All The Breathes Documentary

[Clinio Lofton]

AllThat Breathes is a 2022 documentary film directed by Shaunak Sen. It is produced by Shaunak Sen, Aman Mann and Teddy Leifer under the banner of Rise Films. The film follows siblings Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, who rescue and treat injured birds in India.[2]

The film had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival on 22 January 2022, where it won Grand Jury Prize in World Cinema Documentary Competition.[3][4] It also had a screening at Cannes Film Festival in the special screening section,[5] where it won the Golden Eye.[6] It was later nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film.[7][8]

The film had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival on 22 January 2022.[9][11] It was also selected for screening at 2022 Cannes Film Festival in 'Special Screenings' section and was screened on 23 May.[12][13][14]

HBO Documentary Films bought the worldwide television rights for the film and following its theatrical run in the United States it became available on HBO and streaming service HBO Max on 7 February 2023.[22]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 99% of 87 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "A poetic tribute to tenacity, All That Breathes uses two brothers' tireless efforts to make a broader point about finding triumph within tragedy."[23] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 87 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[24]

Following its winning the Grand Jury Prize in World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance, All That Breathes won the L'Œil d'or, le prix du documentaire at Cannes. Ahead of its theatrical run in Los Angeles and New York, and eventual HBO rollout, Documentary caught up with Sen over a long, early-morning Zoom call. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The basement, the house, and the sheer absurdity of their living conditions draw you in. It was clear that the two brothers, their work and the family could become a kind of a metaphor where they encapsulated a large number of currents I wanted to be in conversation with.

While there are some overlaps, our struggle is nowhere close to being that kind of an existential battle for survival. For them, even though they do run a business for a kind of a baseline livelihood, what it would mean for the workaround birds to stop, is foundationally incomparable to what it would mean for a film to not fructify, for me.

We were able to pace ourselves and were better prepared to scale our jumps, especially because the ambition of the film was to be poetic and cinematic, which requires its own kind of resource-intensive infrastructure departments.

The bird is a figure of phenomenal literature, art, and poetry because it makes us hope. So verticality becomes a really delicious kind of lens through which we can look at human-animal relationships. But I was also, in particular, very interested in this love affair between man and bird.

D: When it comes to duty of care towards participants in your documentary, things are less formalized and less contractualized within India. I wanted to know how you approach relationships with the people in your film.

The question of talking to subjects and generating a conversation about active consent in terms of what is okay to shoot, what is not okay, what is the grammar of that shooting, is a constantly ongoing thing. It begins right when you start talking about the project, to when you are shooting, through the edit and so on.

SS: We had to carefully choose the things that communicate what we want people to sense. Obliquely. But at the same time, we have to be careful enough for it to not be egregiously foolhardy.

D: You made this film in India with funding that is largely international, and then the film is having this global journey. I wanted to talk about the difference in scale between your last film, which you showed widely but independently through your own networks and.

In this case, the scope was much bigger. There it was an investigation of sleep or Delhi at night through renegade sleepers. Here I began with man-bird, human-animal, so the platitudes at play were far bigger now and it required a more expansive treatment.

D: With your film, Writing with Fire and A Night of Knowing Nothing, there seems to be an uptick in South Asian nonfiction storytelling. A growth of interest, even. Why would you say that is happening?

There has also been an efflorescence of documentary schools and courses in India. Like the Sri Aurobindo Center for Arts and Communication in Delhi. Broadly there seems to be some kind of a churn happening.

"Attention to the macro and micro infuses nearly every frame of this nonfiction masterwork, which earned prizes at Sundance and Cannes this year and is maybe the most beautifully realized documentary in recent memory."

An ambitiously intricate study of the intersection of environmental collapse, religious tension, and the love of two Muslim brothers for a feathered scavenger unnervingly falling from a smoggy Delhi sky.

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This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC), and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies (CIMS) at the University of Pennsylvania.

Shaunak Sen is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and writer based in Delhi. His film All That Breathes received nominations at the 2023 Academy and BAFTA awards. The film won awards at Cannes, Sundance, BFI London, IDA and Cinema Eye, and twenty-four other film festivals. Cities of Sleep (2016), his first feature-length documentary, was shown at various major international film festivals and won six international awards. Shaunak has received grants from Sundance, Tribeca, and IDFA-Amsterdam, amongst others. He has received the Pro Helvetia residency in Switzerland, the Sarai-CSDS grant, and the Charles Wallace grant as a visiting scholar (at Cambridge University). Shaunak holds a Ph.D., has been published in journals including BioScope and Widescreen, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute, Berlin. Shaunak has been on juries for festivals including the Sundance Film Festival, Zurich Film Festival, and the IDSFFK, Kerala.

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Depending on your level of investment, All That Breathes could be a documentary about climate change and the crucial need to understand how animals are adapting and how humans need to adapt. It could be a spiritual piece about the webs of synergistic connectivity between, well, everything that breathes. It could be a humanist meditation on how we treat each other, how we tear people down by comparing them to animals, but how really we should treat everything and everyone just a bit better. Or it might just be 91 minutes with a couple of brothers who really like birds.

Director Shaunak Sen screens his 2023 Oscar-nominated documentary, All That Breathes, about birds and the men who tend to them in Delhi, India. The film will be followed by conversation with Professor Chris Cagle.

This event is part of the Arts Interdisciplinary Research (AIR) initiative. AIR is a holistic research center and forum for creative and scholarly research across the arts that includes cutting-edge colloquia, exploratory seminars, lecture demonstrations, launches of research publications and creative works, reading groups, faculty talks, and stand-alone conferences initiated by the faculty of the Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts.

One of the great, tragic flaws of the human race is locked up in our inability to think beyond our familiar scale of time; like the slow blades that slip the shields in Dune, gradual problems -- even if ultimately fatal -- are difficult for us to reckon with for their seeming lack of immediate urgency.

Now, staged against geologic time, even the timescales of the climate catastrophe are negligibly short. An Inconvenient Truth was released just 20 years ago, after all, and human science only began to point towards the damage we were doing to our ecosystem thirty years before that. For a human being, though, a 50-year apocalypse is simply too long-term to wrap one's mental arms around. And then the birds start falling out of the sky.

Shaunak Sen's All That Breathes, produced by HBO Documentary Films (and available on Max, or whatever Max will be called after the next shareholders' call) and released this week on Blu-ray by Janus Contemporaries, concerns itself with the micro-scale. It is not about the climate crisis as a whole or even overtly about the climate crisis at all; it's about two brothers, Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, living in New Delhi, who operate a small not-for-profit called Wildlife Rescue, and care for injured black kites.

The black kites are the aforementioned birds that have been falling out of the sky: as the population and pollution balance of New Delhi crosses the tipping point into inhospitability, the birds are finding it harder and harder to stay alive. Saud informs us that kites are a "traditional bird" -- they are habit-bound and conservative, making them less able to adapt to the changing realities around them than other species.

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