![]() If it had become the story of one family, it wouldn’t have become a planetary thing, it wouldn’t have become truly ecological.”įor all the brothers’ philosophical panache, Sen was “a bit worried” about how their occasionally lugubrious demeanour would come across on camera. It makes you reflect on the entanglement of life forms. “Their voiceover became a kind of bilingual style – the here-and-now observational style and the voiceover inner-life-of-mine style. They come across as complete organic intellectuals,” says Sen. “I was very interested in making this film about the interiority of the mind and the finer philosophical depths that the brothers were able to access because of their work. Sen is “a huge fan” of British nature writing – Robert Macfarlane, JA Baker’s The Peregrine and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk – but through Shehzad and Saud he tells a global story of “neighbourliness or kinship with non-human life” and of how, by improvisation and ingenuity, non-human life still finds niches in an environment dominated by people and their pollution. Photograph: Stéphane Cardinale/Corbis/Getty Images ‘Pure liquid luck’ … director Shaunak Sen at the Cannes festival. Today, they observe, “humanity is now the natural environment”. Their first kite, the brothers remembered, “looked like a furious reptile from another planet”. Sen found himself keeping a diary of their “clever, philosophical droppings”, then he persuaded the brothers to add a voiceover to communicate them. ![]() ![]() They also reveal themselves to be deep thinkers. He was drawn to their “grown-up, grumpy, wry resilience” and was fortunate that they have a compelling, bickering dynamic that injects jeopardy into their story. Shehzad and Saud may “traffic in micro-miracles”, as Sen puts it, but their story is not saccharin. And most of all, I did not want to make a sweet film of nice people doing good things.” I did not want to make a conventional sociopolitical vérité doc. “When we started, I didn’t know what we were making, but I did not want to make a wildlife documentary. Saud is a quiet vet who performs daily miracles on dozens of birds brought in boxes to his makeshift operating theatre his older brother, Shehzad, is the more garrulous fixer, who applies for charitable funds to sustain their hand-to-mouth enterprise. It is only when you get your first yawn in front of the camera that you know the material will now be usable.” Finally, you reach an unselfconsciousness, where people are being instead of behaving. The main weapon in the toolkit of a documentary film-maker is boredom. “Nobody can give access to that kind of intimacy even if they wanted to, because it’s really not a question of volition,” he says. To obtain the intimate realism he desired, Sen first set himself the task with the brothers – who were used to journalists reporting on their work – of disappearing. ![]() Trafficking in micro-miracles … from left, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud. You jump off a cliff and the next few years become a freefall.” “When you visit, their house has a kind of surreal, cinematic density – this grubby, dank basement full of industrial decay, and in the middle of it, these regal birds,” says Sen. Then he was stuck in a traffic jam pondering the “dystopian picture-postcard of Delhi, this monochromatic sky and these birds falling from it” and he Googled: “Where do birds that fall out of the sky go?” Brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud came up: former bodybuilders who rescue and rehabilitate birds of prey in the garage of their modest home in north Delhi. He wanted to explore “the human, non-human entanglement” and also the air, because “everybody in Delhi is preoccupied with the air in one way or another it’s this grey, opaque expanse that’s just laminating every aspect of your life”. This poetic, dreamy but avowedly unsentimental film is adorned with cameos from myna birds and mosquito larvae, turtles on rubbish dumps, pigeons, goats and rats as well as the magisterial kites, with their stern, amber gaze, as if sat in judgment of the pollution around them.įilm ideas, says Sen, begin as “an ineffable glow in the back of your head, where you only have a sense of texture and tone”. All That Breathes enters the universe of another set of struggling urban underdogs: its non-human inhabitants. Sen’s first full-length film, Cities of Sleep, slipped into the world of Delhi’s rough sleepers and its “sleep mafia”.
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