Delhi-based filmmaker Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes, which is set in Delhi, has won the L’Oeil d’Or – the top documentary award at Cannes. The documentary, which premiered in the Special Screening segment at the Cannes Film Festival, also won the ‘World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary’ at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Shaunak, who is still processing this victory, says, “It’s a blur and life takes on a dizzying kind of density which is unprecedented at least for me. I’m not used to any of this (the spotlight). I’m shy and reclusive, especially on social media. It’s not that I’m constantly posting about stuff. It doesn’t come easy to me. Of course, I’m grateful for everything that happened. We all are thrilled, but also I’m constantly trying to steal moments of quiet and calm as much as I can.”

The documentary has long sequences of rats, turtles and other forms of wildlife in Delhi as Shaunak wanted to narrate the story of all that breathes.

Shaunak says that the film’s title gestures toward the kinship that is inherent in living beings. “It’s like ontological neighbourliness between different species,” he says.

The description of the documentary states — from their makeshift bird hospital in their tiny basement, the ‘kite brothers’ care for thousands of these mesmeric creatures that drop daily from New Delhi’s smog-choked skies. As environmental toxicity and civil unrest escalate, the relationship between this Muslim family and the neglected kite forms a poetic chronicle of the city’s collapsing ecology and rising social tensions.

Shaunak adds, “Anyone who lives in Delhi is acutely aware of air as kind of a dark and tactile object. But even in the farthest reaches of my imagination, I did not think that I was making a film on air pollution at all. The basis of the story is the relationship between the brothers and how they continue treating so many birds every day, second — the broader landscape of Delhi, and third — the bird itself which I was interested in.”

All That Breathes is a collaboration between an Indian director, a German DOP (Director of photography), and a Danish film editor. Shaunak’s visual narrative in the documentary has been inspired by Russian director Viktor Kossakovsky’s work as he wanted to bring that narrative to show Delhi’s apocalyptic background. Critics have praised the ‘fantastic macro cinematography’ of the documentary on which three DOPs — Ben Bernhard, Riju Das, and Saumyananda Sahi — worked.

Shaunak says that his idea was “to render the scientific into the poetic”. He says, “The documentary is a poetic sort of formulation that includes the scientific, social and the emotional.”

In an interview with a film magazine, Ben Bernhard spoke about one of the most difficult shots of the documentary — the opening sequence. He was quoted as saying, “Shaunak and I wanted to not only show the rats but to be in the middle of them while connecting the animals to the city life.”

The film was mostly edited in Copenhagen by Danish film editor Charlotte Munch Bengtsen. Shaunak says, “She wanted to find a structure between extreme compression — which is the claustrophobic basement of the brothers, and decompression — the vista of the city itself.”

Talking about Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, the brothers on whom Shaunak has based the documentary, he says, “It’s a deep kind of friendship where they have opened their lives to me and I have opened large parts of my life to them. They have always been very respectful of me as an artiste who essentially retains the autonomy of the story that he is telling.”

Both the brothers bring fallen kites home and sometimes the number is around 30 a day. They provide medical attention to these kites and feed them, and till now, they have rescued over 24,000 birds. When did they start rescuing kites?

Mohammad Saud says, “When I was around 10-11 years old, I found a kite and I took it to a hospital behind Red Fort, but they refused to operate it as it is a meat-eating bird. I spent the whole day going from one hospital to the other, but everywhere I took the bird, they refused to operate. Shaam mein haar kar maine usse wahin rakh diya jahan se uthaya. Over the years, I kept seeing these birds dying on the road, but I never picked them again because I knew I would not be able to help them. In 2003, one day, I found a black kite and decided to do whatever I can on my own.”

Critics have praised the documentary for its intensity and telling the story as if the camera is not even in the room. Saud says, “Shaunak came to meet us in December 2018 and for the next three years it continued. Shaunak ne kaha tha jab aap camera se itne familiar ho jayenge ki aap camera ke samne yawn karne lagenge tab main apna pehla shot lunga.”

Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad also attended the screening at Cannes and Saud says, “It was a packed house, and we did not just get a long standing ovation, but people were crying in the theatres.”

Shaunak adds, “I think there is a quiet grace to trying something very hard and then getting the success that it is earned and justified.”