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All That Breathes
A Mesmerising Chronicle of Inter-Species Coexistence
Speakers
94 mins | Hindi | English subtitles | 2022 | India, UK, US
In one of the world’s most populated cities, two brothers — Nadeem and Saud — devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi that has been falling from the sky at alarming rates. Amid environmental toxicity and social unrest, the ‘kite brothers’ spend day and night caring for the creatures in their makeshift avian basement hospital. Director Shaunak Sen (Cities of Sleep) explores the connection between the kites and the Muslim brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence.
The film has received international acclaim at several festivals and won many awards, including a nomination for best long documentary at the Academy Awards (Oscars) earlier this year.
The Director, Shaunak Sen (virtually) and Cinematographer, Saumyananda Sahi will join us for a Q&A with the audience.
In collaboration with:
Speakers
Shaunak Sen
Shaunak Sen is a filmmaker and film scholar based in New Delhi, India. Cities of Sleep (2016), his first feature-length documentary, was shown at various major international film festivals (including DOK Leipzig, DMZ Docs and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, among others) and won 6 international awards. Shaunak received the IDFA Bertha Fund (2019), the Sundance Documentary Grant (2019), the Catapult Film Fund (2020), the Charles Wallace Grant, the Sarai CSDS Digital Media fellowship (2014), and the Films Division of India fellowship (2013). He was also a visiting scholar at Cambridge University (2018) and has published academic articles in Bioscope, Widescreen and other journals.
Saumyananda Sahi
Born in Bangalore, Saumyananda Sahi originally studied philosophy at St Stephens College in Delhi before deciding he wanted to be a cinematographer, attending the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune.
Over the past decade, Saumyananda has worked on a variety of projects, both factual and fiction, with such filmmakers as Kamal Swaroop, Shaunak Sen, Prateek Vats, Arun Karthick, Anamika Haksar, Thomas F Lennon and Prashant Nair. His work has played at film festivals around the world, including Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Rotterdam, Locarno, Busan, Hot Docs (Canada) and IDFA (Holland). He was nominated for an Asia Pacific Award (Balekempa, 2018) and, more recently, a 2021 Filmfare Award (Eeb Allay Ooo!, 2019) for Best Cinematography. He won awards at both MIFF (Have You Seen the Arana?, 2014) and IDSFFK (Rangbhoomi, 2014). His most recent work includes feature film Nasir (2020) and documentaries Invisible Demons (2021) and All That Breathes (2022).
As well as his work as a cinematographer, Saumyananda has directed two documentaries and has producer, editor and production designer credits to his name. In 2019, Saumyananda was selected for the PJLF Three Rivers writing residency to develop his directorial debut fiction film, which he will be co-directing with Tanushree Das in 2023.
Swati Dandekar
Swati Dandekar is a documentary filmmaker and a film educator based in Bangalore, India, with a special interest in creating visual narratives of the living history around her, of people, places, ideas, traditions, practices, and the continuous process of change. In addition, she has been closely involved with designing media for education. As a founder trustee of Vikalp Bengaluru, she has been actively screening documentary films and curating festivals in Bangalore city for over fifteen years. Swati heads the Film programme at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore.
