Common People | All That Breathes (2022)

IMPORTANT! SCREENING WILL BE HELD AT KAUNAS’ CINEMA CENTRE “ROMUVA” (Laisvės al., 54, Kaunas)

THE THIRD SCREENING

November 10th, 7 p.m. in the chamber hall of Kaunas film centre “Romuva” (Laisves al. 54, Kaunas), the audience will see the highlight of major international film festivals—Shaunak Sen’s documentary “All That Breathes” (2022).

Through this film, the director wants to harness the enchantment of the sky. He wants audiences to leave theatres and instinctively look up – to think of the sky and the birds in it as novel, wonderfully alien things and their importants in the scenarious of the survival of the Earth.

More about the movie and the director:

As legions of birds fall from New Delhi’s darkening skies, and the city smolders with social unrest, two brothers race to save a casualty of the turbulent times: the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to their city’s ecosystem.

In one of the world’s most populated cities, two brothers—Nadeem and Saud—devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi that 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 basement hospital. Director Shaunak Sen explores the connection between the kites and the Muslim brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence.

Documentary; India, USA, GB, 2022.Hindu with English and Lithuanian subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, 94 min.

In addition to dozens of nominations at various international film festivals, “All That Breathes” received the highest award in the documentary category at the Cannes Film Festival. It was awarded the top jury prize at the Sundance festival and the best documentary of the year at the London Film Festival. It also won gold in its category at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and silver at the Krakow Film Festival.

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 various major international film festivals (including DOK Leipzig, DMZ Docs and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, among others) and won 6 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.

PARTICIPATION AT THE EVENT IS FREE OF CHARGE

The Common People 2022 program examines the individual’s relationship with the environment and the landscape in which they live and work. We will look at the landscape as a factor generating social, political, and ecological meanings. The program’s films will reveal not only the beauty or issues of landscapes but also the contexts in which they exist, as well as their positive or negative influence on the individual and vice versa. Travelling from idyllic provincial landscapes to polluted metropolises, we will focus on historical layers of the environment, ecological and personal human tragedies, and social issues. We will try to understand how the relationship between man and space changes in the face of today’s challenges.

The project is curated by Karolis Žukas (Kitas Kinas) and Edvinas Grinkevičius (Kaunas Artists’ House).

Visual identity: Eglė Simonavičiūtė.

The project is financed by the Lithuanian Film Center and organized by Kaunas Artists’ House. Partners: platform Kitas Kinas and Kaunas Deaf Rehabilitation Centre.