Delhi-based film director Shaunak Sen, a former student of Jamia Millia Islamia and JNU, received the prestigious L’OEil D’Or award, also known as The Golden Eye, for his poetic and environmentally-sensitive documentary, ‘All That Breathes’, at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday.

The jury said, “L’OEil d’Or goes to a film that, in a world of destruction, reminds us that every life matters, and every small action matters. You can grab your camera, you can save a bird, you can hunt for some moments of stealing beauty, it matters. It’s an inspirational journey in observation of three Don Quixotes who may not save the whole world but do save their world.”

The award includes a cash prize of 5,000 euros.

Against the darkening backdrop of New Delhi’s apocalyptic air and escalating violence, Shaunak Sen’s ‘All That Breathes’, the film that bagged the Golden Eye Award at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, maps the lives of two brothers, Saud and Nadeem, who have devoted their lives to rescuing and treating the black kite from a rundown basement in Wazirabad.

“I am not interested in making either conventional ‘nature-based’ programming or a ‘wildlife’ documentary. My focus is neither limited to the life of the human protagonists nor the avian ones. The city itself – replete with the many human-animal ensembles in it – features in the film as a character,” the 34-year-old film director said in a director’s note put on the Cannes film festival website.

Earlier in January, the 88-minute documentary had received the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance International Film Festival. The film is dedicated to Sen’s father, who passed away following a stroke last July.

“In recent months, Nadeem and Saud have felt under siege from factors other than Delhi’s ongoing environmental catastrophe. The family grapples with the seismic ecological and political changes taking place around them and their relationship with their work comes under severe stress,” Sen further writes.

“The film experiences many of these macro-level changes through intimate details, as the family deals with them. Sometimes through trepidation, sometimes through instinctive fear, sometimes with wry humour, occasionally with ugly in-fighting, but mostly – with quiet courage,” he says.

Work on the film, which was edited in Denmark, began in 2019. In an earlier interview to The Times of India, Sen had explained the film germinated in his head. He spoke of “the grey hazy monotone laminates our life”, the “tiny dots” or black kites which glide on the city’s skies.