Delhi—or Dilli, as it is called in several South Asian languages—makes cynics out of most of us who have lived there. The trite thing to ask after, often, is the “dil” (heart) in Dilli. As I watched Sen’s new film, All That Breathes, premiere at Sundance, I reacquainted myself with the city’s heart as it took flight on the wings of the black kites that dot Delhi’s skies; as it lay nestled in the basement where Nadeem, Saud, and Salik—the film’s protagonists—nurse wounded kites back to health; and as it soared high in defiance of imminent, ever-present mortality.
Following its winning the Grand Jury Prize in World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance, All That Breathes won the L’Œil d’or, le prix du documentaire at Cannes. Ahead of its theatrical run in Los Angeles and New York, and eventual HBO rollout, Documentary caught up with Sen over a long, early-morning Zoom call. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
DOCUMENTARY: Let’s go back to the beginning. How did you meet Nadeem, Saud, and Salik, and how did you decide to tell their story?
SHAUNAK SEN: I was in a fellowship in the UK, at Cambridge, and was around people who were working on human-animal relationships, physiologically. Somebody was working on polar bears, somebody was working on vegetation in Fukushima, and generally speaking, there was a lot of philosophical rigor around the human-animal index. At the project’s most incipient stage, I got interested in and started looking for people who personified or embodied deep or profound relationships with the skies. Back then I had a vague sense, or a texture, of what the film ought to be. If you lived in Delhi for a while, everybody knows that there’s this kind of gray sensorium. The air that you’re breathing, you’re constantly feeling like you’re suspended in a kind of ethos that is foundationally antithetical to your sense of sustenance and nourishment.
At the film’s earliest stages, what I was interested in was a kind of grayness. Like this haze that sort of laminates our lives and the entirety of the city from September all the way to January. So that’s how it essentially began. It largely was a triangulation of meditation on air, on the color gray, and something to do with birds….
SS: I would keep looking at these low, gliding dots in the sky, which are the “cheels,” the black kites. When you’re driving and you’re stuck in traffic, and you look up, you constantly see these circling birds. At some point, you inevitably end up imagining what would happen if you see a kite fall.
D: Because how they sharply dive and plunge…
SS: Yes. I got fairly gripped by the idea of what happens when a bird falls from this gray sky, and that’s how I came across the work of Nadeem and Saud.
D: What was that first time visiting their home-cum-dispensary-cum-basement office like?
SS: The minute you visit their house for the first time, you see that tiny, dingy basement full of industrial decay on one side and very vulnerable birds on the other. It’s so inherently cinematic.
The basement, the house, and the sheer absurdity of their living conditions draw you in. It was clear that the two brothers, their work and the family could become a kind of a metaphor where they encapsulated a large number of currents I wanted to be in conversation with.
D: There was something I noticed as the brothers struggled to find funding for their work. It kind of mirrors the struggles of the filmmaking process. Would you say that is true?
SS: I’ve not been asked that before, but I see what you’re nudging towards. Having said that, I don’t want to over-determine the consonances too much. There is precarity and a large deal of uncertainty that one has to soldier on against, amidst what feels like impossible odds. It’s not just a material battle but also a kind of emotional and spiritual battle on both these registers—both what they do and in indie filmmaking…
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After the truth-shower 