Shaunak Sen’s 'All That Breathes', Vinay Shukla’s Ravish Kumar-starrer 'While We Watched' win Peabody Awards in Documentary category

Stills from Shaunak Sen's 'All That Breathes' (left) and journalist Ravish Kumar in Vinay Shukla's 'While We Watched', both the Indian documentary films have won the prestigious Peabody Award 2024.

In what is a bumper year for India, While We Watched directed by Vinay Shukla and the Shaunak Sen-directed All That Breathes have won the Peabody award in the Documentary category, the awards body announced on Thursday (May 9). Three documentary films with India connect were nominated for the Peabody awards this year: While We Watched; All That Breathes; and Indian-Canadian Nisha Pahuja’s To Kill A Tiger (Netflix), the latter was nominated for the Oscars this year. This is yet another feather, a prestigious one at that, in the directors' hats and for the Indian documentary film, having picked up global awards and nominations over the last two years.

The award has been bagged by Indian filmmakers for a second consecutive year after Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s Writing With Fire won the award in 2023, making them the first Indian filmmakers to win this recognition. For 80-plus years, Peabody Awards, one of the oldest, most venerated, and beloved awards for media in the US, has celebrated "Stories That Matter" and reflect the world around us. The George Foster Peabody Awards were created by the University of Georgia (UGA) in partnership with the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). The annual Peabody winners are a collection of stories that powerfully reflect the pressing social issues and the vibrant emerging voices of our day.

Thomas and Ghosh's Writing With Fire (2021), a documentary film revolves around the only women-led newspaper in India, 'Khabar Lahariya' in Bundelkhand, and how it transitions into digital journalism, also has the unique feat of being the first Indian documentary feature to make it to the final five nominations of the Academy Awards in 2022. This was followed by Sen's All That Breathes in 2023. Both the films began their winning spree at the Sundance Film Festival, where the former picked up two awards (Audience and Special Jury) in 2021 and the latter won the top prize, Grand Jury Prize in 2022, in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. All That Breathes, which has won over 17 international awards, including the top documentary award at Cannes 2023, L'œil d'Or (The Golden Eye, previously won by Payal Kapadia's A Night of Knowing Nothing), bowed out to Navalny at BAFTA and the Oscars 2023.

Sen’s film is about two Muslim brothers Nadeem Shehzad, 44, and Muhammad Saud, 40, who, along with their young wingman Salik Rehman, have been nursing injured black kites — over 20,000 in two decades — in north-east Delhi. “Delhi, to say it clichédly, has become apocalyptic, with birds falling off the skies. Aman Mann (co-producer) and I looked for people in the city who have a profound relationship with bird,” Sen had told this writer after winning the Sundance award in 2022. The film is also about “the salient bipolarity of the space was super cinematic to me, where heavy metallic cutting machines share space with these majestic birds being treated. The particular (brothers, their relationship with raptors) became the lens to look at the broader (contemporary social history, the city’s zeitgeist),” added Sen, who is on the JCB Prize for Literature 2024 jury.

Shukla’s film follows former NDTV anchor and journalist Ravish Kumar as the last man standing and waging a battle against a shrinking newsroom and . Kumar’s iconic introduction – Namaskar Main Ravish Kumar – is also the original Hindi title of the film.

“I dedicate this award to Jess Search, whom I miss terribly, and to my uncle Sarvesh Shukla, who smiles at me every time I see him,” Shukla wrote on Instagram. Search, who passed away in 2023, was one of the executive producers of the film and was widely recognised in the documentary community for her extensive work in the field.

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As India ranks 159 out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index 2024, amid declining press freedom, the film tries to present a poignant depiction of the rapid changes in the Indian media industry. The Peabody group describes While We Watched as “timely depiction of a newsroom in crisis that follows [Ravish] Kumar for two years as he battles a barrage of fake news, falling ratings, and the resulting cutbacks while struggling to maintain fact-based analyses.”

Previously, Shukla co-directed An Insignificant Man (2016) with screenwriter and producer Khushboo Ranka, which follows the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal, chronicling the most outrageous political debut in the largest democracy in the world. The film saw a traditional release and ran eight-week-long house-full shows in film theatres across the country.

After a year of sporadic screenings at festivals here and there in the country, and following the Peabody nomination, the film’s streaming rights were bought by MUBI. While We Watched will premiere on the streaming platform on May 24. All That Breathes can be watched on HBO and JioCinema.