Hansal Mehta calls All That Breathes ‘much more cinematic’ than Oscar winner Navalny: 'Go ahead. Crucify me...'
Filmmaker Hansal Mehta took to Twitter to express his disappointment that Indian documentary All That Breathes lost the Oscar to Navalny.
Shaunak Sen's documentary All That Breathes lost out on the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 95th Academy Awards to Navalny. Now, director Hansal Mehta has shared his opinion on Twitter after watching both the films, where he said that All That Breathes is "much more cinematic" than Navalny. The filmmaker called Daniel Roher's Navalny "very ordinary as a film." (Also read: All That Breathes review: This Oscar nominee from India is visually stunning doc on need to co-exist)
Filmmaker Hansal Mehta took to Twitter to share his opinion on All That Breathes losing out on the Oscar to Navalny and wrote: "So I found the #Navalny documentary very important as a political story and very ordinary as a film. Go ahead. Crucify me for my opinion. But #AllThatBreathes is a class apart. Far more depth, very political also and definitely much more cinematic."
Navalny is a documentary film that revolves around Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and events related to his poisoning. The award was presented by actor Riz Ahmed and musician Questlove.
All That Breathes revolves around the lives of siblings Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, who work out of their makeshift basement in Delhi's Wazirabad, to rescue and treat injured birds, especially the black kites. The Hindustan Times review called the film "visually stunning," and said: "Breathtakingly shot by the team of cinematographers including Benjamin Bernhard, Riju Das and Soumyananda Sahi, All That Breathes finds arresting visual poetry in the darkest, dirtiest of places... Sen has created a masterwork."
The critically-acclaimed film had previously won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Eye award for the best documentary at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. After the film didn't win, Shaunak had shared some pictures on his Instagram from the night and admitted that the team felt ‘low’. He wrote: “So many chin-uppy messages of encouragement/support since yesterday. We were low for about an hour, but we're soon distracted into equanimity amidst the whirl of glittery people and things. Brain is still to wrap around the fact that this is the end of this chapter.”
