All That Breathes

Factual America

20 Oct

Written By

Welcome to the fourth season of Factual America!

Today, Matthew Sherwood speaks to Shaunak Sen, director of All That Breathes, an award-winning documentary about two brothers, Mohammad and Nadeem, in Delhi, who have dedicated their lives to helping the Black Kite, a victim of Delhi’s ever worsening air pollution.

All That Breathes is both an intimate portrayal of Mohammad’s and Nadeem’s work and, as Shaunak explains, a philosophical documentary that shows how the toxicity of Delhi’s air is reflected on the ground.

Above all, though it is a film about miracles: miracles in the air and on the ground, giving hope to a world that seems doomed to disaster.

Join Matthew and Shaunak as they discuss this timely documentary, which has already taken the film festival circuit by storm, winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the Golden Eye award at Cannes earlier this year. The film is currently on release in the UK and USA and will be available to stream on HBO next year.

“... every bird that flies out of their basement is a miracle.” - Shaunak Sen

Time Stamps

00:00 – Trailer for All That Breathes
02:23 – Introducing this episode’s guest, Shaunak Shen
05:08 – Shaunak’s synopsis for All That Breathes
07:17 – What it is like living in Delhi
09:51 – What drives Mohammad and Nadeem to help the black kites
11:57 – Delhi’s tumultuous political life
15:03 – Entry points into the ‘broader zeitgeist’ of society
17:58 – The three brothers as Don Quixote figures
20:03 – Happily surprised by the praise All That Breathes has been given
21:01 – Twin Desires: Getting the film seen, and sparking a Conversation
23:21 – How Shaunak came to make All that Breathes
24:34 – The kind of documentary Shaunak wanted to make
26:25 – Why Shaunak used three cinematographers
28:42 – Filming rats
30:50 – Shaunak’s artistic inspirations
34:00 – How composer Roger Goula became involved in the film
35:03 – Shaunak’s PhD status
36:05 – What next for Shaunak
37:44 – Looking to the future: Shaunak’s hopes for the environment

Resources:

All That Breathes (2022)
MovieMaker Magazine
Innersound Audio
Alamo Pictures

Transcript for Factual America Episode 108: All That Breathes

Shaunak Sen 00:00
Hi, my name is Shaunak. I'm the director of All That Breathes, and very happy to be here.

Matthew Sherwood 02:23
Welcome to the fourth season of Factual America. We're brought to you by Alamo Pictures, an Austin-London based production company, making documentaries about America for international audiences. I'm your host, Matthew Sherwood. Each week, I watch a hit documentary, and then talk with the filmmakers and their subjects. This week, it is my supreme pleasure to welcome award-winning filmmaker Shaunak Sen, director of All That Breathes. The film premiered at Sundance earlier this year, where it won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary competition. It also picked up the Golden Eye award at this year's Cannes Film Festival. All that Breathes follows two brothers who run a bird hospital dedicated to rescuing injured black kites, a staple in the smoke choked skies of New Delhi, where cows, rats, monkeys, frogs, and hogs struggle to survive amidst a worsening ecological, as well as social, environment. In the words of one of the Sundance jurors, this poetic film delivers an urgent political story while constructing a singular, and loving, portrait of protagonists, resisting seemingly inevitable ecological disaster with humorous touches punctuated by unsentimental depiction of the animal kingdom. It is no wonder then that All That Breathes is tipped to be in the running for an Oscar. Join me as we talk with Shaunak about his efforts to bring His beautifully artistic and socially relevant film to the big screen. Shaunak Sen, welcome to Factual America. How are things with you?

Shaunak Sen 03:57
I'm good. How are you? Thank you for having me on.

Matthew Sherwood 03:59
Yeah, well, it's a pleasure to have you; thank you for joining us here at Factual America. Listeners and viewers have heard and seen the intro, but just to remind you, we're here with Shaunak Sen, director and producer of All That Breathes, premiered at Sundance, won the Grand Jury Award, Golden Eye at Cannes. Also had a - it's also having a theatrical release in the UK this month. It's October 2022. So, on the 14th, and I understand also a New York and LA releases later in October. And it's way far away, but I understand that it will be streaming on HBO sometime in 2023. So, again, thank you so much for joining us. Really looking forward to talking to you about this lovely film, this beautiful film, that you've made. Maybe we can get started - because most of our listeners will not have seen the film, I believe, so, maybe you tell us, what is All That Breathes all about? Maybe you can give us a synopsis?

Shaunak Sen 05:08
Well, it's about - at one very simple level, it's about this one bird called the black kite in the city of Delhi. And this family, this Muslim family, that looks after hundreds of black kites that are falling off the sky every single day. The current levels of pollution and a variety of other climate change related factors are such that the bigger birds in the city either get entangled in wires or collide into buildings, and so on. So, at one level, it's about this one family that works out of this tiny, very claustrophobic, stifled kind of basement and takes care of, in the last 15 years, they've treated over 25,000 black kites. So, that's one aspect of it. However, I mean, like I keep saying, it's not at all like a sweet film with nice people doing good things. It's a kind of philosophical, then [...] non-human relationships, you get a sense of the kind of social and political background of the city of Delhi. And in a way we look at the toxicity of the air to also think of the - well, the toxicity on the ground between human beings and so on. So, I think the best kind of logline of it is that it's a kind of philosophical examination of human-non-human relationships in an extreme ecosystem, like the city of Delhi through this one family's relationship with this bird called the black kite.

Matthew Sherwood 06:37
And I think, well, I think that is the perfect synopsis of what this film is about, since I've had the pleasure of seeing it. I mean, maybe give us a little more detail in terms of what these brothers are up against? And also, I mean, you know, at one level as you say, there's this ecological element and how it affects wildlife. But what affects wildlife is also affecting humans, too. And it's not just physical health, is it? I mean, what is it - what's it like to live in Delhi? And, you know, what are the pressures, and everything that these people are going through?

Shaunak Sen 07:17
Well, the thing is that, I think in a way this film, it's only intuitively natural that this film came from somebody in Delhi. I've lived in Delhi for the last many years. And for anybody who's lived in that city, your life is sort of constantly laminated by a pervasive greyness. You know, the sky is a kind of monochromatic, hazy grey expanse, you're constantly breathing in air that's very obviously noxious. And the air itself is a kind of heavy, palpable, concrete kind of entity. And the film also began with this one time when me and my producer and friend, Aman Mann, were sat in a car in a traffic jam. And we looked up and, you know, the black kites are these tiny black dots gliding in the sky, and we had the distinct impression that one of them was sort of falling down to the ground. And I was gripped with this figure of bird that falls off a very polluted grey sky, and what happens to it. So, we started researching into what happens to - I mean, I literally googled what happens to birds that fall off the sky. And I came across these brothers and the remarkable work that they do, where, you know, they're working out of a very tiny, derelict, industrial basement, on one side of which there's this heavy metal cutting machines, and on the other, you have these magisterial birds being treated. So, it was just so inherently cinematic that that's how it started. But living in Delhi really is this. You really feel like - and when I met the brothers, I realized that they sort of have the front row seats to the apocalypse. But more than that, it's like, everywhere, if you live in the city of Delhi, you're conscious, you're constantly conscious of what you're breathing in. And as if the air conditioners of Spaceship Earth are beginning to go awry. That's the broader sensation.

Matthew Sherwood 09:12
And why do these - I mean, as you say, what these brothers are up against - I mean, what drives them? Their life is not easy, but they're basically self-taught veterinarians, you know, they do amazing - as you said, they've treated 20,000, over 20,000, birds over 15 years or so. I mean, they've got other things, they're obviously intelligent, they could maybe do - you know, what drives them to carry on with this?

Shaunak Sen 09:43
Yes, I mean, I don't think that intelligence is a kind of binary opposite to what they do.

Matthew Sherwood 09:48
Oh no, I don't mean it that way.

Shaunak Sen 09:51
And like all difficult questions, I don't think there's any simple answer. So, the brothers themselves don't have any answer to give for it. And I don't think it's possible for them to know. Because now at this point the entirety of their lives and their family, and what they do was entirely, singularly, devoted to the cause of working with the birds. But more than that, I think what I was drawn was that a lot of the environmental discourse, especially in cinema, and popular culture, I sort of sometimes get a bit tired with because a lot of it is characterized by a kind of, either a bleeding heart sentimentality or kind of gloom and doom despair, you know. Instead, I think you have to sort of emotionally move people, and the brothers were refreshing to me, because their kind of attitude is of a kind of wry resilience. They put their head down and get the job done. And they're very unsentimental and often stark. So, even though they have, like I was saying, a front row seat to the apocalypse, they have this kind of, you know, they're unsentimental and the birds are falling, and the entirety of the bird fall of Delhi comes into their tiny basement, but they get on with it. And that kind of cruel optimism, or a kind of elegant starkness to the obvious inevitability to the disaster that is coming, I find very, very interesting; it has a kind of emotional and philosophical position. So, that's how I first got drawn to them.

Matthew Sherwood 11:25
And then at the same time, you've alluded to this, that - when you were talking about toxicity - but there's also this backdrop of political turmoil and social violence, which I gather you - I mean, that's - you were already filming, when some of these things happened, that started happening, weren't you; so, you weren't necessarily expecting to capture these things, but they are there and they are, I wouldn't say up front and center, but they're part of the story, obviously.

Shaunak Sen 11:57
Sure. They're definitely not front and center. And I think initially, we began with the express intention of making an ecological film. And, well, you know, not a kind of, frankly, conventionally political film. And I think over time, what happened is that the city of Delhi was going through a lot of turbulence and tumult in the last two years. And basically, it was, at one point, I didn't want to eschew entirely the volatility of the streets outside, but at the same time, the brothers themselves are not very polit - I mean, I think they're political in a different way. They're interested in the politics of man and humans - humans and bird. But that's a different kind of politics, you know, not the politics of identity or sectarian violence and so on. So, but, you know, the background of the city was just so pregnant with this kind of unruly chaos and unrest that it had to make its way in and the form that we sort of zeroed in on was of the leak, that a character goes to the balcony and you hear the murmurations of a protesting crowd outside. A character watches a video of violence on his cell phone, and we just hear the audio and nothing else. You know, it's like - so, it's basically stuff like that. It's where the real outside world sort of haemorrhages in. So, you sense the political instead of being told, and I actually prefer this sort of thing where, because I personally feel like if somebody pedantically kind of lectures you on what certain political subjects you're either preaching to the choir, or you're, anyway, sort of, you know, like, not talking to the people that you want to talk to. The point is films have to be Trojan horses, and you have to sneak things in, and you have to get people to be moved emotionally and still understand the political stuff that, you know, is happening. So, it's really about sensing the political through the aesthetic.

Matthew Sherwood 14:10
Right. Right. And I mean, I think, like you said, I think there's one of the brothers at one point says, that's, you know, this is happening about a kilometer away, right, or two kilometers away, I think he says, you know, and it's like, which is kind of - maybe that's - not to take this too far - but maybe in terms of, sort of analogies, I mean, for most people, isn't it always just, it's always - seldom are we in the middle of it all, in a lot of times, it is just the street over, the neighborhood over, the country - you know, it's kind of - we are surrounded by this but we're not necessarily, you know, it may be direct, you know, directly involved that, you know, in terms of the person trying to view this and draw a connection...

Shaunak Sen 15:00
Yeah, I think - Sorry....

Matthew Sherwood 15:02
No, no, go ahead.

Shaunak Sen 15:03
I was just saying that I think there are different ways in which one can find entry points into a broader zeitgeist, and one that is as tempestuous as what's happening in South Asia currently. And I think in - there are different ways, you know, you can adopt the more oblique or tangential kind of a perspective which also illuminates the particular social trend that you're interested in certain ways, or you can take it on more frankly. I personally prefer the more oblique kind of style. And, of course, things are happening like three kilometers away. And it's like, you're feeling this kind of neighborliness to all things political and volatile. It's never as far as you think it is. But kind of entering it through this kind of perspective of somebody who's not directly confronting it, or is in the thick of it, but is affected by it, and is at the same time conscious of it, and the city is on the boil behind them. I find that kind of interesting way to snapshot a social milieu.

Matthew Sherwood 16:17
Okay. I think, well, that's a very good point. And I think this is actually a very good opportunity for us to give our listeners a quick, early break. So, we'll be right back with Shaunak Sen, director and producer of All That Breathes, premiered at Sundance earlier this year, won the Grand Jury Award, won the Golden Eye at the Cannes Film Festival. It's having its theatrical release in the UK on October 14, and then later this month in New York, and LA. At some point in 2023 it'll be will be streaming on HBO.

Factual America Midroll 16:50
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Matthew Sherwood 17:10
Welcome back to Factual America. I'm here with award winning director, Shaunak Sen. His film is All That Breathes, premiered at Sundance, it's having its theatrical release in the UK in a few days, here in October 2022, and in New York, and LA later this month. You did win the Golden Eye award at Cannes and there's a quote from the jury. It says goes to a film that in a world of destruction reminds us that every life matters, and every small action matters. You can grab your camera, you can save a bird, you can hunt for some moments of stealing beauty, it matters. It's an inspirational journey in the observation of three Don Quixotes who may not save the world, but do save their world. What do you think of quotes like that?

Shaunak Sen 17:58
I love that quote. I love the term Don Quixote as I also love the emphasis on micro-gestures, because at the end of the day, what's - you know; like, I was earlier talking about the philosophical position towards climate change that I think the brothers embody. This thing that when you talk to them, they'll say that for every bird that flies out of their basement is a miracle. And it's really true. You know, it's like, they've done what they've done almost without any support for the last many, many years. They're definitely not in a fluent family by any stretch. So, for them to carry on, so - like, to soldier on and do what they're doing, it really matters in the sense that the fact that a certain percentage of birds survive, and many of them fly off. Of course, if one sort of zooms out and says that in the broader scheme of things, what does it matter if a hundred birds survived in a month where 5,000 birds died? Or, you know, I mean, these are hypothetical questions, I'm just speaking hypothetically. But the point is that I think it matters like micro-gestures and micro [...] need certain things to be life rafts to get by. You know, life is difficult. It's difficult because of climate change. It's difficult because the world is hostile. And it's difficult emotionally. So, a kind of, you know, it's important to think of the passage of time and the meaning of life in micro-dosages. And in that, what they do is that they provide - like, to me, I see them was tiny paper boats or life rafts and I feel like it really matters and the film was a kind of articulation of that thing.

Matthew Sherwood 19:56
And did you ever expect to get such a reaction to your film? I mean, in your wildest imaginations? Because it's obviously done quite well.

Shaunak Sen 20:03
I mean, in my wildest imaginations, I thought, I hoped that it would be successful, if I think imaginative wildly. But no, I think this went beyond that because I was hoping for the film to be seen. That was my main sort of desire and ambition. But this has now gone far beyond my desire matrix or anything that I imagined. Because winning at Sundance and Cannes what it does is that more than anything else, it's not so much a question about me being happy about success. It's more a question about the fact that the film now enters conversations and enters rooms that I just didn't think it would. So, it becomes part of a constituency that far outreaches what any of us had imagined.

Matthew Sherwood 20:51
And do you think - I mean, do you think that's basically any filmmakers - really, when it comes down to it, you just want people to see it? You're not thinking beyond that, really, when you make a film.

Shaunak Sen 21:01
Yes, I think that's a starting point. I think that's the founding point, for sure. You really want it seen, especially because I'd made a film before this and I had gone to a few festivals, but didn't really get anywhere close to the kind of wide enough viewership that we were all hoping for. So, just seeing it, it was enough currency for me. Of course, you also want people to like it, and not so much, like, it's not so much liking, but for it to spark off some kind of conversation. And, you know, and if people are going beyond that, like it, and you're not - like yesterday, in the New York Film Festival, we had a really emphatic response, and that was very meaningful. So, those kinds of things really matter.

Matthew Sherwood 21:47
And what was that response that you had yesterday?

Shaunak Sen 21:51
You know, you have a lot of people - somebody wrote on a piece of paper, saying that, you can use the co-enzymes of the birds' poops to help generate food for them. And it said that - I gathered this is a person who's a scientist or a researcher of some sort. So, from that to extremely emotionally overwhelmed reactions or to, you know, like, cooler kind of evaluations of the film's aesthetic and formal strategies or - you know, there's a reception afterwards, and it feels like there's a kind of celebration of the world of the brothers and a very serious engagement with the film's grammar. And that's all you can ask for. Like, you know, it's not like we've made a kind of box office - you know, it's not like you're expecting that kind of - this is the, really the end of what we were looking for in terms of responses. So, that's just totally fine.

Matthew Sherwood 22:52
I mean, you were saying earlier that literally it's just down to sitting in the car looking up in the grey skies and seeing the kites and thinking you're seeing one falling and - or did see one fall - and then you looked this up. I mean, how did this - I mean, how did this film come about? Did you - literally, you did a google and then you found Mohammad and Nadeem, and then you went and approached them and, is that - that's basically the genesis of this?

Shaunak Sen 23:21
Yes, very much. We literally googled where do birds that fall out of the sky go. And then we found them and once - a film is like a freefall, right; like, and then it takes time and it takes effort, and you don't know where it's gonna land. So, it was that kind of an amorphous shapeshifting kind of a freefall, and we vaguely knew that we wanted to work on the triangulation of air, birds, and people, and afterwards it takes on a kind of momentum of its own. We didn't anticipate the social-political threads to happen. We didn't anticipate one of the brothers going off to the US, all the emotional kind of tensions between the brothers themselves. None of that. In the film like this, also the animals themselves are always deliciously distinct birds full of your designs, right. So, there's nothing which you can really plan beforehand and in [...] aggressive embrace of the unscriptedness of the world.

Matthew Sherwood 23:21
Yeah. Yeah, and that's, I mean, that's - well, it's what verite, fly-on-the-wall stuff is, isn't it; you never know really, what you're going to get at any one time. I mean, did you, when you first - I mean, did you know instantly that those brothers were going to work as subjects? Because they could be doing wonderful work, but not work as subjects, right, or wouldn't make...

Shaunak Sen 24:34
Yeah. Yeah. So, incidentally, the first ever set of characters that we met for the film were the brothers. So, actually, I've never, ever researched beyond the brothers for this film. So, we met the brothers on the 31st of December 2018, on New Year's Eve, and within a week from that, we started the film with them. We never met other characters; no other research beyond these people. So, that's how it began. I was certain I did not want to be a fly-on-the-wall. I don't think this film is really the classic Frederick Wiseman kind of observational, fly-on-the-wall sort of thing. Nor is it - I mean, you know, Hertzog says that he's not a - Werner Hertzog says that he's not so much a fly-on-the-wall, but a bee that stings because he has that kind of a strong interventionist sort of thing. I don't think there's anywhere - If you needed a fly not bee, I think we're more like earthworms, wriggling sideways in the middle of that spectrum.

Matthew Sherwood 26:04
Well, I think that brings me up to an interesting point - well, I found interesting - because it isn't, really, as you say, it's not really fly-on-the-wall, because there's a lot of things; like, well, I guess what I'm getting to is the cinematography. And you had three cinematographers. Was that the plan? That's not usual for...

Shaunak Sen 26:24
Yeah, that's not usual, nor was it planned. I do - you're total, mad person to plan with three different DPs. What essentially happened is that people - look, we shot for two-and-a-half, three years. Those are long periods of time. And it's very difficult to get one person to, you know, stay it through. So, the two DPs are this German DP called Ben Bernhard and the Indian DP, Riju Das. It's with Ben that we develop this kind of vocabulary of the long language, bands and [...] downs and focus shifts and so on, where, you know, you see the natural world in this kind of uncut, uninterrupted, slow, flowy sense. And it's with him that we develop this kind of poetic lyrical style, and also the [...] itself, not just shooting animals, but also this poetic style of shooting the human beings. So, it's with him that we developed it, and then it evolved further with Riju, where we were, as you know, in the film there's a panoply of animals, like kite, rats, mules, horses, pigs. And all of those have also been shortened this - the idea was to shoot it not like a regular nature doc or a wildlife doc but make it cinematic. And we welcome that kind of - you know, we took our time, we wanted to shoot it like a proper high art film and not like a wildlife doc. So, we committed ourselves to the visual grammar of it.

Matthew Sherwood 26:24
Yeah. No, I think it's a very good point because it's not, you know, it's not your typical Animal Planet. You know, people like, even David Attenborough docs go for some - they're increasingly, or for a long time, tried to go for something, what they would call artistic, but it's nothing like what they would present, is it. I mean, it's very - just that first scene. Just personally I - who got to - who got the short straw and had to sit down and get down and dirty with the rats at the beginning, you know, to film all that? I mean, that's - but it's very poignant, you've got a lot of - you've got several scenes interspersed with those kinds of moments.

Shaunak Sen 28:42
I feel like all of us wanted the short straw because when you're shooting animals anything can happen. You're all trying to, like, you know, get your piece of the adventure shot. So, that's totally natural. It's like a four minute long shot where the camera just glides through hundreds of rats with the traffic and the city in the background. That was shot over, like, many hours through nights. And, you know, of course at the end of it, like, rats was scurrying on top of our legs and all that. But ... you know, shooting mode is a different kind of - you're - it's like a fever dream of where you're driven by different kinds of, you know, you're not your usual self. There's the kind of transformative potential of when the shooting - it begins where you're truly adventurous, and your entire body and everything is in service of something, quote unquote, greater. But yeah, those were intense times but, you know, like, a film like this requires tons and tons of reccing and reccing and reccing, and because you're shooting animals, but once you get the hang of it, it's really addictive shooting animals.

Matthew Sherwood 29:59
And, I mean, normally I don't ask questions like this, and probably filmmakers hate these kinds of questions, but, I mean, who - I mean, who are your inspirations? Because I feel like, you know, yeah, there have been artistic docs obviously, but it felt like this was going more for classic narratives, you know, in terms of a lot of the way the things were shot and filmed. And even the, even the sound, you know, I think it's - did you have anything - were you - do you have any specific references in mind when you were making this film or filming? Or is it just kind of you all had a vision for how you kind of saw this. And you did what you could to, you know, capture that?

Shaunak Sen 30:50
I think references not so much in terms of I want to make a film which plot sets narrative structure out in such and such way, but more in the sense of an aesthetic, loosely defined universe. That was the filmography that we were looking at. And I'm actually, I wonder, like, why you think that filmmakers don't want to because I love speaking about my heroes and references and all of that. And, I mean, so much of filmmaking is an inherently citational act. And that's the beauty of it, you know, it's all very incestuous. I mean, it ought to be. So, I love talking about, like, people who've been important to me. For instance, in this film, I think three people are worth mentioning. One is that cinematographically, I was very interested in the camera style of, you know, the filmmaker called Viktor Kossakovsky, who made the Aquarela, and Antipodas, and so on, and actually, Ben, our German DP shoots a lot of Viktor Kossakovsky's films. So, he shot Aquarela and so on. And he, like, I sort of reached out to him because I wanted to dip my toes in that fully kernel of cinematographic practice. And that's how it began, then, so I can't recommend enough a film called Vivan las Antipodas, which is an incredible - and to my mind, I'm gonna completely fanboy on this now - the best short documentary that I've seen.

Matthew Sherwood 32:29
And what was called again?

Shaunak Sen 32:32
Antipodas. Vivan las Antipodas.

Matthew Sherwood 32:34
Okay.

Shaunak Sen 32:36
By Viktor Kossakovsky. The second, I was also very inspired by editing, whether it's by this person called Gianfranco Rossi. And I love the editing style of films like Sacro Gra or Notturno, and so on. And similar to that was this film called Truffle Hunter that has come out. And in fact, our editor, Charlotte Bengsten was also the editor of Truffle Hunter. So, the structure was very interesting, because it's not a regular linear kind of story. And that's also something that I was very drawn to. And lastly, I'm interested in this kind of hybrid form that film director, like Roberto Minervini, does, which is sort of like it has the outer container of being a documentary, but it takes in, uses the toys of fiction to tell something that is very grounded in the real and empirical world. So, that's very interesting to me as well.

Matthew Sherwood 33:34
Well, and I appreciate that, and I stand corrected, I will ask more of our filmmakers, their inspirations for their films. I mean, a lot of people - I've seen some reviewers have really - and I second this - also highlight the score and the music in this, the sound work that went in. How did - is his name Roger Goula that...

Shaunak Sen 33:59
Yeah...

Matthew Sherwood 33:59
... got involved?

Shaunak Sen 34:00
Roger Goula is a composer based in London. And our main sort of thing was that firstly, we wanted to have a surprising kind of choice of music, so not too much strings, but I thought it had to be like a kind of fairy tale at first, where when we're talking about the brothers', kind of ravenous relationship with the kite and it had to emerge as this kind of childhood fairy tale or a thing of [...] otherworldly magical being, but at the same time, it had to eventually progress into a fairy tale gone dark. So, we use a lot of distortion and the distortion used sounds of the kites and talons and feathers, and so on. So, that was largely how we were thinking,

Matthew Sherwood 34:43
Yeah, no, it all comes together so well, and it's so beautifully done. I mean, you're relative - this is only your second feature. If I believe Wikipedia, you're still a student in a way. Well, we're all students, I guess, but you're a PhD student, I think...

Shaunak Sen 35:03
No! No, it's wrong. It's really infuriating. It's like, I can't seem to figure how to edit Wikipedia, because I finished my PhD two years ago.

Matthew Sherwood 35:12
Okay.

Shaunak Sen 35:12
And you know, the difference between somebody who's doing a PhD and somebody who's done with PhD, is truly, truly incomparable [...] life; so, I'm very much firmly and happily in the post PhD life. And I want to announce that unambiguously. So, no, I'm done. I've been done with the PhD for a while. And yeah, and, of course, that was like, profoundly impactful in terms of thinking of the film and so on. So, but just to clarify, I'm done.

Matthew Sherwood 35:52
Okay. So, now that you're done, what is - I mean, what is next for you? How are you going to? How are you going to top this? I'm not going to say how are you going to top this? What are you going to do next? In terms of...

Shaunak Sen 36:05
I think I'm interested in the world of the planetary still, and I think the main wheelhouse of things that I'd stay in would be the ecological sublime. But above and beyond that, I don't know yet. Maybe fiction is the form but something to do with issues of - and I want to zoom out further and think through kind of geological lens, but largely the ecological sublime to planetary, you know, continents shifting. But you'll only get these kinds of vague platitudes from me right now, because I'm still marinating things that I'm reading and I don't know what I'm doing next.

Matthew Sherwood 36:42
Yeah, but okay. I think that's, I mean, that's - I can appreciate that. And you're probably still just enjoying what All That Breathes is bringing your way for the moment, but I think - I mean, as you were saying, you stick with the planetary; I mean, and I really - what struck with me, what resonated with me, was your comments earlier about this sort of dichotomy. Either people tend to go sort of over sentimentalized, or - that's not the word you used, but you used a better word than I am coming up with now - or you have your doom and gloom merchants when it comes to these sorts of things. I mean, are you - I mean, but personally, are you hopeful? Do you think, I mean, you've lived in Delhi, you obviously a citizen of the world, do you see what's happening? I mean, what - are you a hopeful person about what's going to happen with our environment?

Shaunak Sen 37:44
I think it's impossible to have any kind of simple minded hope that is vanilla and milquetoast. All hope, of course, has to be tempered by - so I have a kind of guarded, cautious optimism. Let's call it optimism instead of hope, in the sense that because optimism is also a kind of a general position on the world. So, but I also - what else is there to do, right; like, you have to - what? What is what is the counter side to it? So, you're obviously very aware of what increasingly feels like the inevitability of something genuinely dark that is, that seems to be in the offing. But, yeah, I think I'm hopeful and I'm micro-hopeful in the language of the brothers' life which is, you kind of swallow micro-gestures that help, so, I feel that these kinds of individual things where everybody's mounting the ramparts of their own individual capacity is very important.

Matthew Sherwood 39:03
Okay. Thanks. I think we'll leave it at that with leaving you the last word. I want to thank you again, so much Shaunak for coming onto the podcast and discussing your lovely film, and I do encourage everyone to, as soon as possible, however, you can find it, to go out and see this film. Again, to remind you, we've been here with Shaunak Sen, director and producer of All That Breathes, premiered at Sundance, is having its theatrical release here in the UK on October 14, also releasing in theatres in New York and LA at the end of the month. And for those of you who can't get to any of those theatres or cinemas, well, hopefully you don't have to wait till 2023, but it will be streaming on HBO, so Shaunak, again, thank you so much. We'd love to have you back on, when you do your next masterpiece. So, hopefully that's not too far in the future.

Shaunak Sen 40:10
Thank you, this is very enjoyable. And thank you for having me on.

Matthew Sherwood 40:14
Well, thank you and thanks for everyone who helped make it happen.

Matthew Sherwood 40:17
And finally, a big thanks to our listeners. As always, we love to hear from you. So, please keep sending us feedback and episode ideas. You can reach out to us on YouTube, social media, or directly by going to our website, www.factualamerica.com and clicking on the Get in Touch link. And, as always, please remember to like us, and share us with your friends and family wherever you happen to listen or watch podcasts. This is Factual America, signing off.

Factual America Outro 40:46
You've been listening to Factual America. This podcast is produced by Alamo Pictures, specializing in documentaries, television, and shorts about the USA for international audiences. Head on down to the show notes for more information about today's episode, our guests, and the team behind the podcast. Subscribe to our mailing list or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @alamopictures. Be the first to hear about new productions, festivals showing our films, and to connect with our team. Our homepage is alamopictures.co.uk.

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