Shaunak Sen’s “Everything That Breathes”: A Meditation on Humankind’s Relationship with Other Living Things

Shaunak Sen remembers sitting in his car in traffic on a grey, hazy day, watching black dots gliding across the sky from afar. “I had the distinct impression that I saw one of those black dots swoop down,” Sen, an award-winning Indian filmmaker and video artist, said during a recent discussion as part of Science Gallery Bangalore’s Carbon Film Festival, held in Bengaluru earlier this month.

Obsessed with the idea of ​​what would happen to a bird if it fell from a polluted sky, he pulled out his phone and Googled it, only to discover two brothers, Saud and Nadeem, who will be the subjects of a documentary due to be released in 2022. Everything that breathesIt was also screened at the festival.

“I just randomly messaged them on Facebook and went to meet them,” he told his conversation partners at the session, nature educator and conservationist Garima Bhatia and wildlife biologist and conservation scientist Ravi Chellam.

This was, in many ways, the starting point for this beautiful film, which has won numerous international awards, including the World Cinema Grand Prix Documentary Award at the Sundance Film Festival and the GoldenEye Award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, and was also nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 95th Academy Awards.

Set in Delhi, the film tells the story of two brothers (and their very charming assistant, Salik), former bodybuilders who dedicate their lives to rescuing and treating birds, primarily black kites. But it’s also a portrait of a city and its inhabitants, both human and non-human, in turbulent times, and a meditation on humanity’s relationship with the other creatures with whom we share the world.

During the discussion, Shaunack reveals how his encounters with people during his fellowship at Cambridge influenced the film: “I was surrounded by people who were studying human-nonhuman relations. Some were studying wolves in Chernobyl, others were studying plants in Fukushima,” he says. He adds that this prompted him to think about more-than-human perspectives, and to “see not humans as an absolute reference point, but as an intertwining of relations between human and non-human species.”

Title Talk

Garima begins the conversation by describing how the film, which she has already seen three times, makes her feel. “Every time I watch it, I see something different. It always gives me intense emotions,” she says, a sentiment that Ravi, who has seen it four times, seems to agree with. Ravi then delves into the film, starting with its title, to find out more about it.

Shaunack says the title comes from an old saying from the brothers’ mother: There can’t be hierarchies between different life forms. “If anyone else had said that, I would have dismissed it as lofty gibberish,” he says. But the brothers themselves, he says, specifically live by the adage.

He describes them as thoughtful, contemplative people who spent much of their lives thinking about this kind of simultaneity, this “kinship, this entanglement between human and non-human species. I wanted a title that could capture neighborliness in a broader sense.

Filming process

Garima calls. Everything that breathes It’s a deeply reflective film, with a lyrical, poetic quality that forces the viewer to slow down. Schonack says he started out like any other documentary, shooting various subjects with a handheld camera. “I took a raw, dirty approach, holding the camera in my hand and shooting on the run,” he says. “The logic was that if the characters move, the camera just follows them.”

After four or five months of shooting in this style, he realized the material he was collecting was too restless and extreme. “This style lends itself to when you want really raw footage, whether it’s action or a character that’s really immersive,” he says. “But my characters weren’t restless. They were very calm and contemplative.”

So he concluded he needed to find a different way to tell the story, one where the content and form matched. “I gradually realized that to tell this non-fiction story, I needed to use the tools of fiction,” he says, adding that he wanted the film to have the look of a fiction film, while still being non-fiction at its core. “And so the format was born,” he says.

A matter of time

Indeed, like any good work of fiction, Everything that breathes The work is full of diversity; its brilliantly written characters’ lives and struggles acquire a certain universality, raising big questions about the human condition: identity, belonging, love and meaning. “I realized the brothers were really smart and philosophical, and I needed a form in which they could share their smartest thoughts,” says Chaunack, who narrates these thoughts throughout the story.

He says the narration gave him insight into their past and how they got started in this life: “It was like a love story between two brothers and a bird… a fascinating, otherworldly, mysterious bird, like an alien with glassy, ​​reptilian eyes.”

He also talks about the film’s use of long takes, its essay-like style that makes it seem more creative than a journalistic documentary, and the actual filming process, which he describes as “ornithological in nature.” Like bird watching, he says, he has to slow down, decelerate and pare himself down while filming: “You’re trying to collect bits and pieces of everyday life, almost like you’re disappearing into the wallpaper.”

It’s only a matter of time before he achieves the sense of the everyday that’s so essential to documentary filmmaking – “material steeped in banality.” “The first month is usually a no-go because everyone’s so self-conscious and awkward,” says Shaunack. But as he continues filming, a sense of ordinariness and realism slowly seeps in. “Everything is raw and matter-of-fact,” he says. “The comfort really comes with the passage of time. You literally keep the camera rolling for three years.”

Other discussions

Other points discussed during the session included how publicity changed the trajectory of the brothers’ lives, the graphic nature of the footage, why the film did not receive a theatrical release in India, the politics of the film, and the challenges of filming during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shaunak talks about how the film has taken on a life of its own since it was nominated for an Oscar, something that was completely unprecedented. He also ensured that the brothers attended all the big events related to the film. “Nadeem has probably attended more film festivals than I have,” he says, adding that the media attention has raised a lot of donations. He also thinks it would be foolhardy to think that a single film has changed the brothers’ lives. “I hope that this film will be an oasis for a moment, a kind of witness to the unique lives that they lead,” he says.

Movies as a Trojan Horse

He also thinks films can be a Trojan horse. They help subtly spark conversations people don’t necessarily want to have. “Films can sneak into conversations and move people emotionally without being pedantic.” That’s why he dislikes a lot of wildlife documentaries, which are preachy, pedantic and make people feel bad about themselves. “It really does more harm than good.” Instead, he believes in what he calls little empathy plugs. “That’s how films usually work: They get into the bloodstream of the culture and add to the pool of ideas that we’re all trying to aspire to.”