Shaunak Sen on All That Breathes: a documentary about trans-species kinship

In the opening scene of All That Breathes, humans are barely in sight. Perhaps there are some in the blurry background, but in the foreground what we see is a slow pan along an abandoned plot of land. It’s filled to the brim with rats as they feast on human-left waste and burrow into their handmade homes in the ground. 

It’s an image that sets up the theme of the film: our ecosystem lives not in opposition to humans, but in parallel with us. Shaunak Sen’s documentary isn’t about rats, however. The film, which won the Grierson Award for best documentary at this year’s BFI London Film Festival before going on wide UK release, follows two brothers, Mohammad and Nadeem, as they run a bird sanctuary for black kites. Throughout the film, these injured birds are seen falling from the skies above New Delhi due to the increasingly poor air quality. The two brothers dedicate their lives to their mission, rehabilitating dozens of birds at once and sharing information to aid other members of their community in warding them off. 

For Sen, the question of the relationships between species was the original throughline of the film. “I was interested in trans-species friendship and this trans-species obsession to become the other,” he says, citing as inspirations the books The Peregrine by J.A. Baker and Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, both texts that explore the uniquely blurred relationship between humans and birds.

As the film progresses, Sen examines the reasons why black kites are falling from the sky and how the brothers’ commitment to their mission affects their families’ livelihood. “There is a lot of environmental discourse that I’m a bit impatient with sometimes because it is either [using a] bleeding-heart sentimentality or it is lecturing, pedantic and sanctimonious,” he says. “In some ways they do more damage than help.” He described his own approach as more like a “Trojan horse” of ecological cinema: someone who doesn’t care for birds or ecological issues could be moved by the brother’s story and the messaging can thereby effectively “enter the bloodstream of [their] consciousness”.  

Unlike his previous film, Cities of Sleep (2016), which Sen describes as “raw” and “gritty”, All That Breathes adopts a lyrical, artistic quality, the deliberate editing contrasting the “constant compression in the tiny, claustrophobic basement” where the bird sanctuary is housed and the “decompression of expanse of the sky”. Sen expresses admiration for the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Viktor Kossakovsky, the Russian filmmaker behind the immersive natural world documentaries Aquarela (2018) and Gunda (2020). 

Like Kossakovsky’s films, All That Breathes is a stunning show of the power of cinema, creating a clear parallel between the two brothers and the black kites they rescue – and more broadly between humans and animals. Sen’s film shows how we are all suffering under the same debilitating environmental conditions. As humans, however, we have some part to play in rectifying it, whether it be by rehabilitating birds or attempting to understand that little more about the dangers of climate change. 

All That Breathes screened at the 66th BFI London Film Festival, where it won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary. 

Now in its fifth year, the LFF Critics Mentorship Programme continues to look at how we can better serve writers from underrepresented communities. It offers an opportunity for emerging critics to develop their film writing skills and have a chance to be mentored by industry media professionals in order to help pave the way to future opportunities for paid work in the media.

This year six mentees took part in an intensive four-day programme of screenings and events at the start of the festival, mentored both as a group by co-lead mentors Akua Gyamfi (founder, The British Blacklist) and Amon Warmann (contributing editor, Empire, co-host Fade To Black) as well as being individually paired with LFF media partners at Empire, The Face, Little White Lies, Sight and Sound, Screen and Time Out for one-on-one mentoring and to help produce pieces of film journalism for their portfolio.

The mentees had full access to press screenings and events throughout the festival to write reviews and features, plus additional interview access with filmmakers and an array of guest speaker sessions and opportunities to network.