One of the top contenders for Best Documentary at the Oscars this year ranges from the skies above Delhi, India to a basement below the city’s north end.
In All That Breathes, brothers Nadeem and Saud operate a subterranean workshop-cum-makeshift animal hospital where they aid injured and ailing black kites, a bird of prey increasingly vulnerable to Delhi’s intense air pollution.
“I was really gripped by this figure of the black dot in the sky, which is the black kite,” recalls filmmaker Shaunak Sen, “the lazy gliding dots that you see — one of the them starts falling down. And I remember seeing this vaguely while driving my car one day and I was truly gripped with this figure. So, I started researching what happens to birds when they fall down. And that’s when I came upon the work of the brothers. The minute that you walked into that tiny, damp, air-lit basement, and you see the metal cutting machines on one side and these incredible regal birds on the other, it’s cinematically dense and riveting.”
All That BreathesSideshow and Submarine Deluxe, in association with HBO Documentary Films, released ‘The Submarine Deluxe Story’ in Los Angeles theaters on Friday. This film premiered in New York a week earlier. Since its premiere at Sundance last January, the film has been loved by audiences all over the world. It won the Grand Jury Prize in World Cinema Documentary. It won the prestigious “Golden Eye” (L’Oeil d’or) award at Cannes as the festival’s best documentary, and was nominated this past week for a Gotham Award for Best Documentary Feature and shortlisted for the IDA Awards.
Sen was surprised to be recognized for his second documentary.
“Just to get into the likes of Sundance and Cannes, let alone winning them, is already at the top of my desire matrix,”Deadline is told by him. “It’s really something that feels not entirely processed. Now to have the film open theatrically in the U.K. and U.S. — my brain is still wrapping itself around it.”
Nadeem, Saud and their faithful assistant Salik have successfully rehabilitated over 20,000 birds, most of which are kites, over the years. Because of the harmful particulates in the air, many birds are becoming more vulnerable to injuries and metabolic bone damage. The brothers tend to the birds with patience, and they sense their healing intention. Sen describes the tight quarters as uncomfortable for some members of the film crew. “ferocious raptors.”
“Ourproducer and my close friend Aman [Mann] is petrified of kites and wouldn’t work close to them,” Sen explains. “I am also not super comfortable, but I can be at arm’s length. And some of us are very comfortable with it.”Comfortable or not the director felt the urge to film the birds “as wondrous, otherworldly, awe-inspiring creatures.”
The film impressed not only because of its outstanding cinematography (by Ben Bernhard), but also for the elegant voiceover, which was derived from scattered observations made by the brothers over the course the documentary’s production.
“When other birds fly, their effort shows. But the kite swims,”They note this in the beginning of the film. They observe the film’s end. “Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air. That’s why we can’t abandon the birds.”
While Nadeem Saud and Saud don’t necessarily speak many words, what they do say is persuasive.
“The brothers themselves have… rich inner lives, and they’re philosophers of the urban,” Sen comments. “So, we decided to put in these kind of voiceover bits… cut to either the images that invoke their childhood or the magic of the black kite or the ecological absurdity of the city of Delhi. They’re really obviously lyrical set pieces.”
There are humorous touches in the film, which come from the endearing young Salik, who is sort of like a baby bird to the brothers’ older, wiser birds.
“Salik brings a kind of unguarded innocence to the film, which is helpful because it contrasts with the seriousness of the brothers,” Sen says. “He gets the laughs and things happen to him — his glasses get taken away [by a bird]. He says absurd things, like, ‘What happens if there is a nuclear war — will the birds survive?’ …You really fall in love with him.”
The smog hanging over Delhi is not just smog, but also, as in other parts of India, rising political tensions due to strident Hindu nationalism. As Muslims, brothers like them are at risk of being attacked. There is a clear connection between toxic skies and toxic political atmosphere. While the director gestures toward that, he doesn’t make it an overt topic of All That Breathes.
“The sectarian stuff is very obvious in what’s happening. And you can sense the political as a kind of oblique tangential presence in the film, the fact that the city is on the boil and there’s a lot of turbulence developing in the city of Delhi the last two years,” Sen notes. “I was interested in how the real world leaks in, and that’s the way resonances or tremors of the world are sensed. The film is ultimately ecological and does not have a fractal political ambition.”
He also said, “I feel it’s firmly political in the sense that the brothers are concerned about the relationship between humans and birds, which is its own kind of politics. But that’s what they’re interested in and we had to respect the integrity of their lives and their concerns.”
Sen doesn’t see his film as a nature or wildlife film. Rather, it’s a holistic meditation on the interdependence of living things – of all that breathe. The fates and fates of birds are connected to the fates of humans.
Kites are airborne predators and scan the sky for food. Sen was asked by us if he sees any similarities between Sen’s keen perception of birds, and his observational skills that are necessary to be a documentary filmmaker.
“Not inasmuch as direct parallels between the kite and our visual jobs as filmmakers,”He responds. “But the act of birdwatching and filmmaking are very, very similar, because what happens is that birdwatching requires you to decelerate, to slow down, no quick movements, sit still patiently and become a part of the wallpaper of the world. There’s a kind of intense, radical looking that birdwatching requires, which is very similar to the kind of fly on the wall approach that a lot of documentary filmmakers have.”
He added, “It’s just embracing the radical un-scriptedness of the world and just waiting, and eventually life rewards you with surprises. So, I suppose filmmaking is fundamentally ornithological in some ways.”