“I Wanted to Enchant the Birds, and the Increasingly Poisonous Skies They Fall Out Of”: Shaunak Sen on His Sundance-Debuting doc All That Breathes

"You don’t care for things because they share the same country, religion or politics. Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air.” Those are the poetic words heard in the closing voiceover of Shaunak Sen’s mesmerizing All That Breathes. World-premiering in the World Cinema Documentary Competition (January 21) at this year’s Sundance, the film’s an ambitiously intricate study of the intersection of environmental collapse, religious tension, and the love of two Muslim brothers for a feathered scavenger unnervingly falling from a smoggy Delhi sky. With stunning cinematography and utmost attention to the tiniest detail (down to mosquitos buzzing over a puddle), Sen (Cities of Sleep) follows Wildlife Rescue cofounders Nadeem and Saud (and their equally dedicated volunteer Salik), self-taught bird doctors on an increasingly Sisyphean quest to save the black kite, a meat-eating raptor that can’t be treated at the local animal hospital because it’s “non-vegetarian.” And do so amidst funding woes and power outages, choking pollution and political clashes in the streets. It’s a tale of high drama in which the avian stars serve as canaries in a toxic global coal mine soon to engulf us all. Filmmaker spoke to the New Delhi-based director and film scholar, who focused on “urban ecologies” during a 2018 Cambridge fellowship, to learn all about All That Breathes and the lessons he took away from an unheralded bird of prey.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.