging, to my mind it is that one should not be overzealous first of all because there are still a lot of problems, we don’t have a stable dissemination infrastructure, we don’t have proper distribution, There’s only one or two break-out documentaries every year and we certainly need a much stronger documentary circuit and funding. We have to be more cautiously optimistic about it. You are correct in diagnosing that there is definitely a moment that is happening where we are doing well but let us not forget or minimize the work of the former owner who has done a lot of work in the last twenty years which you cannot deny But there is a tectonic shift that is definitely happening in the last two years.
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