In the spotlight
Shaunak Sen - All that Breathes
Film still: All that Breathes, dir. Shaunak Sen
“The best films are Trojan horses”
The subject for documentary film All That Breathes imposed itself onto Shaunak Sen day after day. “The sky in my hometown of New Delhi is heavy, gray, and almost tangible,” according to the filmmaker. “You are constantly aware of it, as you breathe it in or walk through it. That's why I wanted to make a documentary about air pollution and its effect on people. Underlying this idea was my philosophical interest in the relationship between human and non-human life forms. That led me to birds. They form the bridge between air and people, especially in a compact, urban ecology where everything is closely connected.”
Sen had expected to need to do a lot of research before he could start filming, but his first Google search hit was a bull’s eye. It led him straight to Wildlife Rescue, an organization founded in 2010 by two brothers who dedicate their lives to saving the endangered black kite bird species. The makeshift hospital they run from their basement immediately won Sen over. “It’s an industrial space, dingy and cramped, where those majestic birds of prey are patched up. The location has a strong cinematic feel, which reminded me of Andrei Tarkovsky films."
To capture the ordinary, everyday scenes he witnessed before him, Sen allowed the brothers to “become totally bored with the presence of the camera. In the beginning, they were still very self-conscious and performed the role known from formal talking heads interviews. I had to wait for the first yawn.”
During the three years that Sen was filming the bird rescue center, the atmosphere in the city changed. Religious riots swept across New Delhi. Tensions were also running high in the neighborhood the two brothers called home, who belong to the city’s Muslim minority.
“When I started filming, All That Breathes was intended to be a purely ecological documentary. But events from the outside world seeped in; the sound of protests outside or videos of violence that circulated on WhatsApp. At some point I decided to accept it and allow it to happen, but without underlining it—allowing it to exist on the periphery. I didn’t want to put too much emphasis on socio-political current affairs, because that quickly turns moralistic. I don’t like films that put their cards on the table like that. The best films are Trojan horses. All That Breathes is an ecological film at heart, but all those other themes fight one another for space and attention.”
Photo: director Shaunak Sen doing a Q&A after the Oxfam Novib Special screening of All that Breathes
A significantly larger production budget compared to Sen’s previous film enabled him to make bolder stylistic choices. “Cities of Sleep was raw and grainy, and shot in a cinéma vérité style. This film is more serrated and essayistic. I had more control over the cinematic language. That's most recognizable in the voiceover scenes. These are statements by the brothers that I later re-recorded and incorporated into the film in a lyrical, and hopefully subtle, way.”
The result is a film that tells several stories at once, which the viewer instinctively feels belong together without fully understanding how. “I didn't want to make a nature documentary, a conventional socio-political film, or a street film about good people doing good things,” says Sen. “The film turned out to be all of those things in the end, and none of them at the same time.”
That fits the subject of the film perfectly, in Sen’s opinion. “People often tend to separate and categorize different aspects, but life is one big tangled mess. You see that in the film, too. The immeasurably large and the intimately small are both subject to the logic of the universe.”
By Edo Dijksterhuis
Film still: All that Breathes, dir. Shaunak Sen