The phone rings for a while and finally I hear a cheery, familiar voice many continents away. “How is it going, Shaunak, after the nomination for the academy awards? What does it feel like?” I ask. “Discombobulating,” comes the single-word reply, before the phone crackles.
There is no time on a long-distance call between India and America to pick up the dictionary to find out the meaning of this new word. Anyway, I sense what it could mean from the number of failed attempts before wrangling a window to speak to the filmmaker amidst a crazy schedule of events and promotions in the lead up to the Academy Awards. I have known Shaunak and witnessed his journey with All That Breathes from when it was first pitched at Docedge Kolkata, an Asian forum for documentary. He was one of us, a nervous filmmaker struggling to find the right path at the first public pitch for a new film. Flash forward to three years later when it premieres at Sundance and bags the Jury Award.
I got to see All That Breathes in a darkened auditorium in the Festival de Cannes some months later. The opening shots are of a public space in Delhi, the camera glides at ground level. The frame comes alive with insects and rodents scurrying. As they move, the camera stays close to them to open up a whole new dimension of the city. The audio track invites the viewer to notice the steady breathing of other creatures besides humans. The slow camera movement steadily draws one’s attention to a world where the rest of the non-human population of Delhi struggles to coexist, breathe, and claim their patch of the polluted sky. This is the canvas where black kites soar as the main protagonists, only to plummet into a heap from the toxic air. The visual poetry is underlined by a deep voice reciting shayari, meditations of the human protagonist in the film.
Poetry could be discombobulating for a documentary audience used to hard hitting reality, but poetry is the language of the film that Shaunak and his camera team embrace so that one senses, rather than sees, a breathing, layered narrative. The birds of prey treated as scavenger outcasts by society are patiently healed in the dim light of a dangling bulb by the band of brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, whose story resonates with the black kite narrative. What shines through is humanity. In one scene their young assistant Salik laughs jovially at the large bird who swoops down and carries away his spectacles in his talons. In another scene, he gets news of the Delhi riots while in an auto full of boxes of injured birds. He grapples with his phone and a wriggling squirrel who peeps out of his shirt pocket—he tucks the squirrel back safely, but the scene cuts as we realise his own life is in the lurch as violence grips the city. Poetry and irony sit side by side, drawing a standing ovation as the lights come on Shaunak with his three protagonists all in black, perfectly-tailored suits step on stage.
All That Breathes wins the L’Oeil d’Or (Golden Eye) award at Cannes and then goes on to bag more major awards at a dizzying pace. “The brain still boggles,” he declares, and every documentary filmmaker understands why this is an incredible achievement in a country that produces the most number of films in the world, but the documentary genre gets little to no support. It is at forums like Docedge in Kolkata that filmmakers get a taste of how they can secure international support for their films. It is also here that Shaunak saw the work of Viktor Kossakovsky. Sparse, mostly silent, and deeply philosophical, Kossakovsky’s films open up a whole new language. “I did not want to make an observational, verite film,” he says. It was time to break creative boundaries and he adopted an outer shell of fiction using the smooth gliding technology of camera on dolly and tracks, choreographed movements to create an aesthetic of beauty, while exploring real life moments. This crafting was possible when Shaunak’s dream of working with Viktor Kossakovsky’s cinematographer Ben Bernhard came true along with some strong international film grants. After the first year of filming, he no longer had to work on a shoestring budget and Ben Bernhard established the language of the film. The pandemic years brought a fresh set of challenges with restrictions on international travel. Shaunak had to find ways to continue filming. This is when Kolkata-based FTII-trained Riju Das took over, and further evolved a beautiful narrative told intimately through the camera eye. Saumyananda Sahi is also credited as the third eye and sounding board.
So beautiful is the film that at the International Short and Documentary Film Festival of Kerala, where both our films were being screened, I walk right into a lively discussion about the construction of the film and whether it is “too beautiful to be real”. When I ask Shaunak about this reaction, he says he chose consciously to move away from the observational, verite style of his previous film Cities of Sleep that explores the operations of the infamous sleep mafia and securing a safe spot to sleep for the homeless. The documentary genre is too vast and diverse to be asked, “How dare you not be that fly on the wall?” Shaunak says that he could not make much money on Cities of Sleep, and that he decided to give All That Breathes a much wider wingspan than the proverbial fly on the wall to take him on a flight far beyond his wildest imagination.
In 2022, Indian filmmakers Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh were also nominated for the Academy Awards with their feature documentary Writing with Fire—the first time that India came close to bagging the feature documentary award. Shaunak has learnt a lot from them as friends and filmmakers who were a few years senior to him while studying at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre (MCRC), Jamia Milia University. “What they did was monumental,” says Shaunak. He draws tremendous moral support from them, “I can call them anytime.” Shaunak also credits the film institute where they studied, one of the rare ones where the emphasis is always on nonfiction rather than fiction. The films that were shown to students as well as the personal journeys of the faculty at MCRC made it a creative crucible for the Indian documentary filmmaker. It is no wonder that its alumni Facebook page boasts that most of the Indian members of the Academy Awards Jury for documentary are from this institute. There are other common factors in the two films besides the filmmakers having studied in the same institute—the films were mentored and pitched at Docedge where they were first noticed, supported by international grants, premiered at Sundance, and went on to win Academy Award nominations. Shaunak points out that one more film from India is carving a similar path this year—Against the Tide—directed by Sarvnik Kaur and produced by Koval Bhatia, also a pair from the same film school. They pitched their film at Docedge, secured grants, and just won a special jury award at Sundance. He describes what is happening in the Indian documentary scene as unprecedented, with Indian filmmakers bagging top awards in Sundance, Cannes, and Toronto. What is his advice to young filmmakers—You need time, a quotidian, everydayness to slow drip, he shares.
At the Academy Awards this year, an Indian film called The Elephant Whisperers by Kartiki Gonsalves has been nominated in the short documentary category as well. Shaunak knows the producer Guneet Monga, as they studied in the same school. Guneet is no newcomer to the Academy Awards, having jointly produced the award-winning Period End of Sentence (2019). It is a moment for India—two documentaries are nominated and the filmmakers find they have each other for company for the grand gala events in the run up to the big day, rather than doing it alone. The Elephant Whisperers is a Netflix-backed documentary available in India. All That Breathes has been acquired by HBO and the team is trying to find an OTT so it can be streamed in India. Distribution is equally important, “It is what the world thinks of the film,” says Shaunak. He points out that after HBO made the film available on February 7, so many more have watched the film. So will All That Breathes or The Elephant Whisperers bring home the Oscar? We will have to wait with bated breath, but meanwhile it has brought home the realisation that in India, it is the documentary genre that is stealing a march on fiction factories.
Miriam Chandy Menacherry is an award winning documentary filmmaker based in Mumbai. Her most recent films include From the Shadows, #Missingirls, and The Leopard’s Tribe.