Exploring Delhi, through the prism of birds

It’s far from the time of Diwali when the air quality in the city is usually believed to be bad

It’s far from the time of Diwali when the air quality in the city is usually believed to be bad. As you read this, Delhi remained in ‘very poor’ category with overall AQI at 313 as per Air Quality and Weather Forecasting and Research’s recordings on Friday. No wonder then that when Delhi-based documentary filmmaker, Shaunak Sen decided to explore the subject of air quality, he based his cinematic work All That Breathes, in the Capital.

Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, is set against the social unrest caused by Delhi’s poor air quality, and is based on the story of two brothers, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, who set out to protect Black Kites.

The film has won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance International Film Festival 2022, and Sen shares that the moment of announcement was “dizzyingly blurry”. Based on the story of two brothers, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud — who set out to protect Black Kites — the film is set against the social unrest caused by Delhi’s poor air quality.

‘I have grown up in Delhi. We couldn't have made this movie in any other city we didn’t know as intimately’

“I, and most members in the directorial team have grown up here. We are deeply embedded in local context, interested in vernacular and colloquial cultures, and have witnessed it churning in recent years,” says Sen talking about growing up here and the life that reflects in his films. He adds: “I don’t think we could have made our previous film Cities of Sleep (2016), nor this film, All That Breathes in any other city that we don’t know as intimately well. The previous film was about disassembling the city through the lens of sleep, this film is about exploring Delhi through the prism of birds or non-human life... Examining a megapolis with as variegated worlds in it, like Delhi through these unique registers open up often subterranean or tangential aspects. That’s the kind of ambulatory relationship that I am interested in with the city of Delhi.”

The film evokes a sense of hope even in turbulent times. But Sen says they “weren’t interested in invoking straight-nosed unlinear emotions like either hope or despair or jadedness or joy”. Instead, his directorial venture was “drawing out a complicated picture of two brothers who untiringly work on saving birds falling out of the skies in a time of monumental ecological shifts. There are of course moments of unbridled joy, alongside a more zoomed out sense of bleakness. The point was to draw out a complex snapshot of their lives that invokes a plenitude of often contradictory, and conflicting feelings. But overall, hopefully, you are left deeply emotionally attuned to the brothers, their struggles, and the residue of their wry unsentimental sense of soldiering on, despite the most challenging of times.”

Overwhelmed with swathes of congratulatory messages, on social media and in personal communications, Sen, says he’s guardedly optimistic that the film now has more of a “fighting chance to land a good distributor” and be seen widely. “This is the main challenge for most documentaries. In the outpour of congratulatory messages, I’ve been personally most swayed by people who think this will make bigger grants/festivals/distributors outside take indie Indian films seriously, and possibly open some doors for other filmmakers,” he opines.

Sen, who made his directorial debut with the feature-length documentary Cities of Sleep (2016), says, “I had more resources this time. So I had more liberty to play with form and grammar, and play with treatments other than just the ethnographic. Which is why we attempted a more fabular, oblique, and languid form both in the shooting and in the edit structure.”

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