Exclusive: Director Shaunak Sen on His Oscar-Nominated Documentary All That Breathes

In the city of Delhi, and all across India, air pollution has become a serious problem. The air quality in Delhi has become a severe hazard for not only humans, but the animals and nature surrounding the city, adding to a growing list of issues facing contemporary Indian society today. As seen in the documentary All That Breathes, two brothers are taking unique approaches to rescue the birds of the region, which are falling from the sky due to the pollutants. Directed by Shaunak Sen, the eye-opening documentary touches on many different themes and subjects through its run time, and it has become a staple at film festivals and award shows globally. The film won the Golden Eye at the Cannes Film Festival, and is nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2023.

We were joined by the director of All That Breathes to discuss the documentary.

Finding a Balance

MW: How did you come across the story of the brothers originally?

Shaunak Sen: I wanted to do something on the air; I live in Delhi, everyone is pretty preoccupied with the gray, opaque, sterile air quality. I was also sort of thinking about human and non-human relationships philosophically. I was fascinated by birds, and when I started Googling, “what happens to birds when they fall out [of the sky],” the brothers’ work came up. That’s how it started.

MW: So did you reach out to them first, and then decided to make a documentary?

Sen: Yeah, the minute you visit that basement it’s inherently cinematic. Those birds among that grubby, industrial basement. I was just completely riveted by how cinematic it was. It was a three-year-long shoot.

MW: There’s quite a bit of subtext and context going on in the background of All That Breathes. Over those three years, were any decisions made about what should and shouldn’t be shown on camera?

Sen: When we began, it was primarily an ecological and philosophical film. After that, the city of Delhi was going through a turbulent time, a tumultuous time socially. And the real challenge and question was whether to put the camera straight towards, or respect the integrity of the story you are shooting. So what we decided was that the outside world would sort of leak in. The leak as a form became a kind of aesthetic, where the character goes to the balcony, and you hear the murmurs of a crowd, or a character is looking at a video of what feels like political violence, but you only hear the audio of it. So you hear the resonants or echoes of that sort of permeates or hemorrhages into this world. I wanted it like that where the social is like a blurry dim that you could sense.

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MW: Since you filmed over three years, you must’ve had a lot of footage. What was the decision-making process of what to leave in or cut?

Sen: We had about three hundred hours of footage, so we had to edit simultaneously. We were editing while we were shooting for about five months, then we went to Copenhagen. There, we already had about a three-hour baseline to work with. There were three storylines in the story: the ecological, which are the animals, the brothers, with their personal and emotional lives, and then there’s the social-political. These became guiding blocks, and we kept vacillating between them. But in a way, the film keeps hurtling between extreme compression and decompression. So we go from a claustrophobic tiny, cramped basement to the open skies of Delhi and back. It’s constant compression and decompression, like inhaling and exhaling, like breathing. That became a kind of a cadence for the edit.

MovieWeb: Building on that, were many of the shots and images intentional before heading into filming? Or did they just happen during production?

Sen: It was coming to the place we were shooting in, because it was architecturally like that, and I like this waxing and waning between the particular and the whole. Documentary especially allows this, it opens up a constant kind of ping-pong match the very specific and the universal. When that gets architecturally approximated, that’s even better.

Looking Towards the Sky

MovieWeb: What are your inspirations when it comes to filmmaking?

Sen: Cinematically, it comes to someone like Victor Kossakovsky. Edit-wise, Gianfranco Rossi. In general, it was Tarkovsky.

MovieWeb: Both Cities of Sleep and All That Breathes cover a massive subject: contemporary Delhi. As a filmmaker, what would you say to hope to achieve through the medium?

Sen: With All That Breathes, the approach of the brothers, i.e. the general take on human and non-human entanglement, is the kind of quiet grace underwriting their whole lives. When I met them, it enchanted the sky and birds for me, and I hope it does the same for the audience. I hope audiences leave the theater and look up.

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MovieWeb: Documentary filmmaking is pretty intimate, which is what you just got at. How did you navigate being a filmmaker, with a camera, and interacting with the brothers?

Sen: Well, initially, we had to work hard on breaking them out of the sound bite talking head format. The whole point was that they didn’t have to do anything, they had to go about their lives. So the first month…the footage is absolute trash because they were too conscious of the camera. But it’s a very necessary rite of passage, but you have to wait for the time when everybody gets bored, and they’re not really conscious of the camera or you. Then I am not obtrusive anymore, nor is the camera. That’s when it becomes better. After three years, you inherently become a part of their lives, so it becomes easier.