With John Wick 2 and 3 editor Evan Schiff unavailable, franchise director and co-creator Chad Stahelski cast around for a new cutting room collaborator for Chapter 4. He alighted on Nathan Orloff (Ghostbusters: Afterlife), in part because Orloff had limited experience editing action movies.

“In my interview with Chad, we just really hit it off,” Orloff explains on the Next Best Picture podcast. “I found out many months later that one of the reasons he wanted to bring me on is because I don’t have extensive experience in action. He didn’t want someone to come in and do their thing that they’ve been doing on other action movies… because John Wick is sort of antithetical to how a lot of action movies are cut these days.”

READ MORE: The Next Best Picture Podcast – Interview With “John Wick: Chapter 4” Editor Nathan Orloff (The Next Best Picture)

To understand why, you have to appreciate that Stahelski’s vision for the fourth installment in the franchise was to expand the John Wick universe by bringing in multiple storylines and a longer run-time to let the action play out on screen, rather than having the editing dictate the action.

“The other films are very much like, you know, that John is on a direct rampage or running for his life. This film was intentionally designed to be more reflective and contemplating, that after his entire career as a hitman, he is forced to reckon with his past and what he’s done.”

Stahelski’s influences range from the lush visuals of Wong Kar-wei to the operatic staging of Sergio Leone westerns. As the director explained to Jim Hemphill at IndieWire: “I love the seventies movie style. I love four act operas. I love Kabuki theater. The Asian cinema kind of breaks a lot of rules that we adhere to in the three act version [of movies] and we’d like to think John Wick breaks a lot of those rules because we do go a little operatic.

“Lawrence of Arabia is a good example like that. That movie kind of flies by to me and it doesn’t feel like you need an intermission in it.”

The filmmaker’s homage goes so far as to mimic the famous “match cut” by editor Ann V Coates in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia in which Lawrence in profile blows out a match and Coates cuts to a blazing desert sunrise.

“I remember vividly when I went to set in Paris, Chad asked me ‘what’s the most famous cut in all of cinema?’ and said we’re going to do it our way,” Orloff relates to Next Best Picture. “I wanted to make sure we did the exact number of frames when the fire was blown out before cutting to the sunrise. You know, I wanted to do it justice.

“He told me he’d rather swing and miss than do the same thing over again. And so that match cut is indicative of [telling the] audience what we’re going for.”

Another acknowledged influence on the director’s action style are classic MGM musicals or those featuring Fred Astaire. In films like Singing In The Rain or Top Hat the camera stays generally static and in wide shot with minimal edits so the viewer can take in all the dancing brilliance performed by the film’s stars.

“I love Bob Fosse here, one of my huge inspirations,” Stahelski tells Indiewire. “You take Gene Kelly, the old Sunday Morning Sunday Parade or something like that. You watch Fred Astaire do his thing. And if you watch the way we shoot, it’s very simple. The way we train people [to perform stunts] is very, very, very dance oriented.”

READ MORE: How Gene Kelly and ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ Taught John Wick to Fight (IndieWire)

Orloff elaborates on what this means to decisions in the cutting room.

“Musicals like back then were sort of like you edited around the dancing,” he says on an episode of The Rough Cut podcast. “You showed them dancing. They would do a move, finish, cut, start something else. And the way Chad talked about that really inspired me to do that with our characters and not use the editing to try to punch anything up.”

There are times when the stunt performance or that of Keanu Reeves aren’t quite perfect “they slip or there’s something not great about the timing of this or that, but not being so obsessive about perfection makes it just so much more real. When you’re cutting less, you’re able to absorb everything more. You feel more empathy for the characters because you feel like you’re just there.”

John Wick: Chapter 4 clocks in at 169 minutes, more than an hour longer than the original. Stahelski explains why he wanted a movie of this length.

“In our heads we knew that we wanted to show this constant decreasing circle that spirals closer and closer as [the stories] come together. So every act brings us closer together. That was the plan. It sounds like a very genius plan, but you don’t know until you cut the whole thing together. Our first cut was 3 hours 45 minutes.”

So how did the edit team set about cutting that down, and knowing which killing to leave in or excise?

“When you have 14 action sequences, you can’t just edit that sequence,” the director explained. “You’ll never know if a five minute car scene or a ten minute car scene is good to watch in the two and a half hour movie.

So the only way to truly know that you’re doing the right thing is step back and take that half day. We’d edit all morning but by four p.m. we’re like, Let’s watch the movie. And my editorial staff probably hates me. We’ve watched it so many times because literally even if we just took like 30 seconds out of something, I’d make everybody watch the movie again, because that’s the only way you know, you have the right pace.

He adds, “It’s the whole song that makes you rock out. I think that was a big learning experience with me and my editorial team to constantly watch a two and five hour movie and feel where the slow parts were and to work on those parts.”

Because John Wick is dispatching henchmen left and right in intricately planned and executed stunts, making the decision about what to cut was a tricky one admits the editor.

“There is definitely sometimes overkill when something is too similar to something else,” Orloff told Next Best Picture, “but going back to the music was a huge help in creating different tones and alternating what we were doing to avoid the things feeling the same. And to Chad’s credit, especially in the last act when we go from street fight to a car chase to a lengthy overhead shot that, even though the audience has watched non-stop action for 30-45 minutes the movie is structured so skillfully that you’re seeing something you’ve never seen before.”

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When former HBO Sports President Ross Greenburg approached Sam Pollard two years ago about doing a documentary on NBA legend Bill Russell, Pollard jumped at the chance.

“I didn’t hesitate. I said yes, because I grew up in the ’60s,” Pollard told WNYC’s Allison Stewart. “I was very familiar with Bill Russell. I was familiar with the rivalry between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. I was excited to jump in and do this documentary.”

Bill Russell: Legend premiered on Netflix February 8 and includes the last interview with Russell, an 11-time NBA champion with the Boston Celtics. Russell died during the filmmaking process at his home in Mercer Island, Washington on July 31, 2022. He was 88.

The two-part documentary, directed by Pollard (MLK/FBI, Mr. Soul!), weaves interviews with archival footage and excerpts from Russell’s memoirs, to tell the basketball legend’s story. Corey Stoll narrates while Jeffrey Wright reads the excerpts from Russell’s memoirs.

Pollard told Clint Krute during an episode of the Film Comment podcast that one of the biggest challenges “was to say to ourselves, ‘when do we have too much basketball? When do we need to stop and go to something that he was doing off the court?’ And then when we got to his activities off the court, the question we had to ask ourselves was, ‘how long did we stay with that material before we get back to the basketball?'”

The director added that the classic narrative structure they originally had after the tease was to follow Russell’s life chronologically. But Pollard said they decided to show Russell getting drafted in 1956 by the Celtics instead “to create the drama.”

“[Y]ou [Pollard] play with a bit of the established or traditional sports documentary time structure by reversing what we would usually think was gonna happen after the tease that we would start with the origin story narrative,” scholar Samantha Sheppard said during the Film Comment podcast with Pollard and Krute. “But you move us and shift us along and then take us back to more of a familial historical narrative in that sense. And I think that in that way, in watching this, it’s like a trick. Often it does feel quite traditional. It feels even with the time change, still quite chronological at times.”

Sheppard, an associate professor of cinema and media studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University, authored Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen, which explores sports documentaries and how they represent blackness.

“It [sports documentaries] finally gives these athletes larger context. It lets them speak, it lets them be culturally and critically framed, and it lets them, it lets us as audiences see their sport not divorced from the sociality in which they live,” said Sheppard. “So it’s not a narrative of shut up and dribble, it’s actually ‘tell us more and also show us the sport at the same time.’ So these films become really, really important as a way to provide a greater context to black athletes in ways that we have not seen them on the court, and more particularly off the court in terms of their social or cultural impact.”

Russell played with the Boston Celtics from 1956-1969. During Russell’s career, he scored a long list of achievements, including 11 NBA championships with the Boston Celtics (two of those as a player/coach), 5 NBA Most Valuable Player awards, 12 NBA All-Star games, two NCAA championships, and an Olympic Gold medal.

“What’s interesting about Russell is from one perspective, he seems like this imposing, 6’9 center for the Boston Celtics. Winner, winner, winner, right? But there’s the other side to Bill Russell where he’s extremely thoughtful,” Pollard told Esquire’s Alex Belth. “He’s extremely nuanced about everything in life, not only as a basketball player but as a Black man in America. And he had opinions about everything.”

READ MORE: The Thing That Made Bill Russell Great (Esquire)

Off the court, Russell was very involved in the Civil Rights movement, attending the 1963 March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King and the 1967 Cleveland Summit as well as speaking out against the Boston bussing issues.

“This man was a real activist,” Pollard told NECN’s Clinton Bradford. “He didn’t just want to be known as a great basketball player, which he was, he wanted to be known as a human being who was well rounded, who had other things on his mind and other issues he wanted to articulate and talk about.”

Pollard wouldn’t have been able to tell Russell’s story without the mountain of archival footage, stills, and articles dug up by archival producer Helen Russell.

“Documentary filmmaking is really being like an anthropologist,” Pollard told Film Comment’s Krute. “You’re doing a deep dive, you’re doing a tremendous amount of research. And the more research you do, the more you find gold, you really find gold.”

But because Russell played in the 1950s and 1960s, some of that footage wasn’t the greatest.

“The one challenge that we as documentarians always face is that when you see this old footage, you say, ‘It looks pretty crappy, and there wasn’t a lot of coverage,'” Pollard told Variety’s Addie Morfoot. “So, you have to sort of take a leap of faith. [We looked at the archives] and would say – ‘Is that Bill Russell?’ But we also knew that we were never going to get the same kind of coverage and quality we see today.”

READ MORE: Sam Pollard on Documenting Basketball Great Bill Russell’s ‘Complicated’ Legacy: ‘It Took a While to Edit This One’ (Variety)

Even with the at times grainy footage, Pollard still managed to weave a narrative that makes Bill Russell: Legend stand out.

“What helps set the documentary apart is that Pollard has assembled a treasure trove of vintage game footage and vintage interviews, as well as a wealth of new or new-ish interviews with Russell, [Bill] Cousy, Satch Sanders and many of their contemporaries including the aforementioned [Jerry] West, Bill Bradley, Walt Frazier and more,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter’s Dan Fienberg. “There’s a very good balance between the game footage, which accentuates Russell’s grace and athleticism, and the interviews, which concentrate on his intensity and, perhaps more than anything, his intellect.”

Russell was a student of the game, spending hours studying.

READ MORE: ‘Bill Russell: Legend’ Review: Netflix Doc on NBA Icon Is Good Enough to Make You Want More (The Hollywood Reporter)

“[H]e understood that the game of basketball is just not about being physical, it’s about being mental,” Pollard told WNYC’s Stewart. “It’s about understanding how to position yourself and play against other players, where you should be, where one of your teammates should be to get the ball to take it down to court to get a basket, to know when to get a rebound and where to get the rebound and how to use that. When he was at USF with his future teammate, K.C Jones, they came up with the strategies. That’s what they would call themselves rocket scientists.”

Pollard added: “They were really thinking about the physics of basketball. It just goes to show you that athletes are very intelligent people, they’re not just jocks, they’re very intelligent. Bill took it to another level in terms of understanding the science and the physics of the game and how to use the game to his advantage.”

Alex Belth in his introduction to his interview with Pollard summed the documentary and Russell up: “Bill Russell: Legend reminds us that in the world of team sports, the biggest team player of them all was also perhaps the most singular individualist, too.”

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Sight and Sound, the prestigious international film magazine, selected Charlotte Wells’ debut feature Aftersun as the best film of 2022.

Inspired by, but not based on, the director’s experiences as the child of young parents, the ‘90s-set film stars newcomer Francesca Corio as Sophie, an 11-year-old girl on a package holiday to Turkey with her father Calum (Paul Mescal).

The film, which also won seven British Indie Film Awards, is described by the magazine as an “exquisitely subtle yet deeply affecting and honest depiction of mental illness, father-daughter love, and memory.”

READ MORE: The 50 best films of 2022 (Sight & Sound)

Developed and produced with the support of the BFI Film Fund, using funds from the National Lottery, Aftersun was one of the most talked about films at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and was picked up for international distribution by A24.

IndieWire’s Eric Kohn judged it “the most evocative look at an adolescent gaze coming to terms with the adult world since Moonlight.”

Several critics compare the way Aftersun paints its characters’ interior lives to that of Moonlight director Barry Jenkins. Not coincidentally, perhaps, Jenkins and his producing partner Adele Romanski served as producers on the film.

The 35-year-old was born and raised in Edinburgh, but moved to the US in 2012 to study film at NYU. There, her standout short films including Laps and Blue Christmas caught the attention of Romanski, who encouraged Wells to develop the script.

“Her short films were pretty fucking brilliant,” Romanski tells Kohn. “I was curious to hear what she was working on and how the storytelling style for her shorts would translate into that longer format. Then we waited patiently for years.”

That was in 2018. Wells finally retreated into a two-week writing frenzy in 2019, but held onto her first draft for another half a year before sending it to Romanski. “I spent six months pretending to rewrite but in actual fact just spellchecking it over and over again,” she said.

Her film is very much about memory — how certain moments stay with us forever, but also how our interpretation of events can differ from what actually happened. The story’s “beautiful elusiveness — its accumulation of seemingly inconsequential fragments that gradually accrue in emotional power,” per Tom Grierson in the Los Angeles Times, makes it a difficult movie to encapsulate, even for its maker.

READ MORE: How director and star create emotional power with glimpses of memories in ‘Aftersun’ (Los Angeles Times)

Deadline’s Damon Wise isn’t the only interviewer to observe Wells appearing “somewhat shell-shocked by her film’s progress in the world,” adding “I’m actually a little in awe of the fact that this film has — and could — reach so many people.”

That’s perhaps because, as she tells Marshall Shaffer at Slant Magazine, “Mental health struggles are messy, symptoms overlap and diagnoses are often [incorrect]. It’s incredibly difficult to pinpoint many mental illnesses.”

READ MORE: Interview: Charlotte Wells on Delineating Memory and Story in Aftersun (Slant Magazine)

Of the film’s deliberate ambiguity Wells says to Alex Denney of AnotherMag, “I think inherent in whatever style it is that I have there is space for people to bring their own experiences. It’s both conscious and not: I think when you avoid a certain kind of exposition it does create ambiguity and people will fill that ambiguity with their own experiences, their own reference points that they enter the cinema with.”

Withholding information “is kind of the point of the film” she tells IndieWire. “I think the ambiguity is inherent in the subtlety and my aversion to exposition. But for me, the answers are all in the film.”

Her reticence to talk in concrete terms about her work is also warning not to label it an autobiography. “It’s very much fiction, but rooted in experience and memory,” she reveals to Denney. “It’s personal in that the feeling is mine and I allowed my own memories and anecdotes through all of childhood to form the kind of skeleton outline [of the first draft]. But after that point it did become very much about the story I was trying to tell, and that frequently required pushing it away from my own experience.”

Cinematographer Gregory Oke records on lush 35mm and partly masks Calum’s appearance throughout the film, rendering him as a semi-ghostly presence.

“We worked hard to keep Calum at arm’s length, to keep more physical distance between him and the camera in order to create the feeling that he is in some sense unknowable,” Wells tells Denney.

READ MORE: Charlotte Wells on Aftersun: “Grief Doesn’t Exist without the Joy” (AnOther)

Interspersed throughout the narrative is a jarring dreamlike rave sequence, which finds the adult Sophie confronting her father under strobe lights on the crowded dancefloor.

“In a lot of ways, there was a mystery to the process of discovering exactly what this was,” Wells explains to IndieWire. “So much of the process found its way into the film. The process of rooting through the past and memories and allowing some to rise to the surface, transforming them or reframing them.”

Noting Aftersun’s impressionistic style, Deadline’s Wise wonders whether Wells achieved that by taking things away in the edit, or scripting it.

“Both,” is her reply. “I didn’t shoot anything I didn’t want to be in the film. But there is plenty that isn’t in the final cut, that was lost in service of the edit. There were discoveries in the edit that were originally just strategies that we used to solve problems but which ended up being quite a meaningful strategy in terms of creating a sense of memory.”

READ MORE: Charlotte Wells On The Surprise Success Of Her Festival Hit ‘Aftersun’: “I’m A Little In Awe” (Deadline)

The way Aftersun deceptively drifts from scene to scene — punctuated by meditative cutaways of shots like a person’s hand or a random passerby yelling at their child kid — are all painstakingly crafted.

“Some of [those shots] were whole scenes reduced to an image,” Wells tells IndieWire’s Kohn. “Some were details in the script, and some were discovered on set based on months, if not years, of conversations with my cinematographer.”

When it’s suggested the deft execution of Aftersun feels like a magic trick, she demurs. “I don’t have an answer as to what it is,” she says. “We didn’t set out to pull off an emotional heist.”

READ MORE: Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski Had to Give Up on ‘Aftersun’ Before Charlotte Wells Could Finish It (IndieWire)

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TL;DR

• “All That Breathes” debuted at Sundance last year, where it won the Grand Jury Prize in World Cinema Documentary Competition. It was also awarded at Cannes; and will be available to watch on HBO in 2023.
• Director Shaunak Sen’s sophomore effort follows raptor rehabilitation efforts in New Delhi, chronicling a family’s experience of nature, pollution, bureaucracy, and ultimately, societal turmoil.
• Cinematographer Ben Bernhard filmed the documentary using the Canon EOS C500 Mark II and Riju Das shot with an EOS C70, alternating between tight shots in a basement and wide expanses of urban sky to evoke the act of breathing.

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People love to understand animals through a human lens. But what happens when a documentarian uses both a camera lens and the fate of a predatory bird species to consider humanity? The end result is “All That Breathes,” directed by Shaunak Sen.

The Story

Sen says he “began developing a deep interest in the behavioral and evolutionary changes in animals in Delhi prompted by air pollution” while a fellow at Cambridge University in 2018. Additionally, Sen’s awareness of his environment developed alongside the “sense of unease many of us felt towards the escalating social tension in India.” 

Despite these undercurrents, this project did not begin with a lofty message, but instead with a color.

“The starting point was the city of Delhi, where gray is the all-pervasive texture. When I’d be looking up at the monochromatic sky, I’d see these black dots, and every now and then they are dropping. I was overtaken by this sense of a bird falling off a gray polluted sky,” Sen told TheWrap’s Joe McGovern. “That’s how I started researching what happens to birds that fall. So the film didn’t start off as a film about birds, it was meant to be about the mood and texture of the air we live in.”

READ MORE: ‘All That Breathes’ Director Shaunak Sen on Breaking Nature Doc Clichés While Filming Hospitalized Birds (TheWrap)

As part of his research, Sen turned to media savvy brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, bodybuilders turned raptor rescuers at Wildlife Rescue, an avian hospital located in their basement soap dispenser workshop. 

Although New Delhi has a well established avian hospital, that facility is run by Jains, who traditionally practice ahimsa and do not handle meat. This complicates treating non-vegetarian birds. Black kites are the most common bird in the region and are predatory, which meant that when the Muslim brothers first tried to save an injured kite, the Charity Bird Hospital rejected it, sparking their first interest in caring for these creatures. 

“Focusing closely on the figure of the black kite opened up not just the environmental but also the most pressing socio-political dramas of our times,” Sen explained. India has been rocked by religious conflict under the Hindu nationalist Modi government.

The third “All That Breathes” protagonist (and viewer favorite) is cousin and acolyte Salik Rehman, who has volunteered at Wildlife Rescue since 2010 and officially joined the team in 2017. 

“In the end, human subjects define the documentary, and while Nadeem and Mohammad are deeply spiritual and iconoclastic men, Salik quietly steals the spotlight. His youth and unabashed admiration for the black kites is the film’s telos. It is Salik who gives the viewer pause,” writes Maria Garcia for All Arts. After several festival screenings, Sen agreed and told Garcia, “I think Salik saves the film.”

According to the press kit, “The combined stories of this human-kite ensemble paint an untold picture of life in the world’s most hazardous urban environment. It tells the story of toxicity — in the air and among people — and shines a light on a remarkable family that chooses to battle on against the backdrop of both.”

The “All That Breathes” Vibe

Not every filmmaker would be inspired by this story, or feel up to the challenge of finding beauty in a makeshift veterinary and a crowded, polluted Delhi neighborhood. But Sen did, telling All Arts’ Garcia: “The first time I entered that basement and witnessed the damp, dank, industrialized, grubby space and these remarkably majestic birds, the sheer duality of that struck me as inherently cinematic.”

Although the basement was the jumping off point, Sen knew it would not end there. 

“Basically, the film keeps switching between the tiny, cramped, claustrophobic space of the basement and the extremely open expanse of the sky above Delhi, between extreme compression and extreme decompression, like breathing, inhaling and exhaling,” Sen explained to Garcia.

Another shooting technique was crucial. Garcai writes that “Sen turned to the democratizing pan in which the camera glides right or left and sometimes up or down, linking all the elements within its moving frame. With no cuts to picture, the pan is the cinema’s answer to action in real time.” 

Sen explained, “The pan was a kind of lovely grammar where undifferentiated things could be stitched together, and we realized that this languorous style was helping our cause.” 

READ MORE: Filmmaker Shaunak Sen on his documentary following three bird rescuers helping New Dehli’s black kites (All Arts)

In the interview with TheWrap, Sen remarked that the “That steady, stealthy traveling camera is important to me and had been important to many generations of Indian filmmakers.” 

The Equipment

A traditional wildlife documentary brings to mind certain camera and lens requirements, but because Sen and his team aimed to subvert these tropes, cinematographers opted for a kit that enabled him to go from a cinematic shot and then quickly transition to a more run-and-gun setup. 

Ben Bernhard, one of three cinematographers who worked on “All That Breathes,” opted for the Canon EOS C500 Mark II, which he told Mark Hawkins allows filmmakers “to be flexible and spontaneous.” 

Importantly, Bernhard notes, “[E]ven when the camera is stripped down, you can still take advantage of internal ND filters, dual slot recording and a Canon Log 2 curve, which all help in a documentary environment.” Its 5-axis Electronic IS was also key for following animals or chasing human subjects.

Bernhard went with photographic lenses for this shoot, including “vintage lenses and Canon L-series primes and zooms” in order to reduce overall weight and increase flexibility, according to the Canon interview.

Setting also dictated lens choice. For example, Bernhard said, “I used a Canon EF 500mm f/4L IS II USM with a Canon Extender EF 2x III to film the black kites in the sky. But when I was filming the brothers in their operating room, space was very limited and I ended up shooting with a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM.”

To create his “poetic look,” Bernhard might also opt for “1/8 or 1/16 Black Pro-Mist filters,” which he says “break down the digital look of modern cameras.”

The camera’s 5.9K full-frame CMOS sensor came in handy for shots in the basement hospital and even more so when Bernhard filmed inside the raptor cage. 

Multiple recording functions were also crucial to the end result. Bernhard filmed the black kites in flight using the 4K 50/60p recording option to create a slo-mo effect for the swooping. Also of note: the three second pre-recording option. According to Canon, “With pre-recording enabled, the EOS C500 Mark II continuously records three or five seconds of footage to its temporary memory. Then, when you press the REC button to start recording, your clip will also contain the pre-recorded video and audio.”

Bernhard explains, “Without pre-recording, you would run out of cards very quickly if you need to be constantly rolling to capture a moment.” As is the case with documentary filmmaking, of course.

READ MORE: Shooting a Sundance-supported documentary with Canon kit (Canon)

Indeed, Sen told TheWrap, “To get a sense of everyday mundaneness, you have to let the camera run and just bore the living daylights out of your subjects. Until you’ve gotten the first yawn from them, you haven’t gotten any usable material. That yawn means that you are not an intrusive presence, nor is the camera. You’re becoming the wallpaper of their lives and they don’t care. That’s what makes material usable.” To achieve that, the team shot 400 hours of footage.

After Effects

How does Sen hope “All That Breathes” will affect audiences? In his director’s statement, Sen explained, “I want to harness the enchantment of the sky. I want audiences to leave theatres and instinctively look up – to think of the sky and the birds in it as novel, wonderfully alien things.”

Although many have praised the documentary as a pro-conservation, anti-pollution work, Sen told The Film Stage’s Jordan Raup, “it’s only obliquely about the environment in that how the film began was: for anybody who lives in Delhi, the air is a really opaque, visceral, tactile, palpable entity. And I was interested in the kind of broader, gray texture that constantly laminates our lives.”

Sen explained, “Films are meant to be Trojan horses. You have to emotionally move people…The idea was to make the kind of story where you felt like you were observing a world and you felt that the idea was to try and make something that was cinematic and witty and poetic and lyrical and to emotionally move people.”

READ MORE: All That Breathes Director Shaunak Sen on Capturing New Delhi Bird Rescuers with a Majestic Cinematic Vision (The Film Stage)

Does “All That Breathes” achieve these goals? New York Times film critic A.O. Scott’s review concludes: “Neither a nature documentary nor a political lecture, ‘All That Breathes’ is a subtle, haunting reflection on the meaning of humanity — on the breathtaking kindness and heartbreaking cruelty that define our wounded, intrepid, predatory species.”

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