'All That Breathes' and the evolution of the Oscars documentary feature category

A working still from the shoot of the Oscar-nominated Indian documentary feature 'All that Breathes' (Photo courtesy Aman Mann)

Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes drummed up momentous buzz leading up to its Oscar nomination. Many awards and nominations around the world, including winning The Golden Eye at Cannes 2022 and the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, the acquisition by HBO Max, and Instagram-amplified effusive words by cinema greats around the world, including directors Mira Nair and Judd Apatow, Dune cinematographer Greig Fraser and actors Dev Patel and Riz Ahmed. For India, the Oscar nomination is a second after last year's Writing With Fire — if this year, All That Breathes wins, it will be the only Indian full-length documentary to have won an Oscar. Winning an Oscar is certainly not the pinnacle of cinematic achievement; it is a subjective decision of a jury like all awards. The success and importance of All That Breathes in the world of documentary film-making as an art form, a practice and a discipline, is something different.

The documentary film has the potential to be the new investigative journalism, the new long-form journalism or literary journalism. In the diverse content universes that collide on our screens without interruption all day, all night, a full-length documentary film can be the more perspicuous and thorough form of storytelling than others for obvious reasons. A great documentary is the punctuation the content-obsessed world needs at times, to the elevated or subliminal truths that powerful fiction contain. Great documentaries make us look at the way our worlds are, and, hence, at ourselves. And Sen’s film has done something wonderful and majestic in that sense.

A working still from the shoot of the Oscar-nominated Indian documentary feature 'All that Breathes' (Photo courtesy Aman Mann)

The devoted documentary filmmaker has to let the camera run. And run till it bores the living daylights out of their subjects. Sen did exactly that, over several years, shooting the film in Delhi with cinematographers Ben Bernhard, Riju Das and Saumyananda Sahi. The daily tasks involved in kite conservation prompt Sen’s two protagonists — north-east Delhi brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud — to philosophise on the human condition. They are simply following the animist example set by their late mother — they have a day job of manufacturing soap dispensers, but most of their days are spent rescuing and treating black kites that fall off the Delhi skies every day. Their mother’s outlook on the interconnectedness of all living things gives Sen his film’s title: “One shouldn’t differentiate between all that breathes.”

A still from All that Breathes. (Image courtesy Aman Mann)

The visual language of the film takes that simple yet profound idea quite literally. Every little creeping, crawling, humming, escaping life form of the great metropolis come alive in all their minutiae. And yet, this is not a small story that tells the big story, like some Western critics have concluded. Sen’s gaze  is roving, not overtly political; it doesn’t have a hierarchy of narrative importance. The work of Nadeem and Saud continues because of, in spite of and in the midst of Delhi’s chronic, calamitous air pollution and rising Islamophobic violence. All That Breathes is meditative, truthful and patient film-making that deserves to be seen anywhere the human and animal coexists. How this kind of film-making is seen matters, although now, its reach through television is assured. The way it has been made, spills over to the way it is seen — the film works best as an experience when we surrender to its slow natural rhythms and become still. That’s probably easier to do in the dark, all-senses-consuming theatre than a distraction-filled home or office or café, but still, All That Breathes brings patience and stillness back to watching. When you surrender, its magic consumes you in the most uplifting of ways. The fact that Sen obviously is saying Muslims in the new India and kites have something in common, isn’t meant to be a sermon or a prophetic drone, he simply shows it through the way he lets the brothers reveal themselves in their languidly articulate pace. Rats, monkeys, centipedes and snails are secondary to the character study of these two brothers in All That Breathes. The narrative’s intertwining of spirituality, politics and human drama is masterful.

The brothers Nadeem Shehzad (left) and Mohammad Saud from a still in 'All that Breathes'. (Image courtesy Aman Mann)

Sean B Carroll, a developmental biologist, who is executive producer for All That Breathes, says, “The appeal of this film was Nadeem’s and Saud’s story — their devotion to nursing birds back to health in the face of many obstacles. We hoped that it would be an inspiring story for general audiences.” Carroll joined the team when the company he co-runs, Tangled Bank Studios (known for science and nature-related documentaries), was contacted by their British partner Rise Films who were already involved with the Indian producers Kiterabbit in producing All That Breathes.

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Carroll recalls that during the editing process it was hard to predict how audiences might react to the finished film. In a short attention span world, would people settle in and immerse themselves in the nano-environs of Delhi? The film’s wide reach excites Carroll, he says it warms his biologist soul because people the world over are taking to a story with the simple message that we ought not to differentiate among creatures that breathe.

“As far as Oscar chances, the fact that it has received a nomination is a great triumph in itself. A win is almost too much to consider — and not winning would not be a setback in any way.” Carroll emphasises that the documentary community has embraced the film wholeheartedly: “There is great camaraderie among the teams behind the leading films this year who are meeting up again and again at festivals and awards ceremonies. There is a wonderful mutually supportive spirit that will last long beyond the award season.”

Most reports emerging in film coverage across American media and Hollywood trade sites predicting Oscar wins this year don’t consider All That Breathes to be the strong favourite although every critic has had something good to say about the film. BTLnews.com says, “It is a 'here is my small corner of the world' documentary if there ever was one, but one with a story that is clamoring to be heard outside its confined walls.”

The strong contender seems to be Navalny by Daniel Roher, a Sundance favourite about the assassination attempt on the eponymous Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. The film follows a sleuthing story as Navalny and his allies try to and eventually uncover who was behind the mysterious poison attack that almost ended his life in August 2020. For obvious reasons, this film has political resonance in America. Navalny got this year’s Best Documentary BAFTA.

The other nominees are Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, about photographer Nan Golden’s quest to bring justice to a family for their role in America’s ongoing opioid crisis. Like in her best works, including her 2015 Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden, in this one too, Poitras lets her subject become the storyteller, stepping entirely out of the way. Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love is about volcanologists Katia and Maurice Frafft; and Simon Lereng Wilmont’s Danish film A House Made of Splinters is a harrowing look at an orphanage in war-torn Ukraine. An American favourite this year, which missed a nomination, is the breathtaking outer space story Good Night Oppy, about Opportunity, a Mars rover.

The Oscar Best Documentary Feature award began in 1942. In the initial years, the award was a part of the Academy’s efforts to support war-related movies, with propaganda films and morale-boosting documentaries from studios such as Disney and directors like Frank Capra. For several years since then, the number of nominations varied, until the number was standardised at five in 1969. Voting was then limited to the documentary branch of the Academy; now voting for this category is open to all Academy members. Unlike the Academy’s propensity for awarding political views that satisfy a liberal but unalienating framework, taking unpopular political stands haven’t been fortuitous for documentary filmmakers at the Oscars after Michael Moore’s win for Bowling for Columbine in 2002. Moore went on stage after winning the Oscar and said in his speech that the American invasion of Iraq was “criminal”. So, whether the Academy awards an eulogistic view of a Russian leader, a hero in America’s eyes, whether Laura Poitras’ assured, trend-setting documentary language still gets the Academy’s approval or whether the poetic susurrations of the interconnectedness of all life forms in Sen’s All That Breathes enraptures them the most, the documentary category at the Oscars is a big driver of interest in and support of non-fiction filmmaking around the world — especially the big OTT players, for whom non-fiction is clearly an ascendant category.

Mohammad Saud in a still from 'All that Breathes'. (Image courtesy Aman Mann)

Every critic and every jury so far agrees Sen is a pioneer in documentary filmmaking language. In late 2018, Shaunak was on a fellowship in Cambridge on human-animal relationship in human ecology. When he returned to Delhi, he was sitting at a traffic light one day when he saw a tiny dot circling in the smog-filled sky. Soon, it seemed to start falling. That image captivated him, and he started talking to Aman Mann, his producer on his first feature-length documentary Cities of Sleep (2015), a sensitive chronicling of the geographies of homelessness and sleep in Delhi, released in 2016. The duo began researching about animals in the city. Mann says, “We realised that the density of black kites in New Delhi was higher than anywhere else in the world and it was really unusual. We then looked at what happened to injured birds that fell off, we found out that all the raptors of New Delhi went to these two brothers, Nadeem and Saud.”

Their home was already a dream for the cinematic eye: A basement with ankle-deep water, which also preserved huge metal-cutting machines which they use for their day job, in a room next to it is a treatment space for the wounded but majestic black kites, on the roof, are huge cages with 70-80 raptors at any given time. They never met any other characters for the film. They set up a production company specifically for the film and then bit by bit Mann got more involved with production — managing fund-raising, grant-writing, the day-to-day shoot logistics, almost as a response to a necessity. This was his first role as a full-fledged producer and it lent the team its autonomy in making decisions. Like Carroll, Mann, too, says that he didn’t expect such diverse audiences from different cultures and countries grasping and appreciating the deep devotion that drives the two brothers in the film.

A still from 'All that Breathes'. (Image courtesy Aman Mann)

The India run of All That Breathes is yet to begin. It has been shown at six Indian film festivals, and Mann says HBO Max is in talks with its India partner, which is Disney+ Hotstar, to release the film for Indian audiences soon. “Within a couple of months, people of India will be able to see it,” Mann says. If the Oscar win comes through, Indian documentary filmmaking gets a big impetus. Equally remarkably, it becomes all the more convincing to the world that the slow, unhurried, un-viral voice is often the one showing us and telling us something that’s simultaneously distressing and beautiful — the quality that imbues all compelling life.