In many parts of the world the kite (often red in colour) is a solitary bird which imposingly patrols its hallowed air space, circling effortlessly above forest and pasture, lord of all it surveys. It was this bird that director Shaunak Sen would observe for hours when on a visiting fellowship at the University of Cambridge. “They are truly majestic beings, both when they’re swooping or when they’re gliding, lazily, like gods in the sky,” he says.
Which is when the kernel of an idea for began to form. “Before you begin a film, first comes the idea,” agrees Sen. “The foundation of a general interest in human/animal relationships, I think, came by looking up at the skies in the UK.”
The united ‘triumvirate’ of elements – the sky, the bird and the human – was a theme he was determined to explore, but he would do so back in Delhi, which Sen describes as a “truly singular and unique ecological place […where…] the air that you’re breathing in is foundationally hostile to your sense of sustenance and wellbeing.”
When he looked to the sky above the Indian city, he once more saw the kites, but these were the black variety, and what’s more they were so abundant as to darken the heavens. And when Sen began to seek out a human dimension for his film it didn’t take him long to come across the Muslim brothers Nadeem and Saud who had been running a bird sanctuary in Delhi for years, tending to all manner of winged creatures, but mainly the kites that fall from the sky.
The film tells us that, for Muslims, caring for kites will deliver spiritual rewards. This can playfully entail throwing pieces of meat into the sky and watching the aerial battles involved in the catching of the morsels. But when, as kids, the brothers brought an injured bird to an established animal hospital, they were turned away on the grounds that the bird was “non-vegetarian.”
So they decided to turn their home and workplace into a makeshift clinic, a place that director Sen found astounding, “The minute you set foot in that tiny damp derelict basement with its industrial decay and heavy metal cutting machines on one side, and on the other, the incredibly delicate and tender process of healing these magisterial birds, it immediately hits you like a bat in the face – the sheer cinematic potential of this place,” he says.
At the core of the film is the loving relationship between the two brothers. But it can also be fractious, such as when Nadeem decides to leave for the US to continue his bird studies, leaving behind an increasingly disconsolate Saud (whose dedication to his feathered patients is astonishing) to run the operation more or less single-handedly, although he has an able first lieutenant in the form of their young cousin Salik.
That said, long-hoped-for investment may be coming their way, after the New York Times publishes an article on the brothers’ endeavours. But the whole film is also played out against a background of religious strife in which the local Muslim population live in fear of their lives and property as tensions rise as swiftly as the black kites.
The film argues that pollution has changed the metabolism of the city. Song birds sing at a higher pitch and lizards grow extra toes. And the kites have proliferated, pushing out the vultures, enabling them to claim top predator spot. But they also feed on the city’s detritus, eating (Saud estimates) 15 tons of rubbish per month. “Nature will always find a way to absorb waste,” he says. “The city is a stomach. The kites are the microbiome of a gut.”
Yes, there is a significant ecological undertow to the film, but director Sen was never going to use a sledgehammer to crack the proverbial nut. His was never going to be a didactic approach. When it comes to imparting a message, “films are the best Trojan horses when they’re fully flexing their aesthetic muscles,” he says. In this regard Sen was influenced by “this Russian master called Victor Kossakovsky,” and he called on the services of German cinematographer Ben Bernhardt who worked on Kossakovsky’s Aquarela (2019).
We see ample evidence of the German DOP’s brilliant camera skills, such as the opening tracking shot across the waste dump swarming with rats, and a delicious shot of a worm swimming in a puddle on whose surface the reflection of a plane slowly crosses. “You have to keep shooting because you have to be prepared to catch surprises like that,” says Sen.
Images of animals punctuate the film throughout, whether they are birds, dogs, cows, frogs, centipedes, tortoises or wild boars, and all the time emphasise the connectivity of ‘all that breathes’ within the wider animal kingdom. “Every now and then the narrative gets punctured by a scene of an animal within the landscape of the city,” agrees Sen. “Cumulatively you see rats, mosquitoes, pigs, horses and so on and so forth, and the idea is that you see life rich, large on the canvas of the city.”
It is an attitude that is “in equal measure informed by non-Western ontologies,” Sen adds. “It kind of decentres the human as the absolute reference point.”
On May 23 Sen will be contributing to the Cannes Docs panel ‘A New Generation of Indian Doc Makers – Thoughts & Impressions.’ What does he put the recent boom in Indian documentaries down to?
“An obvious answer to give is that obviously India has always been an incredible place, a world so driven by contradictions that it obviously provides singular stories,” he says. “But I think what has changed now is that with different incubation, pitching and mentorship labs…I started understanding documentaries [and their] creative form.” Labs like DocedgeKolkata underlined brilliantly that documentaries didn’t have to be “pedagogic and boring,” he underlines.
Not only did Sen begin to understand the “ecosystem of distribution and fundraising,” he also saw the wide spectrum of choices available within film language deployed internationally, he adds. “And I think that it’s been a happy coincidence that within the space of a year and a half, there are projects that are competent in every way, which is not in any way to minimize [the works of] filmmakers before us, some of who have told fabulous stories. But I think resources were an issue prior to this.” He references recent films such as Writing with Fire by 2022 Oscar nominees Sushmit Ghosh & Rintu Thomas, and Rahul Jain’s multi award-winning Invisible Demons (2021)
He also points to the opportunity to collaborate with top international talents, as further evidenced on All That Breathes by Danish editor Charlotte Munch Bengtsen (The Act of Killing) coming on board to cut the film. “I think the film circuit is enriched when there’s this kind of cross-pollination with other cultures,” Sen concludes.
