Shaunak Sen Interview: The making of a dystopic fairytale

Express News Service

Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes had its world premiere on January 22, 2022, at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury award in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. Over a year since then, it has emerged, deservedly so, as the most celebrated among the recent Indian films. The most awarded documentary of the year won laurels at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, best feature, director and editing prizes at the International Documentary Association Awards 2022 and the best documentary trophy at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. It has also been nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 95th Academy Awards.

All That Breathes is underlined with a sense of urgency when it comes to the issue of ecological devastation it is centred on. It tells the story of brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, their assistant Salik Rehman and their lifelong commitment to rescuing and saving the injured kites. “The epistemic wallpaper of our lives” is how Sen puts it.

Excerpts:

The story of Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad had been documented before. What was it that intrigued you to think of making a film about them?
Growing up in Delhi, a person is used to the hazy sky, the sun as the diffused blot, and the bad air. And there is a general sense that something hostile is dominating your life. And then every time you look up, you’ll always see these slow, gliding dots. The kites. One of the first things I remember telling my producer partner, Aman Mann, was that I was interested in making this film where the audience comes out of the theatre and looks up at the sky. When I met the brothers, I found that they work in this tiny, derelict, very industrially decayed basement. On the one side, there are the heavy metal cutting machines and the whirring, metallic sounds. On the other side, I found these magisterial yet vulnerable birds. There’s something inherently cinematic about this kind of duality. They are doing such phenomenally important work in this tiny, stifling, claustrophobic basement.

What went into the scripting and shooting of the film?
It came up organically. We had hours and hours of interviews from over two and a half years of shooting footage. I had a diary full of very clever, acute and often philosophically intense things that the brothers would share through the comments, which we sharpened over time. We then extracted the best bits out of it. My previous film Cities of Sleep was more classically observational, candid, and shot with a handheld camera. This was far more controlled, curated, languid, fluid, and aestheticized.

Was this process of curating reality satisfying or challenging?
I don’t know if satisfying would be a correct parameter. Whatever comes intuitively or organically to you at the time of making, feels satisfactory. I would like to believe that All That Breathes is a far more mature understanding of time and space, editing rhythm and the camera. But I was a different person back then and Cities of Sleep was an intuitive expression of who I was then.

There is the sky and kites in the film but there’s a lot captured about what’s happening on the ground, and the whole ecosystem of scavenging.
In the first few shots, if you look at the images and break those down, the camera immerses you in this kind of subterranean world, almost the substrata of the city, teeming with rats. After that, you see a lone single kite soaring in the sky beautifully, after which you see a puddle on the road with a pack of mosquitoes who are both terrestrial and in the air. This sense of different cuts of straight lines above the ground was something that I was vaguely interested in, not in a very frontal manner.

I was very interested in the theory of more-than-human turn. It tells us that the human is not the absolute central reference point of analysis or entry into the world. You think of the world through these different nodes of entanglements and these non-human lives.

So, for instance, when you see a slow, languid pan of a turtle going through garbage and then look at the traffic above, what you’re seeing is a kind of encounter or collision between two different temporalities.  Eventually, we developed a grammar to tell it. We developed these slow, languid pans, or tilts down where you reveal the duality of the world. Over time, through the shoot, what we realized was very important to the vocabulary of filming was that we should not cut the shots. So, none of these shots has any cuts.

Researching, writing, shooting and editing. It must have been an exhaustive process.
Animals are not easy to shoot. They are monumentally indifferent to your design. We were also certain that we didn’t want to do the more conventional wildlife documentary. We also didn’t have the skills to do it. You can say that you want to shoot the mice and snails and all of that. But to find them and then shoot them is another matter altogether. So, it meant just relentlessly turning up at places every day.
There is a comforting and languid touch profound in all aspects of the film.

Sometimes there is this over-romanticized, bleeding-heart sentimentality about environmentalism, that I don’t have a lot of patience for. What drew me to the brothers was that they have a wry, unsentimental way of soldiering every day while witnessing ecological devastation at a scale that is unimaginable for most of us.

They follow the emotional logic of the story, even if they feel like they are interrupting the narrative thrust. And that was something that developed very organically on the edit.

There is talk about the smelly water, about a child being unwell. You have integrated pollution as a part of life.
At no point did we ever think that we were making a film on pollution. We were very sure about what we were not going to do. Only later did we discover what the film was about. It slowly began to emerge that these are the broader coordinates that the film ought to map and what to steer clear of.
The ecological issues around Delhi, very often are the epistemic wallpaper of our lives. The kind of banal, trivial ways in which emerging environmental consciousness articulates itself every day. It’s not an exception. It’s in the fabric of every day.

You seem to have got a lot of access to the brothers and their families. There is a certain intimacy yet a distance with which you frame and film them. How did you negotiate that?
The camera is a very obtrusive presence in the beginning, so most of the material is unusable anyway. It’s only when they get really bored of you and they yawn in front of the camera marking the beginning of actual work. At first, they weren’t sure what it meant, they were expecting sit-down interviews etc. And then they realized that we were just hanging around, shooting everything in their lives. We had a code word, I would come in and say “ab hum deewar hain (now we are the wall)”. They’d then ignore us and go about their day. Slowly the circumference of what is ok to shoot grows because they also start trusting you and deep friendships develop. At this point, they are like family members, and we are family members to them. There were personal tragedies in my life [father’s death]. They came and attended the funeral service. You get embedded in each other’s lives. This kind of shooting leads to a very special kind of density of friendship and intensity which waxes and wanes through the course of the film.

There are the anti-CAA/NRC protests in the background…
We didn’t envision the documentary to be a political snapshot of the country. There is a lot of respect for people who are making that kind of cinema, but this project was not it. It became a question of integrity, whether to point the camera away or stick to them.

It is never frontally encountered though. We only see things from a distance because the brothers themselves are very aware, they are not political. What they are interested in is the cosmological politics, of the relationship between man and the sky or the humans and the birds. They’re like ‘If we go to protest, who’ll take care of the birds?’ It’s about the problem one decides to attend to that very often configures one’s political realm and, for them, politics is often the expression of ecology and environment.

Do the topics like ‘environmental degradation’ and ‘ecological devastation’ have political parallels?
These are metaphorical underpinnings. But you know when you are shooting, you don’t shoot for the metaphor, right? Even during the first few stages of the edit, you don’t do that; you just stick to the spine of the story and its emotional thrust. You don’t encounter anything directly political. It’s about the environment and the atmosphere. Most people outside will not have a sense of what the specifics are. 

<br /> Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes had its world premiere on January 22, 2022, at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury award in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. Over a year since then, it has emerged, deservedly so, as the most celebrated among the recent Indian films. The most awarded documentary of the year won laurels at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, best feature, director and editing prizes at the International Documentary Association Awards 2022 and the best documentary trophy at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. It has also been nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 95th Academy Awards.</p> <p>All That Breathes is underlined with a sense of urgency when it comes to the issue of ecological devastation it is centred on. It tells the story of brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, their assistant Salik Rehman and their lifelong commitment to rescuing and saving the injured kites. “The epistemic wallpaper of our lives” is how Sen puts it.</p> <p>Excerpts:</p> <p>The story of Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad had been documented before. What was it that intrigued you to think of making a film about them?<br /> Growing up in Delhi, a person is used to the hazy sky, the sun as the diffused blot, and the bad air. And there is a general sense that something hostile is dominating your life. And then every time you look up, you’ll always see these slow, gliding dots. The kites. One of the first things I remember telling my producer partner, Aman Mann, was that I was interested in making this film where the audience comes out of the theatre and looks up at the sky. When I met the brothers, I found that they work in this tiny, derelict, very industrially decayed basement. On the one side, there are the heavy metal cutting machines and the whirring, metallic sounds. On the other side, I found these magisterial yet vulnerable birds. There’s something inherently cinematic about this kind of duality. They are doing such phenomenally important work in this tiny, stifling, claustrophobic basement.</p> <p>What went into the scripting and shooting of the film?<br /> It came up organically. We had hours and hours of interviews from over two and a half years of shooting footage. I had a diary full of very clever, acute and often philosophically intense things that the brothers would share through the comments, which we sharpened over time. We then extracted the best bits out of it. My previous film Cities of Sleep was more classically observational, candid, and shot with a handheld camera. This was far more controlled, curated, languid, fluid, and aestheticized.</p> <p>Was this process of curating reality satisfying or challenging?<br /> I don’t know if satisfying would be a correct parameter. Whatever comes intuitively or organically to you at the time of making, feels satisfactory. I would like to believe that All That Breathes is a far more mature understanding of time and space, editing rhythm and the camera. But I was a different person back then and Cities of Sleep was an intuitive expression of who I was then.</p> <p>There is the sky and kites in the film but there’s a lot captured about what’s happening on the ground, and the whole ecosystem of scavenging.<br /> In the first few shots, if you look at the images and break those down, the camera immerses you in this kind of subterranean world, almost the substrata of the city, teeming with rats. After that, you see a lone single kite soaring in the sky beautifully, after which you see a puddle on the road with a pack of mosquitoes who are both terrestrial and in the air. This sense of different cuts of straight lines above the ground was something that I was vaguely interested in, not in a very frontal manner.</p> <p>I was very interested in the theory of more-than-human turn. It tells us that the human is not the absolute central reference point of analysis or entry into the world. You think of the world through these different nodes of entanglements and these non-human lives.</p> <p>So, for instance, when you see a slow, languid pan of a turtle going through garbage and then look at the traffic above, what you’re seeing is a kind of encounter or collision between two different temporalities.  Eventually, we developed a grammar to tell it. We developed these slow, languid pans, or tilts down where you reveal the duality of the world. Over time, through the shoot, what we realized was very important to the vocabulary of filming was that we should not cut the shots. So, none of these shots has any cuts.</p> <p>Researching, writing, shooting and editing. It must have been an exhaustive process.<br /> Animals are not easy to shoot. They are monumentally indifferent to your design. We were also certain that we didn’t want to do the more conventional wildlife documentary. We also didn’t have the skills to do it. You can say that you want to shoot the mice and snails and all of that. But to find them and then shoot them is another matter altogether. So, it meant just relentlessly turning up at places every day.<br /> There is a comforting and languid touch profound in all aspects of the film.</p> <p>Sometimes there is this over-romanticized, bleeding-heart sentimentality about environmentalism, that I don’t have a lot of patience for. What drew me to the brothers was that they have a wry, unsentimental way of soldiering every day while witnessing ecological devastation at a scale that is unimaginable for most of us.</p> <p>They follow the emotional logic of the story, even if they feel like they are interrupting the narrative thrust. And that was something that developed very organically on the edit.</p> <p>There is talk about the smelly water, about a child being unwell. You have integrated pollution as a part of life.<br /> At no point did we ever think that we were making a film on pollution. We were very sure about what we were not going to do. Only later did we discover what the film was about. It slowly began to emerge that these are the broader coordinates that the film ought to map and what to steer clear of.<br /> The ecological issues around Delhi, very often are the epistemic wallpaper of our lives. The kind of banal, trivial ways in which emerging environmental consciousness articulates itself every day. It’s not an exception. It’s in the fabric of every day.</p> <p>You seem to have got a lot of access to the brothers and their families. There is a certain intimacy yet a distance with which you frame and film them. How did you negotiate that?<br /> The camera is a very obtrusive presence in the beginning, so most of the material is unusable anyway. It’s only when they get really bored of you and they yawn in front of the camera marking the beginning of actual work. At first, they weren’t sure what it meant, they were expecting sit-down interviews etc. And then they realized that we were just hanging around, shooting everything in their lives. We had a code word, I would come in and say “ab hum deewar hain (now we are the wall)”. They’d then ignore us and go about their day. Slowly the circumference of what is ok to shoot grows because they also start trusting you and deep friendships develop. At this point, they are like family members, and we are family members to them. There were personal tragedies in my life [father’s death]. They came and attended the funeral service. You get embedded in each other’s lives. This kind of shooting leads to a very special kind of density of friendship and intensity which waxes and wanes through the course of the film.</p> <p>There are the anti-CAA/NRC protests in the background…<br /> We didn’t envision the documentary to be a political snapshot of the country. There is a lot of respect for people who are making that kind of cinema, but this project was not it. It became a question of integrity, whether to point the camera away or stick to them.</p> <p>It is never frontally encountered though. We only see things from a distance because the brothers themselves are very aware, they are not political. What they are interested in is the cosmological politics, of the relationship between man and the sky or the humans and the birds. They’re like ‘If we go to protest, who’ll take care of the birds?’ It’s about the problem one decides to attend to that very often configures one’s political realm and, for them, politics is often the expression of ecology and environment.</p> <p>Do the topics like ‘environmental degradation’ and ‘ecological devastation’ have political parallels?<br /> These are metaphorical underpinnings. But you know when you are shooting, you don’t shoot for the metaphor, right? Even during the first few stages of the edit, you don’t do that; you just stick to the spine of the story and its emotional thrust. You don’t encounter anything directly political. It’s about the environment and the atmosphere. Most people outside will not have a sense of what the specifics are. <br />