Academy Award-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia (Amy, 2015) talks to Indian director Shaunak Sen about the Sundance-winning doc All That Breathes, which looks set to be one of the front-runners in the race for the Feature Doc Oscar.
The film follows two brothers in a heavily polluted Delhi who dedicate their lives to protecting the abundant but magnificent black kites that circle the skies above their bird sanctuary.
After welcoming Sen to “the craziness of this [awards] life,” Kapadia asked him about the origins of the project. Where and when did Sen first get the idea to make the film?
“I think the film began, to be honest, before I met the characters,” Sen responded. “I wanted to do something on the air of Delhi. When you live in Delhi, the thing is the air itself is such a tactile, palpable, heavy grey thing. I was interested in doing something on this texture of greyness that just coats all of our lives. And apart from that, I was interested in doing something on human/non-human entanglements.
“And the bird as a figure seemed like a metaphor. Like, every time you look up you have this monochromatic sky, there are no stars that you can see at night, there’s barely any clouds differentiating the sky, especially in the winters, and I was really gripped by the figure of a solitary black dot…Every time you look up in Delhi, you see the black kites that are these lazy gliding dots falling [from] the sky.”
“And honestly it began with me literally Googling, ‘where do birds that fall out of the sky go?’ And that’s when the brothers come up. And once you visited the brothers…the basement itself is just so inherently cinematic. You step in there and you can’t tell what time of day it is [within] the really heavy damp industrial decay. But amidst that, there are these stunning birds walking around…and that space invoked for me a kind of dense mise-en-scène that reminds me of Tarkovsky…”
“So I think that’s when, in all earnestness, it began. And you know, it’s like the film is jumping off a cliff, and then it’s a fever dream that just takes over. So I think, at gunpoint, I would say it began with a vague interest in a kind of abstract triangulation of air birds, humans.”
Click to watch the whole chat between Asif Kapadia and Shaunak Sen.
