All That Breathes’ Shaunak Sen

All That Breathes was a darling of the festival circuit in 2022. Universally lauded by critics, the film by Shaunak Sen scored the best documentary prize at both Sundance and Cannes, is up for a BAFTA and an Oscar and has a string of other wins and nominations to its credit. A Kiterabbit Films and Rise Films production in collaboration with HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, the film arrives on HBO and HBO Max next week, streaming across the platform’s European footprint beginning February 7. In the U.K., it will be available on Sky Documentaries on February 8. All That Breathes follows Nadeem and Saud, two brothers in New Delhi who have made it their mission to protect black kites, the birds of prey that have been falling from the skies of the Indian capital at an alarming rate, in a homemade makeshift hospital. Sen tells World Screen Weekly about filming in his hometown and deploying various cinematic and narrative techniques to tell the story of the brothers’ hopeful quest in a city marred by pollution and social divides.

WS: Delhi is a city teeming with stories. How did you stumble upon this one?
SEN: I wanted to do something on the edge and was philosophically interested in human-nonhuman entanglements. I wanted to do something on the color gray, which is the sensorium that laminates our lives in Delhi. I was looking for something that concatenates or embodies all these different instincts. And I was gripped by the figure of a bird falling out of the sky, a gray expanse. Essentially, that’s how the film began, once I discovered the work of the brothers, which is singular and remarkable. They saved 25,000 kites in 15 years. But more than that, the grubby industrial basement where so many magisterial birds are being treated is inherently cinematic. That’s how the film began, because of the sheer cinema in it.

WS: I understand you spent three years filming. How did you approach distilling your way through all of that footage?
SEN: We had over 300 hours of footage, and therefore, we had to have a daily review practice of looking at the footage, illuminating things we were not using and the things that we were. We were basically whittling it down step by step. We started editing with Vedant Joshi in India. We cut it down simultaneously to shooting. Then we went to Copenhagen to edit with Charlotte [Munch Bengtsen] with a whittled-down three-hour-long cut, which she then started sculpting further.

WS: Talk to me about the intimacy of the cinematography and how you were able to embed yourself in their lives to the point that you, as the filmmaker, are invisible.
SEN: I think you have to wait for the critical mass of boredom. In the first month, you are obtrusive, and the camera is obtrusive. What you’re looking for is a quality of the passing of time, which is quotidian, banal and mundane. You have to wait for the first yawn. Everything before that is junk, but it’s kind of a rite of passage. Once you get that, you know that from this point onward, you’ll get unselfconscious behavior.

WS: Was it a challenge to film in Delhi?
SEN: It might not be easy for people who don’t live there. I’m fully embedded in the vernacular and colloquial cultures of the city, and in that, it’s actually the easiest city in the world for me to shoot in. In fact, I would go as far as saying that it’s far tougher to shoot in Western cities because people are not as accommodating. In Delhi, very often, if you just speak friendly with people, you don’t need to go through the rigmarole of licenses and official permission. It’s the human interaction of being able to get the trust that you need.

WS: Have you remained in touch with the brothers? I imagine their work continues.
SEN: I’m in nearly daily touch with the brothers. They’ve been coming to a lot of the festivals. They came to Cannes. Their hospital is continuing. It’s doing slightly better because our producers have very kindly funded the hospital for a year now. It looks like you see it in the film, slightly more developed.

WS: I’ve seen you talk about using scripted production techniques in your work. Can you tell us about that approach?
SEN: I don’t think those techniques in documentaries mimic their original forms. There isn’t anything irreducibly germane to a pan that can be called only fiction; we just see it more in fiction. Documentary is shooting the world as it unfolds. And often, we don’t have the time to apply techniques like a pan or a tilt, which are time-consuming. But in this film, we had a small area to shoot in, and the action was repetitive every day. So I had the luxury of choreographing camera movements. Also, this film had to be meditative and contemplative; therefore, it required a certain dreamy, flowy style, which is why I like these techniques. It’s not like I put in the techniques for the sake of them. The story intuitively demanded an aesthetic style, which is what I did.

WS: Are you finding more opportunities in the TV space today, given that the number of places your projects can land has expanded over the last few years?
SEN: I would imagine so. From the space of my last film in 2015 to now, there are far more avenues to distribute and raise funds. But remember, the minute you compare it with our fiction counterparts; it’s a pitiful scarcity. It’s great compared to where we were, but it’s fairly sparse compared to them.

WS: With exposure on HBO Max, the film will reach far more people than it would just in a theatrical release. What are you hoping audiences take from it?
SEN: What’s most important is the brothers’ philosophical disposition. The film talks about the ecological, the political and the emotional as intertwined. I know the brothers’ wry resilience gets across.