All That Breathes
In one of the world’s most populated cities, brothers Nadeem and Saud devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite. This majestic bird of prey is essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi, but 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 hospital. The film explores the connection between the kites and the brothers, offering a mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence.
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 major international film festivals (including DOK Leipzig, DMZ Docs and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival), and won six 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.