When they see us

As All That Breathes soars at the international festival circuit, filmmaker Shaunak Sen discusses its mood, metaphors and underlying politics

Shaunak Sen has landed in India but the win at the prestigious Cannes International Film Festival is yet to sink in. After winning the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, his documentary, All That Breathes, has won the prestigious L’Oeil d’ Or, the top prize for documentaries at Cannes.

The Delhi boy, who studied the craft at Jamia Millia Islamia and is presently doing his PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, says he feels honoured his film was screened alongside the masters whose works he admired and studied during his growing up years.

A creative non-fiction, the mood piece follows the lives of siblings Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud who rescue and treat black kites in the dilapidated basement of their house in Wazirabad, Delhi. Through them, the documentary looks at the environmental and social decay in the political capital of the country through man-animal relationships and their interdependence

Keen to hold a screening in their neighbourhood in Wazirabad as soon as they catch a breath from all the international attention, Shaunak talks about the visual grammar of the film. Edited excerpts:

How did the film come about?

I was interested in the visceral, heavy, opaque, greyness of the air we experience in Delhi. I have a philosophical interest in the human-animal relationship, especially in birds. I was very interested in the figure of a grey, monotone heavy sky in which these birds float like tiny dots and the dreamy image of a bird falling off the sky.

When I started looking for people who have a deeper meaningful engagement with birds or the skies, I chanced upon the work of the brothers. The minute I met them in the remarkable basement, with industrial decay on one side and these regal-looking birds on the other, I immediately sensed it is an inherently cinematic place. The film became a kind of free-fall, afterwards. It was three years of the rigorous long-winded shoot.