Shaunak Sen remembers sitting in his car in a traffic jam on a day when the skies were grey and hazy, watching black kites, specks from afar, gliding through them. “I got the distinct impression that I saw one of those black dots hurtle down,” says the award-winning Indian filmmaker and video artiste at a recent discussion in Bengaluru, part of Science Gallery Bengaluru’s Carbon Film Festival held in the city earlier this month.
Shaunak Sen
| Photo Credit:
Chris Pizzello
Gripped by the idea of what happens to a bird that falls from a polluted sky, he took out his phone and googled it. That is when he first discovered the two brothers, Saud and Nadeem, who would become the subject of his 2022 documentary film, All That Breathes, which was also screened at the film festival.
“I randomly just cold messaged them on Facebook and then went to meet them,” he tells nature educator and conservationist Garima Bhatia and wildlife biologist and conservation scientist Ravi Chellam, with whom he was in conversation at the session.
This, in many ways, was the starting point for this beautiful film, which went on to win multiple international awards, including the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Eye at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, and was also nominated for the 95th Academy Awards in the Best Documentary Feature category.
Set in Delhi, the film tells the story of the two brothers (and their assistant, the intensely charming Salik), former bodybuilders who have dedicated their lives to rescuing and healing birds, primarily the black kite. But it is also a portrait of a city and its inhabitants—both human and non-human—living through turbulent times, and a meditation on the relationship between humanity and other living beings with whom we share this world.
In the course of the discussion, Shaunak also reveals how his encounters with the people he met while on a fellowship in Cambridge shaped this film. “I was housed around people working on human-non-human relationships…somebody was working on wolves in Chernobyl, somebody was working on vegetation in Fukushima,” he says. It got him thinking about a more-than-human perspective that “looks at the human as not the absolute reference point but kind of relational entanglement between human and non-human species,” he adds.
An interaction of the film, All That Breathes.
| Photo Credit:
HANDOUT E MAIL
Title talk
Garima begins the conversation by describing how the film, which she had already watched three times, made her feel. “Each time I uncover different layers. It is always an intensely emotional experience,” she says, something Ravi, who has watched the film four times, seems to agree with. Ravi then explores the specifics of the film, starting with the title.
Shaunak says that the title stems from something the brothers’ mother used to tell them: that you can’t create hierarchies between different life forms. “If someone else had said that, I would dismiss it as some highfalutin gobbledygook,” he says. But the brothers themselves concretely conduct their lives according to this maxim, he says.
He describes them as contemplative and meditative people who had spent so much of their life thinking about this kind of simultaneity, “a kinship, an entanglement between human and non-human species. I wanted a title that is able to capture that broader kind of neighbourliness.”
A still from the film.
| Photo Credit:
HANDOUT E MAIL
Shooting process
Garima calls All That Breathes a deeply contemplative film with a lyrical, poetic quality about it, one that forces the viewer to slow down. Shaunak says he began by shooting it like any other documentary, using a handheld camera to capture his various subjects. “I had the camera in my hand and took a run and gun, raw, grimy approach,” he says. “There, the logic is that if a character moves, the camera just follows them.”
Within four or five months of shooting in this sort of style, he realised that the material he had collected was too restless and edgy. “This style helps when you want really raw images, be it with action or deep immersion characters,” he says. “But my characters were not restless. They were very calm and contemplative; that was their vibe.”
He, therefore, concluded that he needed to find a different way of telling this story for the form to be concomitant with the content. “Increasingly, I realised that I had to play with the tools of fiction to tell this non-fiction story,” he says, adding that he wanted the outer shell of the film to be like a fiction film even though its heart continued to be non-fiction. “That is how the form emerged,” he says.
A question of time
Indeed, like any good work of fiction, All That Breathes contains multitudes. The lives and struggles of its wonderfully hewn characters acquire a certain universality, asking those big questions about the human condition: identity, belonging, love, and meaning. “I realised that the brothers are just so incredibly smart and philosophical. I needed a form that allowed them to speak their cleverest thoughts,” says Shaunak, who went on to interject voiceovers of these thoughts within the narrative.
The voiceover form, he says, allowed him to access the past and how they started this life “where it felt like a love story about two brothers and a bird…this enchanting other-worldly wondrous bird that looks like an alien with glass, reptilian eyes.”
He also goes into the film’s use of long takes, an essayist style that makes it feel more creative than a journalistic documentary, and the actual shooting process, which he describes as “essentially ornithological.” Like birdwatching, he says one needs to slow down, decelerate, and subtract oneself while shooting. “You are just sort of receding into the wallpaper…trying to collect snatches of everyday life.”
Getting that sense of everydayness so critical to documentary filmmaking, “material soaked in mundane banality,” as Shaunak puts it, is primarily a question of time. “The first month is usually junk since everyone is very conscious and stilted,” he says. But if one keeps shooting, the sense of normalcy and realness does begin to seep in. “Everything is as raw and as unvarnished as can be,” he says. “The comfort is really just a function of pure time…letting the camera roll, quite literally, for three years.”
Other discussions
Other aspects discussed at the session included how publicity changed the life trajectory of these brothers, the rawness of the footage, why the film didn’t have a theatrical release in India, the politics of the film and the challenges of shooting it during COVID-19.
Shaunak goes into how the film took on a life of its own that was completely unprecedented, especially since it was nominated for the Oscars. He also made sure that the brothers were part of every big event connected to it. “Nadeem has probably been to more film festivals than I have,” he says, adding that the media spotlight did mean that they received a lot of donations. He also thinks that it would be foolhardy for him to imagine that a single film could have changed these brothers’ lives. “I hope it provided a momentary oasis and a kind of witnessing of the singular lives that they lead,” he says.
Film as Trojan horse
He also thinks that films can be a Trojan horse, helping drive conversations that people don’t necessarily want to have in a subtle way. “You sneak in conversations and emotionally move people without being pedantic.” Which is why, he says,he dislikes a lot of wildlife documentaries that are often preachy and pedantic, making people feel bad about themselves. “That really does more disservice than good.” Instead, he believes in what he calls tiny empathy plugs. “That is how films usually move. They get into the cultural bloodstream and augment a pool of ideas that all of us are trying to push towards”.
