Oscars 2023: 'All That Breathes' from India misses award as 'Navalny' wins Best Documentary Feature

Oscars 2023: 'All that Breathes' is directed by Shaunak Sen.

All That Breathes from India missed out on the chance to become the first documentary from India to win an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film as Navalny, a film about dissident Russian Alexei Navalny, took home the coveted award.

All That Breathes, directed by Shaunak Sen, focuses on climate change as it follows siblings Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, who have devoted their lives to rescuing and treating injured birds, especially black kites, in Delhi.

Other contenders in the same category included Fire of Love, All the Beauty And The Bloodshed and A House Made of Splinters.

All That Breathes had landed an Oscar nomination on the back of a successful award season. In 2022, it won the 'World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary' at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Eye award for the best documentary at the Cannes Film Festival among a host of other international wins.

The story of Delhi's black kites and an extended family of traditional metal workers from the walled city in Old Delhi that has been caring for them ceaselessly for decades tell a heart-rending yet inspiring tale of love and devotion to life in all its forms. It also reveals the disastrous effects of blatant development that focuses only on the humans, disregarding other forms of life that sustain the planet.

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

A week before the Oscars, in an interview with The Wire, Shaunak Sen elaborated on how he made the laborious task of rescuing the kites look exciting. "I was sure I didn’t want to make a nature-wildlife doc," he said. "Or a sweet film about ‘nice people doing good things’. I was mortified of making an NGOish saccharine hagiography. Because life is much more dense and difficult and layered, right? So I kept thinking of another character. I don’t know if I’ve spoken about this before. I actually had a second character – a major thread about a termite killer. And I had good material."

"I wanted to do a counter-foil because one is the animal of the sky and the other is a subterranean thing. One human loves his animal; the other kills. I thought once the kite story is in order, I’ll hit the pavement with the other one; and, you know, over time, I started worrying that it’d be overkill."

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