A version of this story about “All That Breathes” first appeared in the Guild & Critics Awards/Documentaries issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Winner of film festival prizes at Sundance and Cannes, Shaunak Sen’s documentary “All That Breathes” is about a makeshift bird hospital in Delhi and the two brothers, Nadeem and Saud, plus their volunteer assistant Salik, who work there.
Though focusing on the welfare of animals, Sen’s film is not a conventional nature documentary. Instead, the Delhi-based filmmaker presents this world via patient, cinematic lyricism, a wry sense of humor, and a meditative quality that rewards the viewer with an immensely rich experience.
Sen spoke to TheWrap about making the movie, a major contender to be nominated for this year’s Best Documentary Oscar.
The movie includes so many stirring images of animals in Delhi. Did it begin as a study of the black kite birds?
The starting point was the city of Delhi, where gray is the all-pervasive texture. When I’d be looking up at the monochromatic sky, I’d see these black dots, and every now and then they are dropping. I was overtaken by this sense of a bird falling off a gray polluted sky. That’s how I started researching what happens to birds that fall. So the film didn’t start off as a film about birds, it was meant to be about the mood and texture of the air we live in.
How did you find the focus of the film?
Well, it was more dictated by what it was not. I was certain this was not going to be a mainstream wildlife documentary or that kind of conventional film about the natural world. And it was not meant to be a conventional political-sociological film either. And it was more definitely not going to be a sweet film about nice people doing good things. It wasn’t going to be a heartwarming film about a hospital for birds.
I was trying my best to steer clear of these three things. And what when you’re more sure of what it’s not – a negative entry point – then of course it takes on an amorphous, lyrical form. And I feel like that in hindsight helped. You know that you’re trying to undermine certain tropes and conventions.
What did you think when you first visited the bird hospital?
I was immediately drawn to it. It’s this industrial, grubby, dense basement, with birds popping up in every nook and cranny – that’s so inherently cinematic. And I was drawn to the wry, enigmatic quality of the two brothers who run the place. I often don’t feel comfortable with bleeding-heart sentimentality or despair merchants, but the brothers have this unsentimental resilience. The birds are getting injured, so they go out and help them without making a big deal out of it. There’s a quiet, radical hope in them that’s not histrionic. That’s very interesting to me.
And Salik, their assistant, provides an incredible counterpoint to the brothers, because in contrast to their cryptic introspective quality is his incredible candor and unvarnished, pristine innocence.
Salik is an incredible documentary character. There’s a wonderful moment when a bird plucks the glasses off his face. Do you credit your patience for getting that shot?
I don’t think that shot had anything to do with patience. All the patience came in the first year, with me feebly puttering about to get ideas about the visual language. For that shot, it just so happened that they framing was right and the lighting was right and just then the bird grabbed his glasses. It was a miracle, getting that on camera. With animals on camera, you just wait, wait, wait. And you trust that life will reward you with instances of magic. Like a chipmunk popping out of a shirt pocket. That happens because if you keep shooting, crazy things happen.
The film is 87 minutes long, but how many hours of footage did you shoot?
400 hours, approximately. To get a sense of everyday mundaneness, you have to let the camera run and just bore the living daylights out of your subjects. Until you’ve gotten the first yawn from them, you haven’t gotten any usable material. That yawn means that you are not an intrusive presence, nor is the camera. You’re becoming the wallpaper of their lives and they don’t care. That’s what makes material usable.
Were there other films, or even material outside of films, that we big influences for you?
There’s nothing that’s not inspired by films for me. Everything, even in life, more often than not, a bad day feels like a bad film. But yes, there were many references like Andrei Tarkovsky and “Stalker” and Bela Tarr. That steady, stealthy traveling camera is important to me and had been important to many generations of Indian filmmakers.
I’ve talked to audiences who say that the film made them drowsy, but in a really good way. How do you react to that?
I’ve never been asked that before. Well, the choice of words is crucial. Drowsy is fine, sleeping is perhaps a bit too much. But drowsy is not very far from meditative, right? Those are neighborly terms. We wanted a film that was not anxious or restless. Audiences are brought up on such a diet of distraction and easy consumption, so of course this film feels a bit slower. In a way, it’s like bird-watching, which is about deceleration, becoming still, waiting for the bird.
And, you know, some of my favorite films I have a drowsy relationship with. I mean, who hasn’t dozed through Tarkovsky. We all know this. I don’t want to say my film is “Stalker”-level slow, I don’t want to give the wrong impression. It certainly has a lighter touch. If people feel it has slowness, that’s okay. But in equal measure, people tell me that the film seeps into their consciousness and they say that the images come back and they look up and notice birds more. That was the whole idea – making the ordinary enchanting.
“All That Breathes” is currently playing in select theaters and will be available on HBO and HBO Max in 2023.
Read more from the Guild & Critics Awards/Documentaries issue here.
