All That Breathes’ co-cinematographer Riju Das: ‘Shaunak, the editors were three kites hovering over a landfill of footages, carefully choosing’

(Left) Stills from the Oscar-nominated documentary 'All That Breathes'; Riju Das, one of the three cinematographers on the film. (Images courtesy Aman Mann/Shaunak Sen)

A whole nation swoons to Shah Rukh Khan when he says “mausam bigadne wala hai” (the weather is going to change), to actually make a film about bigda hua mausam (climate gone bad) of a place, of a country, of the world is what a documentary does. Delhi, and India by extension, in a clichéd way, is an apocalypse now, its air noxious. To show that in a humanistic and poetic way is no mean feat. “As Delhi’s air changed, so did its metabolism… Delhi is a gaping wound, and we are trying to put a small Band-Aid on it,” say the brothers, who resuscitate injured raptors from their derelict home clinic alongside a soap-dispenser business because bird hospitals turn away “non-vegetarian birds”. They are the subject of Shaunak Sen’s Oscar-nominated documentary, which lost out the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award to Navalny on March 12. The majestic black kites are falling off the skies. Like microbiomes, they keep the city’s gut healthy, by feeding on human refuse but are refused by the human. How do the non-humans, or the more-than-humans, register their protest, their misery?

Black kites in a still from the Oscar-nominated documentary 'All That Breathes'. (Photo courtesy Aman Mann/Shaunak Sen)

Paeans have been dedicated to Delhi, where history breathes in its nooks and crannies, in its monuments and open spaces. An escape into the past's nostalgia comes easy when faced with the crisis of the present. Tall is the task that urges you to open your eyes (human and camera) to look for beauty in the filth around, in the quotidian, in the shrinking spaces: evocative shots, including one where the sewer looks like a river, and the animals allegorical. Cinematographers Ben Bernhard, Riju Das and Saumyananda Sahi share the credits roll. They will make you pick up your camera and start clicking/documenting. The credit for the film's impact, narrative, visual, emotional, also goes to its editors Charlotte Munch Bengtsen and Vedant Joshi.

Pure issue-based “monolinear messaging”, however, is not for Sen. His long-form, creative documentary relies on revelatory slow pans, languorous tilts, and focus shifts. Sen’s gaze compresses and decompresses to render the scientific and natural as poetic. The camera pans on to a dumping ground, dilates the filth, amplifies the squeaks of scuttling rats, the ominous scene-setting is reminiscent of a “fairy tale gone wrong”. Shot on 16:9 aspect ratio, the frames magnify, matter-of-factly, the non-human, micro life, peripheral species, the invisibilised. The close-up of perched black kites, like students in attendance in a classroom; flies quench their thirst from a puddle that reflects the human world in motion; a little tortoise watches the traffic go past; reflection of buildings and a plane in flight is seen on a puddle on a fallen banner; and happy accidents like a kite flying off with Rehman Salik’s spectacles.

“I was sure about shooting the film from the very first conversation I had with Shaunak. This subject is close to my heart, the interconnectedness of all life. This is also something all our scriptures have told us about since time immemorial. The prospect of exploring the idea with the medium of cinema was attractive and exciting,” says Riju Das, 38.

The main shooting of the film happened over two schedules in 2021, though research and some shooting had been happening for, at least, two years before that.

“It must be noted that COVID-19 was quite rampant at the time. So, as the first wave eased Ben Bernhard flew in from Germany and the first of the two schedules was shot. Unfortunately, midway through that, the second wave set in and the unit went down with COVID. Ben’s stay was time-bound and he had to return. As the second wave eased out, I joined and finished the shoot over five months starting from end June, 2021,” Das adds.

A still of the brothers from the documentary 'All That Breathes'. (Image courtesy Aman Mann/Shaunak Sen)

The Mumbai-based Das grew up in Kolkata, college pushed him to explore still photography and watch world cinema, “a terrific discovery,” he says. Drawing and painting had been a childhood companion, so getting drawn to the visual arts was only a natural progression. The St. Xavier's graduate enrolled in 2007 in filmmaking with a specialisation in cinematography at Pune’s Film and Television Institute of India, and has since been wielding the camera in Bombay, for such projects as Bhaskar Hazarika’s critically acclaimed Aamis (2019) and, now, All That Breathes, among others.

In this interview, before he leaves for Los Angeles, where the Oscars ceremony will take place on March 12, Das talks about the shooting and making of the film. Edited excerpts:

How do you choose your projects?

I choose projects based on who the director is as a person and what his/her/their intentions are with respect to the film in question. Stories have been told since time immemorial, what intrigues me is how one tells a given story. We don’t find all comedy films funny or all murder mysteries engaging. Some stories, the way they are told, resonate with us more. The director’s vision of the given story or subject helps to decide whether or not to participate in a certain project. As a cinematographer, you have to invest in the director.

How many cinematography awards has All That Breathes won till date?

It has won two cinematography awards so far. The 16th Cinema Eye Honours award for best cinematography (Outstanding Non-Fiction Feature) and the best cinematography award at the DOC NYC Film Festival. It is also nominated for best cinematography in a documentary film at the 37th Annual ASC Awards held by the American Society of Cinematographers (March 5). That is a very rare accolade indeed because the ASC has the best cinematographers in the world as its members and to have been nominated is in itself a win! Both the awards we have received are very crucial not just because of the prestigious bodies that have conferred them but also because they mean a lot on a professional and the personal front. To have received validation from them means one is really doing a good job and that helps one believe in the work one is doing.

Indian audiences, who hardly talk about documentaries as much as they do fiction films, are appreciating ATB’s ‘otherworldly’ cinematography, that’s a rarity. Technical departments escape even the media’s focus. What is different this time?

Traditionally, non-fiction films are shot in a run-and-gun verité manner with the camera on the shoulder wherein one is grabbing images of the subject to tell the story. For All That Breathes, which has at its crux the philosophical idea of interconnectedness of all beings, human and non-human, told through the story of the brothers who struggle incessantly to save black kites in Delhi, we felt we needed a unique, coherent language that would convey the idea effectively by making the viewing itself an epic and philosophical experience. As Shaunak says, we wanted to create the impression of a ‘fairy tale gone wrong’ for the film. That needed a lyrical imagery, for which we decided on using various cinematic devices traditionally seen in fiction films, for example, very long pans, long tracking shots where the camera would travel through a space and eventually rest on the subject, careful focus shifting from one part of the frame to another, etc. In doing so, we were consciously seeking to push the boundaries of non-fiction filmmaking as well. That is what, perhaps, makes the cinematography of the film noticeable. One doesn’t see such kind of shot-taking in non-fiction films. Of course, all of this was facilitated by the fact that the protagonists lead a very cyclical life wherein Salik, the youngest brother, brings in injured birds every morning and (Mohammad) Saud and Nadeem (Shehzad) treat those birds. This happens almost every day. That is why we could use such cinematic devices to tell the story.

Brothers Nadeem Shehzad (left) and Mohammad Saud in a still from the documentary 'All That Breathes'. (Image courtesy Aman Mann/Shaunak Sen)

What kind of equipment did you use for the shoot?

In the schedule I shot, we used the Canon C70 camera and Carl Zeiss CP3 lenses. We also used the Laowa 24 mm probe lens to get really close to the smallest of creatures, such as mosquito larvae in a bucket of water, mosquitoes on the surface and ants, etc. Ben had used the Canon C500 and the S1H camera and an assortment of lenses he brought from Germany.

In spite of three cinematographers, how does the film achieve a singular visual grammar?

Any film needs a consistent and singular visual language until designed otherwise. However, in documentary films, one often sees multiple cameramen because the films are made over a few years. Ben had shot over March-April 2021, and Saumyananda Sahi had shot the previous year. By the time I came on board, Ben had already shot most of the animals, what we called the life-writ-large section, in a stunning long-take style with languid pans and tilts of the camera. He had also shot a bit of the brothers’ story, the verité section. A large part of the brothers’ narrative and some life-writ-large parts were still left as the dreaded second wave of COVID struck and shooting had to stop. Shaunak and Ben had already created the tone of the film, which, when I joined, we furthered to create the visual language one sees in the film. We were conscious of the fact that a language needed to be developed and we felt the verité parts also needed an aestheticised language as opposed to a typical handheld, run-and-gun style documentation of the brothers’ journey. Not that that type of shooting would not do justice to an already compelling story of the brothers but an aesthetic approach was necessary to let the film transcend the immediate story and make the larger point, that of the interconnectedness of all beings, human and non-human. That’s how we arrived at the singular language.

Was Shaunak in full control of shot compositions or the DoPs had a free hand?

Shaunak was always very clear about his vision for the film. Also being a very articulate person, he always knew exactly what to say to convey the idea and feeling required in a given scene. That is a most essential quality to have to be a good director, be it fiction or non-fiction filmmaking. Once we had arrived at the visual language, the film required he let us cinematographers create the images and then he would say whether they were what the film required or whether they needed tweaking or not.

Many scenes remain with you much after the film has ended. What was the idea behind the long animal shots?

The idea behind those long animal shots was to demonstrate the central idea of the film, the idea of interconnectedness and coexistence of all forms of life, around which the whole cinematic construction was supposed to be made. To demonstrate that idea, we arrived at a language where we wanted to see different forms of life come together literally in long single takes, which is why you first see the buildings in the background and then as the camera comes down in the first shot, we see a dog in the mid-ground and as the camera keeps coming down further, we reveal those rats. Similarly, the plane shot, where one would see passing traffic and the camera would come down to some garbage lying on the road, and further down you’d see the creepy-crawlies travelling through puddles of water and then eventually, finally, you see the reflection of a plane flying in the sky. All of these are bringing all forms of life, human and non-human, together in one shot. That was the language we thought would be best suited to convey the central theme.

The plane shot from the documentary 'All That Breathes'. (Image courtesy Aman Mann/Shaunak Sen)

How much of the shot footage did not make it to the final film?

A whole lot…that’s how documentaries are generally shot. The film has been in the making for three years, and even before the actual shooting in 2021, for two years, the film was shot for making pitch videos for funders, and some of that has made it to the film, prime example being the shot where the kite takes away Salik’s spectacles. Here, I’d like to talk about the edit and our editors, Charlotte, a very well-known editor from Denmark, and Vedant, a well-known editor from Mumbai, who, along with Shaunak, did an absolutely fantastic job, because there was so much footage (400 hours of raw footage) of various creatures, of the brothers, working on kites, working at the workshop making soap dispensers, of ants, of cows, all sorts of creatures, and it was an extremely difficult task choosing what to keep in the film. I often give Shaunak the metaphor for the edit job wherein you compare the entire footage to the Ghazipur landfill and Shaunak, Charlotte and Vedant like three kites hovering over that footage, carefully choosing what to put in the film and what to reject. Apart from the cinematography which has indeed received rare accolades, the edit has to be highlighted here. It was a very, very difficult job and how beautifully it has been pulled off.

How different is shooting a documentary from a fiction feature, now that you have done both?

The basic difference between fiction and documentary films is that in fiction films, everything is imagined and created, every image is created from scratch, shots are designed, lit in a particular manner. The story/screenplay is written, characters are played by actors, lights are used to create mood, emotion, feelings, etc. In non-fiction films, one sees real people leading real lives. The shooting processes are vastly different. There are no huge cameras and lighting equipment on sets in a non-fiction film, which would have a very small tightly-knit unit of people making the film. The equipment (cameras, lenses, sound-recording gear) are considerably smaller in size and number. The cinematographer is using smaller cameras for ease of shooting, using the lights available in the given locations, etc.

You make the mundane look fantastical, garbage or meat eating. How different was it working with Bhaskar Hazarika on Aamis?

Aamis was, of course, a very different experience compared to All That Breathes. First, it’s a fiction film, the script was written, actors were cast, locations were scouted, and one would go with planned sequences, themes, and what shots to take. Bhaskar and I have now collaborated on one feature film and a bunch of short films and we are also planning to work on the next long format fiction film he’ll make. Working with Bhaskar was, in a way, similar to working with Shaunak because both of them are very sure of what they want from their images, their vision for the film, and, more importantly, both of them are very articulate people and know exactly how to communicate their vision to the crew and cast. That’s a very important skill for a director. Bhaskar always knew what he wanted and how to communicate that to me or to the other people involved in the making of the film, so, both Bhaskar and Shaunak would never go into technical details like ‘give me a 50 mm lens or a 35 mm lens or place the camera here, it should be a high angle or low angle shot’, they would just tell me what was the exact emotion that one wanted to portray in the given scene or sequence and then leave it to the DOP to construct an image, which they’d tell later whether or not it worked for them.

About the mundane bit, I do believe that if you look at something long enough, you can find beauty in it, whether it’s a simple switchboard on the wall or a chair in some corner of the room, whether it’s garbage, or whether it’s meat eating, whatever it is, if you can train yourself to look at something long and hard enough, you can find beauty in anything. And, there is beauty in everything.

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