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Shaunak Sen’s ‘All that Breathes’ wins nomination for the Best Documentary film at the 95th Academy Awards. (Photo courtesy: Rise Films/Kiterabbit Films/HBO/Shaunak Sen)

But as the brothers say in the documentary, “evolution favours experimentation”, these creatures, starting from the rats who populate the opening scenes in a close-up shot, to the snails, millipedes, pigs and kites, who feature in the 91-minute film, live on and thrive amid the chaos and dystopia of the contemporary Indian metropolis.

Since its Sundance win, All That Breathes has snagged a series of top documentary awards which include the Golden Eye award for documentaries at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. HBO has picked up its worldwide television rights. Its recent nominations include a Directors Guild of America award for Sen and the prestigious American Society of Cinematographers award for Ben Bernhard and Riju Das, who shot majority of the film shortly after cinematographer Saumyananda Sahi had to leave the project.

All That Breathes , I feel, has a strong chance to bring home the Oscar for Best Documentary. Here are four reasons why:

Almost like creative non-fiction

The biggest asset of All That Breathes is its deliberate aesthetic form, which is unlike what you would associate with the average documentary: “verité, handheld, sudden cuts,” as Sen puts it.

Sen and his team introduce styles associated with fictional filmmaking into the documentary, wherein several passages in All That Breathes comprise slow, languid shots of the city’s vista, and positioning mosquitoes, rats, snails, and so on, as part of the same ecosystem as humans, a central philosophy which gives the film its title. In between are interspersed moments from the brothers’ lives as they soldier on from day to day, rescuing kites, facing infrastructural problems and lack of funds.

“While the verité documentary unfolds as if the makers are in fly-on-the-wall mode, life unfolds, and we witness, and the film is made on the edit table, here, we wanted curated actuality that is tripoded and controlled,” Sen explains. “You don’t see sliders and tripod pans in documentary. The verité form of this very film would just be nice people doing nice things, but that wasn’t the film I wanted to make. I don’t agree with the understanding that documentaries capture pristine and untainted reality. Here, I am working with the substance of reality and giving it aesthetic shape and the aspiration was to be visually compelling.”

Are there other films like this? Among Sen’s inspirations was Russian filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky’s 2020 documentary Gunda , which looks at the daily lives of a pig, a one-legged chicken and two cows.

The brothers themselves — and the lovable Salik

The brothers’ helping hand Salik Rehman in a still from Shaunak Sen’s Oscars-nominated ‘All That Breathes’. (Photo courtesy Rise Films/Kiterabbit Films/HBO/Shaunak Sen)

All That Breathes is as much a look at how Delhi’s non-human living creatures co-exist cheek by jowl, making do in an increasingly polluted wasteland, as it is a story of two brothers’ love for the non-human and the lengths, they go to be, ultimately, kind in a world that desperately needs more kindness. (The film was shot during the Delhi protests against the Citizenship Amendment Bill, and the violence it led to, snatches of which leak into the narrative).

While the brothers go about their duties with a sincerity and seriousness that is “almost stoic and deceptively uninteresting”, as Sen describes, they are also “philosophers of the urban” who have been observing the ever-changing city and the greying skies for years. Their banter aside, their views on the city, which often work as voiceover as the camera slowly tracks the kites in all their glory, could easily be slipped into a book of philosophical quotes and no one would know the difference.

By contrast, their friend and helper, Salik, a bespectacled and unassuming young man, offers a colour to the documentary bordering on comic relief. An early scene has a kite snatching his glasses away. In other scenes, Salik comes across as “almost innocent and unvarnished”, Sen says. Among the reactions Sen witnessed after the film’s premiere at Sundance, he says, was “people were saying they felt like hugging Salik”.

The otherworldly cinematography

The spectacular cinematography of Shaunak Sen’s Oscars-nominated ‘All That Breathes’. (Photo courtesy Rise Films/Kiterabbit Films/HBO/Shaunak Sen)

The cinematography by Sahi, Bernard and Das flows in tandem with the quietude and grace with which Shehzad and Saud conduct their daily business. In sync is Roger Goula’s hypnotic and dissonant music where beautiful strings are buried underneath layers of electronic synth suggesting something that was once beautiful (in Delhi, or, the world) has gone awry.

Meanwhile, the film is packed with graceful shots of little creatures that make you scratch your head about how they were conceptualised and executed.

For example, one shot tracks a snail slowly moving in the foreground against a burning pyre for the Holika festival. “We are making the human not the centre of the documentary but the non-human,” Sen explains. “We are following the snail’s time, non-human time, as a way to regard the world as experienced by those who are not us.”

Sen’s assistant directors figured out which locations in Delhi were frequented by animals and the crew kept visiting them daily to shoot. Among these was Delhi’s Hamdard Chowk where a certain area would be infested with rats after sundown. The ambitious four-minute opening of the film tracks down from the city’s traffic lights and enters deep into this world of rats, which squeal and squirm audibly transporting the viewer into a non-human space, and instantly the scene cuts to the open sky where a magisterial kite flies far, far away.

Another crazy shot has a millipede crawling over a leaf on the ground and a puddle of water near it reflects the airplane in the sky: all part of the film’s philosophy that constantly connects sky and the several layers of earth in poetic, interesting ways. “That shot came after 10 tilt-downs of the camera, and the moment we had it, I knew it, we are coming to Sundance,” Sen quips.

Empathy for but also Curiosity towards the Other

The black kites in Shaunak Sen’s Oscars-nominated documentary ‘All That Breathes’ (Photo courtesy Rise Films/Kiterabbit Films/HBO/Shaunak Sen)

Behind the style and cinematic finesse of All That Breathes is a throbbing heart that persuades you to look closely at the world around you and understand that everyone, not just humans across boundaries of class, caste or gender, but all kinds of animals are here and now in the same planet, experiencing the same world, perhaps, a little differently, but in that difference lies the truth of all that is life and living: we are all we have and there is nothing else.

“I wanted to do something that connects the human and the non-human,” Sen says about the film’s origins in his mind. “I want to show the simultaneity and coexistence of life, writ large.”

Among his intentions with the film which he kept repeating through the conversation was “to render the natural world poetic”. And just as poetic are his hopes with a viewer’s experience after having watched All That Breathes : “The idea was to reenchant the sky, to hope the audience, after seeing this film, looks up at the sky immediately. I wanted the film to have elements of a fairytale gone dystopic, the nostalgia of childhood when the brothers fell in love with the kites at an early age.”

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(Clockwise from left) Amazon Prime’s new docu series ‘Cinema Marte Dum Tak’s co-creator Vasan Bala, head researcher Pritesh Kumar Srivastava, co-director Disha Rindani and researcher Aseem Chandaver.

The formula? Mostly non-stars, minimal locations, skin show, violence, horror, and innuendo-filled dialogue — a combination that the interviewees proclaim to have worked wonders for their working-class audience of labourers and rickshaw -pullers.

Over time, with the Hindi film industry’s corporatisation, rise of multiplexes, and the onslaught of the Bhojpuri film industry that absorbed the raunchiness of these movies, Bollywood’s little, impish cousin disappeared.

“When we set out to look for these filmmakers, they had all gone dark and underground, retired into their family life, miles away from cinema,” research head Pritesh Kumar Srivastava tells Moneycontrol . He adds that their starting wish-list of filmmakers to interview had up to 50 names but several refused to appear in the series.

Bala explains, “In the corporate space paperwork, legal clearances take a long time but the pulp-movie industry believed in per-day cash and a handshake to start and finish a movie. This drastically different mindsets needed to come as one.”

We had got a glimpse of this world in Ashim Ahluwalia’s Nawazuddin Siddiqui-starrer Miss Lovely (2012), in which a duo of filmmaker brothers combine sex, violence and grotesque horror in quickly made low-budget films that draw huge profits in a short period. Five years later, Shamya Dasgupta’s non-fiction book Don’t Disturb The Dead : The Story of the Ramsay Brothers (2017, HarperCollins) looked into the lives of Bollywood’s horror genre pioneers, the Ramsay brothers, mistakenly believed to have inspired Miss Lovely .

” Miss Lovely wasn’t inspired by the Ramsays at all, but by other, more dubious brothers,” Ahluwalia wrote in the foreword, adding that his film took inspiration from the “rougher, cheaper, wilder lot” of filmmakers who borrowed Ramsays’ methods to make “primal, anarchic films”, which, are, often, dismissed pejoratively as B-grade, C-grade, or Z-grade cinema. Ahluwalia is credited as the creative consultant for the Vice Studios’ production.

“Because of the kind of films they made, and how society understood them, they were distrustful easily,” Srivastava says about the difficulties in bringing the interviewees together. Co-director Disha Rindani adds how the filmmakers would abuse Srivastava and stop taking his calls or responding to emails for months.

“Once word of mouth spread within their industry that this series is happening for real and we are legit, people started agreeing to be part of our series,” Bala says. These films often featured actors who have simultaneously been part of A-list productions: Raza Murad, Kiran Kumar, Mukesh Rishi and Harish Patel. They appear in the series, offering their observations and anecdotes from time to time.

The series was conceived when Vice Media’s Samira Kanwar approached Srivastava to “make something” on these films in 2019. Bala entered the picture in 2020 as executive producer.

“By the time I was there, Pritesh had introduced the potential interviewees to us and all that was left to do was pitch it to Amazon,” Bala says.

The makers had decided that they wouldn’t be “laughing at them but with them” or “accept them, or not, or whatever, with their good, bad and ugly, as anybody would want to be accepted”. The idea was not to create a “ hahaha show, like MTV spoofs, where we would laugh at someone’s expense,” Bala clarifies.

The series is structured around Talwar, Shah, Gulati and Neelam, who have all but left filmmaking, gearing up to make one short film each in their own inimitable style. Interviews and clippings from their works are interspersed in the documentary. In the end, the foursome are touchingly given a red-carpet premiere, a sort of mainstream acknowledgement they yearned for but never received in their prime.

“Initially, we thought the four directors would make one film but that terrible idea was quickly dropped because each has their own style,” Bala says, “It was interesting to see how they get their crew together in a short time and shoot their film on negative (film roll)”.

Production of Cinema Marte Dum Tak was often halted throughout 2020 and 2021 owing to the COVID-induced lockdown. Srivastava and his team would have to stay in constant touch with the interviewees so they don’t lose interest, or, worse, disappear.

(From left) Yesteryear directors J Neelam, Vinod Talwar, Dilip Gulati and Kishan Shah.

But as Rindani tells Moneycontrol , “The last piece of the puzzle was Kanti Shah,” and until his interview had been secured, the makers were not entirely feeling confident.

Kanti Shah, younger brother of Kishan Shah, was the most financially successful of these filmmakers. He managed to finish films quickly, had an aesthetic style better than most, and had the gall to get top stars, such as Dharmendra and Mithun Chakraborty, to act in his films. These films, such as Loha (1997), and, especially, Gunda (1998), are today cult classics, even among the most mainstream of Hindi film-watching cinephiles.

Kanti Shah does appear in the series but, interestingly, he has soured relations with his peers, and, apparently, his family, too.

“The deal with Kanti is that you are alone at the top,” Bala observes. “His success brought him narcissism and megalomania.”

Rindani has an interesting insight: “As you see in the series, the others had a family life, or, you have a woman (J Neelam) who is living life with some kind of dignity and normalcy. Kanti, by, contrast, doesn’t have a family life. He is a rake with no fear of judgement by society and has broken those ties. He knows he can’t be judged and he’s able to do what he wants to do.”

Yesteryear director Kanti Shah watching his 2005 film ‘Angoor’, starring Sapna Sappu. (Photo: Amazon)

Among the researchers on the show was Aseem Chandaver, whom Bala describes as “the biggest fanboy for these sort of films”. Chandaver, Bala says, provided the “analytical framework” for the series: “What is which filmmaker’s style, whose filmmaking gradually declined, who talks too much, that sort of thing Aseem knew best.”

Chandaver, whose Instagram profile offers a treasure trove of moments from those films, tells Moneycontrol , “There are some guys on whom you can make one whole season. You can make a whole season on just Kanti Shah. Or Suresh Jain, the king of sleaze, best-known for his waali films (in late 2000s), Dabbeywali , Kaamwali , Machhliwali .”

The three-year making of the series also witnessed the deaths of many possible interviewees, such as cinematographer Dilip Dey and composer Sawan Kumar Sawan.

One noticeable lack in the series was the voices of the women who starred in these films. These women, in their roles, were frequently in states of undress, molested and raped — staples of the genre. While Neelam does talk about “women empowerment” in these kind of films (it is true that many of these films worked because of the heroine’s star power), it doesn’t quite address the issue.

Turns out that the makers did approach these actresses but “they didn’t want to return and associate with this world,” Rindani says. Sriprada was among those who were approached but she died during the pandemic. Bala, in fact, wants to cast Poonam Dasgupta, a sort of Sridevi of these films, in one of his retromaniac movies. His recent film, Monica, Oh My Darling , for instance, had a role for actor Shiva Rindani, Disha Rindani’s father. Shiva Rindani is also among the interviewees in the series.

Another aspect untouched in the series was that the audience for what Chandaver would call “terribly awesome movies”, instead of B, C, or Z grade, shifted to their smartphone screens, with several streaming sites such as Ullu and Kooku, offering semi-sexual content. It’s not that this audience disappeared into thin air, as the series sometimes suggests.

Rindani says, with the Central Bureau of Investigation cracking down on the porn industry in Gujarat in 2021, the people in the digital space making these films went silent, “restructuring and re-strategising”. In fact, Shiva Rindani was offered to direct a few of these digital-era films.

What’s next for Season Two? Chandaver hopes they “cross international boundaries” and Bala says he has been trying to get Roger Corman, the guru of Hollywood B-movies for Cinema Marte Dum Tak for a long time.

“I have been sliding into his DMs since the pandemic,” Bala says. Corman, who is 96, after all, mentored the who’s who of Hollywood’s greatest directors: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron.

Rindani’s suggestion is more local: Ram Gopal Varma. “That’s a great idea,” Bala muses.

The bilimbi tree plays an important role in the narrative of ‘Anthill’. (Photo: Joygeorgek via Wikimedia Commons 3.0)

But it is also a place of refuge for the downtrodden and those looking for a fresh start – the woman who has an affair with her brother-in-law and has nowhere else to go; the sex worker who needs a new means of livelihood as she ages; the man who inherits the responsibilities of village mediator from his father; a fantastical man who is desired, reviled and mythologised here. Anthill’s 200 characters each have their own backstory and arc, and yet the whole is cohesive, even immersive.

In an email interview, Thomas spoke about Anthill , his literary influences, his readers, the moral compasses that Anthill defies, and what he’s reading, watching and writing now:

Who are your biggest literary influences?

Like many of my generation, I was brought up on a diet of penny-dreadful meets Mills & Boon in Malayalam literature ; they go under the genre of painkili (sic) stories. They were, understandably, the initial influence. Baton Boss, Kottayam Pushpanath and Mathew Mattom were glib, facile storytellers, enough for people like me to get addicted to them at that point of my journey as a reader. But those penny-dreadfuls did help in instilling in me a reading habit at a young age.

Then, with access to local libraries, I graduated to reading Basheer, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Punathil Kunjabdullah, K. Surendran, O.V. Vijayan, M. Mukundan , who are venerated writers in Malayalam; and they became mine too. Then I moved on to translations from other languages and my favourites among them were Dostoevsky and Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay . Even the contemporary Malayalam writers have influenced my writing in many ways. If I am asked to select one among them, S. Hareesh would be it. His writings have been the greatest motivation for me.

There’s an element of fantasy in ‘Anthill’ that must have been pretty hard to translate. Did you work closely with the translator or oversee the drafts?

Nandakumar and I were in constant touch during the translation. There are some leitmotifs and imageries that I have used in the novel which are indigenous to our locality. For instance, the bilimbi tree, which plays an important role in the narrative. Its fruits cover the tree from top to bottom like bees on a beehive. Only those who are familiar with the tree and its fruits can understand the fantasy attached to it.

Perhaps the biggest challenge he may have faced as a translator could be how to render these regional imageries into another language. Through our discussions we were able to resolve these.

Inevitably, in the narration, my characteristic style of nit-picking, mimicry, mockery, and lifting up the cloak and peering inside things have all come in. I am most happy that Nandakumar has made a good fist of it, without any attenuation.

You place the story in a very specific part of Kerala – does the English translation inevitably flatten some of the regional nuance?

The locale is a boondocks called Perumpadi whose remoteness attracts migrants. Being migrants, a majority of the characters use the Kottayam-Pala dialect. There are minor players who have migrated from Thrissur, Kozhikode and Thiruvananthapuram also. The denizens of places around Perumpadi use the Malabar dialect. They too figure in the novel. Therefore, many of the dialects used in Kerala appear in the novel.

I do not think that these patois and dialects can be reproduced in English. Nandakumar has overcome this by using equivalent phrases and using the original Malayalam word where unavoidable.

Are some of the characters based on real people? What can you tell us about them?

I have declaimed in the preface to the novel that everything is a product of my imagination. I cannot say it otherwise here too. After reading the novel, a few people have approached me claiming that they are so-and-so character in it. An example is Shukoor Haji. In the novel, the character becomes wealthy by selling fish. Shukoor Pedayangodu, who holds literary and novel appreciation discussions in front of teashops and shopfronts, had been a fishmonger once. He claims Shukoor Haji is him. If all the people of my place could read and would read the novel, every one of them would come to me claiming to be Jeremias Paul, Kunjandi, Kocharaghavan, Father Neerukuzhi, Prasannan, Neeru, Louis, Balls Scorcher, Sr Philomena, Gandhi of the Valley and all the other characters, depending on how the shoe fits. However, I shall not admit to anything. Any such admission would lead to undesirable consequences.

Is any segment of the book autobiographical? If yes, could you share an anecdote or two from your life that filtered into the book.

The novel does contain autobiographical bits and pieces. But none of them will be openly admitted to. A large part of the story of Paul sir’s family could form part of my family’s story too. Many of the mediations conducted by Jeremias Paul were done in my house. Once upon a time, I too smuggled cashews to Makkoottam. I have dived into the river, swum underwater, farmed and swung on the vines by its banks. Like Theruva Mathu and Uthaman, I have played cards with frayed, mushy decks and done black magic against some. However, it would be a dishonour for me to admit to these as autobiographical. Therefore, I desist. Everything is a figment of my imagination.

One thing I could admit to is the doings in the library. Nellikampoyil Sahrudaya Library has played a great role in my formation. Everything that I have narrated as happening in Perumpadi library has happened in my life too.

Could you talk us through the treatment of sex in the book – there is this matter-of-fact way in which the story talks about child sexual abuse, gay love, sex work, sexual harassment (at the party), and a fantastical virile man who can live under water. Were you consciously distancing from more puritanical views that we espouse in public?

I have met readers who, in an effort to appear genteel, claim that such people exist only in Perumpadi. Let them mull for some time and, hand upon their hearts, say how they and the people around them really are.

All the description of sex in the novel have not been brought in for the sake of prurience. Every character I dreamt up came with all those trappings and baggage. I had mentioned here before that people could turn up claiming to be characters in the book. If they do, I would ask them to their face if their lives weren’t as I have described in the book. If they are honest, they can give only a positive reply. This is all that I have done – when I wrote about anyone in the novel, I didn’t indulge in any censoring. I wrote everything as they are. What the puritans would think or that I may need to cross swords with them was never of concern to me and nothing I have written is with that intent. This is what happens in reality.

I have met readers who, in an effort to appear genteel, claim that such people exist only in Perumpadi. Let them mull for some time and, hand upon their hearts, say how they and the people around them really are. As someone said, chastity is only the lack of opportunity. You can see the true face of anyone only when the circumstances are in their favour.

Do you write with a Malayalam-reading audience, a pan-Indian audience in mind, or does this not matter in your opinion?

I don’t write with any particular audience or readership in mind. What is important is to narrate the stories that are within me. As a reader, I am keen to listen to the story of a Bengali village, a street in Ahmedabad, or people living in the foothills of Himalayas. I should assume the same is the case with people living there – they want to hear stories from Kerala. Jeremias’s mediations could happen in a North Indian village community; his decisions are the same as those of a village mukhiya.

After they have read Anthill (in its Malayalam version) many people have told me that life in Perumpadi is similar to that of the early migrants of Australia and other places. The plot of Anthill is relevant to any community that has migrants, families and religion.

What is the most exciting development in current Malayalam writing according to you? Who among your contemporaries do you admire most?

What used to pass for the ethos of Kerala in our literature were some social tropes such as zari-bordered mundus, Kathakali, the temple elephant, the brass ceremonial lamp, Theyyam, Muslim women in their veils, and Christian women in fan-tail mundu and scapulars. However, works now coming out which present minute aspects of parochial life is what I see as growth of Malayalam literature.

The patois and argot of people from the various corners of Kerala, their rituals and traditions, their vocation and all that are now becoming part of Malayalam literature. Democratisation and pluralism depicted as Kerala ethos is a heartening development. Most of the current crop of Malayali writers pay heed to this. I have already answered the question on who among them I admire most – it is S. Hareesh.

What are you reading right now?

I am reading Gitanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand now. August 17 of Hareesh in Malayalam is a novel I loved reading recently.

What are you writing right now?

I am writing a novel with the working title Wealth with the theme of man’s concept of money. It is a rather large one, encompassing the monetary transactions that have taken place in Kerala’s and India’s history, changes in power equations and myths. I am also writing scripts for a couple of movies.

What movies/series are you watching currently?

The pandemic had turned me into more of a watcher of web series. Now I am back to watching movies in theatres. The last English movie I had watched was Avatar: Way of the Water . And some of the recent excellent Malayalam movies I have watched are Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hai , Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam , and Aavasavyuham .