Shaunak Sen’s ‘All That Breathes’ and a front row seat to the apocalypse

‘All That Breathes’, Shaunak Sen’s Sundance-premiering documentary, is an urgent commentary on the social fabric of Delhi and its apocalyptic skies

Early on in Shaunak Sen’s documentary, All That Breathes — while carefully examining and suturing an injured bird before them — two brothers discuss the potential ramifications of a nuclear war based on a news report one of them came across. If it wasn’t for the bird on the table, you’d have guessed it was just another Delhi basement: crammed with boxes, peeling walls, and the soot-coated bulbs illuminating just enough.

If you ask the 34-year-old director — beyond the casual references to the said nuclear obliteration — Delhi is already in the throes of an apocalypse and the brothers have front row seats to it. And he has captured this in All That Breathes, the only Indian documentary to have a world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Utah, USA (scheduled to be held virtually from January 20).

“Essentially, the film is about the relationship of the people of Delhi with the polluted skies, through the lenses of those black dots [the silent casualty of the city’s darkening skies, the black kite] that we often see gliding through it,” he says. Through the story of the two brothers, Nadeem Shahzad (44) and Mohammad Saud (40), Sen wanted to capture the fact that “nature is not happening elsewhere but right in the heart of our urban jungles”.