S3E3:

Soaring with

Shaunak Sen

Dana Thomas: This is Dana Thomas, and you're listening to The Green Dream, a podcast about how to green up your life.

Climate change is bearing down on us like a mighty hurricane. And it's scary as hell, but it doesn't have to be. I'm Dana Thomas, a leading voice in the sustainable fashion movement. On The Green Dream, I welcome global experts, creators, and change-makers from politics, business, and the arts for dynamic conversations on how you can green up your life. The Green Dream is the podcast of hope.

This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.

 It's Oscars Week next week, and to celebrate cinema's top awards ceremony, we've decided to have a glamorous movie episode here on The Green Dream. Our first guest is Shaunak Sen, the award-winning director of All That Breathes, a poetic documentary about two middle-age brothers, Mohammad and Nadeem, and their young assistant Salik, in New Delhi, India. The three men rescue and rehabilitate injured birds. The film has already won best documentary awards at both the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals – a first in cinema. And it has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary.

Sen, who also hails from Delhi, follows the brothers as they collect and tend to injured birds in their basement clinic, Wildlife Rescue. Most of their patients are black kites, a carnivorous scavenger that Hindu veterinarians, who are vegetarian, refuse to treat. The brothers, who are Muslim, have no such qualms. A few feet away is a soap dispenser workshop – their day job that not only covers family expenses, but also medical equipment, bandages, medicine, and 500 pounds of meat each month to feed the recuperating raptors. In the two decades since the brothers started their rescue campaign, they have saved more than 20,000 birds. 

All That Breathes is not a conventional wildlife film, nor is it a conventional documentary; there are no talking heads, no narration recounting all the issues the creatures are facing, no lecturing. Instead, Sen quietly follows the three men through their everyday lives in Delhi, where the air pollution is so dense and toxic, the brothers believe birds suffocate and fall to the Earth, and where violent sectarian uprisings threaten their own welfare. "Delhi is a gaping wound," Mohammad says, "and we're just a Band-Aid on it."

The New York Times calls All That Breathes "a hopeful story of patience and persistence in the face of obstacles." NPR film critic John Powers said, "All That Breathes celebrates good things it's easy to forget: the wonder of life, the virtues of compassion, and the human capacity to make the world better." All things we try to honor on The Green Dream. 

   All That Breathes is currently available on HBO and HBO Max.

 Also on The Green Dream today is Time magazine film critic Stephanie Zacharek, who will tell us about other touching, and beautiful, environment-themed films in theaters or streaming right now. One of them, "Eo" by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Film.

 But first, Shaunak Sen, to talk about All That Breathes.

Dana Thomas: Shaunak Sen, Welcome to The Green Dream. Tell us, how did the film come to be?

Shaunak Sen: Well, the thing is that when you live in Delhi, you are always sort of preoccupied with the air. The all-pervasive greenness sort of laminates your life, and you're constantly, in some way or the other, thinking about this almost creepily, sentient gray, opaque, tactile air that's coating your life. I was also philosophically interested in human/non-human relationships. So I wanted to do something vaguely on the texture of life in Delhi, the kind of gray tone of life in Delhi, by using birds as a kind of vector. And if I had to pinpoint one moment, I would say that this one time when I sat in my car in New Delhi, and every time you look up the sky is full of this kind of a monochromatic expanse, right? With these lazy black dots gliding in the sky, which are the black kites. And one of them sort of plummeted, like stooped.

 And I had the distinct impression of thinking of a bird that's fallen off the sky. I was gripped by this figure of what happens when a bird falls off the sky. When you Google that singular and brilliant work of the two brothers Nadeem and Saud comes up, who've saved over 25,000 black kites in the last 15 years. Most of all, I did not want to make a sweet film about nice people doing good things. I did not want to make a maudlin, sentimental film. Neither was I at all interested in making a nature or wildlife documentary, conventionally speaking. So, once, I visited there and I saw how they work. They work out of this tiny grubby, claustrophobic basement, the fact that they're all like philosophers in their own right. And I realized that there was enough depth, and that's when the film began.

Dana Thomas: And when did you start shooting it?

Shaunak Sen: We began in 2019, the beginning of 2019, shot till the end of 2022. So we took three years.

Dana Thomas: Three years. But part of that was during Covid, so you had to stop at some points and then carry on again. You have really magical moments in it that seem like you had to have waited a long time to get them – though clearly you spent a long time filming. How many hours did you film for your 90-minute movie?

Shaunak Sen: I think our footage was over 300 hours. So we had a whole mountain, a garage full of hard drives that we had. And yes, I mean a lot of it is a function of time. Life rewards you with accidents and contingencies as you go on shooting because none of us were really experienced in wildlife documentaries, nor was that ever the ambition. So the only thing we could do was to try and take as long as we could and have the luxury of time. So the value of making a kind of indie film is to really work in your own pace and set your own rhythms, really.

Dana Thomas: Now how did you go about convincing the brothers and cousin, right? Their assistant, their cousin? So Mohammed, Nadeem, and cousin Salik. How did you convince them of allowing you to film them and to really enter their lives because you were part of their lives in their house when they were eating and when they were playing with their kids and everything?

Shaunak Sen: Actually convincing them was not the hard part, because I just put all my cards on the table, and said, "This is what I'm interested in. I don't know anything beyond what I vaguely have a sense of right now." Above and beyond that, the main thing was that they were very used to giving bite-sized interviews, like talking head interviews. And that was the form that we had to break them out of, because the main ambition of this kind of creative nonfiction is that you want the quality of the quotidian, of the banal, of everydayness and a kind of humdrumness. And that, where characters are unselfconsciously being instead of behaving in front of the camera, is not an easy quality. But there, the main strengths you have in your toolkit is boredom. You have to wait for characters to get bored, essentially. You have to wait for the critical mass of boredom, plus awareness. And once you get the first yawn, that's what you need. You're waiting for the first yawn, essentially. And I think what happens is that the first month is absolute trash in terms of footage, but it's a required rite of passage.

Dana Thomas: Right. It's a bit like when we're making crêpes in France and the first crêpe always goes in the bin, because it's terrible.

Shaunak Sen: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. And so you need to get people to get used to you and where you and the camera are not obtrusive presences. So that takes a while.

Dana Thomas: That takes a while. And the movie is very poetic. It's very peaceful and calm and meditative. Where does this tone come from? Is this what you set out to do, or did it just emerge that that's how it was in the chaos that is Delhi, I mean it's a cacophony of noise, and activity, and everything happening all at once. I love some of the scenes with the motorcycles of entire families, of them riding behind, this very steady scene of calmness. How did you find that poetic calm?

Shaunak Sen: For one, yes, it is a density, but I think it's more cacophony to outsiders and to westerners. It's my home. So I don't think of it as cacophony at all.

Dana Thomas: But it's active to be sure it's not quiet like the Grand Canyon. There's a lot going on.

Shaunak Sen: Oh yes, it's very dense. It's very, at times it can feel discombobulating. Of course life is very intermeshed, a hundred percent. In terms of the tone, I realized that this couldn't be a regular observational doc. I couldn't go handheld, because that often feels a bit anxious and restless. And the material that I was encountering required the film to be meditative and contemplative. And the characters were like philosophers, and they were talking about ethereal ideas. As such, the form had to find a cinematic or poetic lyrical grammar, which is why we figured out the slow languid, languorous style of uncut pans, and tilts, and so on. And also this lyrical voiceover style because the film had to make you think, it had to make you contemplate, and it therefore couldn't be a quick Hollywoodized montage of things. When you begin the film with four minutes of just rats, what you're doing is that you're setting a spectatorial contract with the audience to say, sit and watch, and your patience will be rewarded. And they realize that there's pleasure in watching itself, and it tweaks the expectations in terms of time, and temporality at large.

Dana Thomas: And I love that you don't just focus on the birds. So the birds are so majestic and so beautiful, but there's horses and pigs and lizards and dogs and frogs, all sorts of wildlife in the film. Did you think of yourself as an environmentalist or an animal lover before you set out to do this or is it just what happened because you were making a movie about these fellows saving birds?

Shaunak Sen: Absolutely not. I had never thought of myself as any serious birder. Only amateurish, I suppose. No, not as an animal – because I've seen how passionately a lot of animal people are. And I regret to say that, before the film, I never shared that kind of passion. But now of course I'm enrolled into it hook, line, and sinker. Feel very passionately about it. The film had to zoom out from being just about the birds and the brothers. It had to be about urban ecology. It had to be about human/non-human entanglement and our neighborliness, or kinship, with non-human life. And therefore we had to show life writ large on the canvas of the city. And therefore the whole panoply of animals that you see in the film to understand that the city is also as much a space of non-human improvisation and survival and successful careers in thriving.

Dana Thomas: At the same time, there's serious political unrest with violent uprisings in the streets. Now, did you already know that this was coming when you set out to start making the movie or was this part of the accidents that you say were happening as you were filming over three years?

Shaunak Sen: It was utterly a part of the accidents that were happening when we were filming because when we began, the film was meant to be purely ecological or philosophical. However, the city of Delhi was going through such a tumultuous time. But I couldn't risk pointing the camera streetward, because I had to respect the integrity of what I was shooting. And in that, what happened was that I realized that the outside world would often leak in. I would often find ways to shoot resonances from the outside world come in. A character goes to the balcony and you hear the distant murmurs of a protesting crowd. Or you hear videos of what sound to be like violence, but you don't see them. So the political is sensed as a pregnant background, but it's always oblique, and tangential, and never really front and center. And I like it that way now. I like it when you sense the social instead of being pedantically told what it is.

Dana Thomas: Exactly. And you also, as you said before, you wanted to work in this animal-human relationship. And this was almost like a seamless way of sewing these two things together. And the idea that there's all this going on while birds are literally falling from the sky, and everyone's so obsessed with what's going on in their microcosm, they're not looking at the macro of the impact of all this environmental pollution in the air on their entire sphere of where they live. I love how you've juxtaposed the micro and the macro, and the people don't necessarily see the macro because they're so obsessed with the micro.

Shaunak Sen: There's an idea that philosopher Timothy Martin has, which he calls “hyper objects,” which, in short, there's certain phenomena in the world which are so expansive that it's difficult for our brains to fully comprehend. This could be something like climate change, or the Anthropocene, or the internet, things that are big. And we only are able to process it cognitively through smaller nodes. And the thing is that while the documentary form is interesting, because it always waxes and wanes between the particular and the whole. And I like it when you zoom in to zoom out. Intimacy is the way to talk about universals, and to tell a truly universal story, you have to also, as much, come in on something which is very irreducibly particular and specific. And one shouldn't shy away from that. So you're constantly waxing and waning between the extremely intimate and the extremely universal. And that is the only way one gets into the- when one looks at the universal, through the universal, very often it ends up being unemotive.

Dana Thomas: Now tell us about the first public screening. Where was it? Was it at Sundance?

Shaunak Sen: Virtually, because it was a pandemic year. Unfortunately, we didn't have a physical premiere.

Dana Thomas: So when was the first public one where you had people in the theater?

Shaunak Sen: First physical premiere was at Cannes, which was very exciting because three brothers, Nareem, Saud, and Salik had come. It was really, really memorable. We got a standing ovation. It was genuinely lovely.

Dana Thomas: And you've received all sorts of awards including the Sundance Documentary Award, the Cannes Film Festival Award, and you're now nominated for an Academy Award. Did you know when you were filming and you were editing that you had a real gem – that it was coming together in such a beautiful way? Like did you feel really good about it?

Shaunak Sen: The thing is that, you know, these are not the terms through which you engage with the work. The work is like a fever dream. You've jumped off a cliff, and you're in free fall. And, of course, you'd think you have something special or something original to say, which is why you put in that kind of work. So those things are always self-perpetuating in terms of why else would you put in time if you didn't think that you had something new to say? I can't imagine that somebody thinks in terms of this award, this award, this award. No, you just want to capture cinematic magic. And after that the world is a pleasant unknown, and you hope that some festivals will stick. But no, not in my wildest dreams had I ever thought of the Oscars, no.

Dana Thomas: That's fantastic. So do you have your tuxedo already?

Shaunak Sen: Immediately after the press for the day gets done, I'm going to get fittings. I'm going to go to a shop and decide. I always try and push these things until it reaches a critical mass of urgency, and it can't be deferred any further. And I've been told that today's really the last day I can push it to.

Dana Thomas: And you've been to several awards shows, haven't you? You have all sorts of things going on, no?

Shaunak Sen: The awards circuit is a pleasant, glitzy hamster wheel of many things over and over again, and it's enjoyable  and it's all of that, like yes, I have.

Dana Thomas: This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.

 If you are enjoying this podcast, check out our interview with Eva Orner, director of Burning, a documentary about the epic wildfires across Australia in 2019 and 2020. You can find that episode and many others in our archives wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to know more about positivity and hope in the climate movement, sign up for The Green Dream newsletter at our new website, thegreendream.studio. Now back to my chat with Shaunak Sen, director of the documentary, All That Breathes. It's now available on HBO and HBO Max.

So how did you get into filmmaking? Because your background is actually more academic than cinematic, isn't it? You did fellowships, including one at Cambridge, you've published scholarly papers. What was the focus of your research when you were doing those fellowships?

Shaunak Sen: My PhD was at the intersection of philosophy and media, but I was doing both things simultaneously, always. I also went to film school and after film school I began my PhD and while doing the PhD, I had made my first films, it wasn't like one or the other. It was both, I sort of led a bit of a bipolar life...

Dana Thomas: Running simultaneously, exactly.

Shaunak Sen: So it's like you're using two different parts of your brain, which sometimes cross pollinate and make things richer, and sometimes they pull at opposite ends. Those two things were always simultaneous, so they're as much a salient part of my personality, therefore...

Dana Thomas: I love that. And your first film was called Cities of Sleep and it's about how the homeless in Delhi were trying to find places to sleep and how this was always being disrupted and how they were being treated. How did that film come about? How did you come up with the idea, and set to it?

Shaunak Sen: I always struggled with my own sleep. And then I wanted to think of ways in which one can think of sleep also can be political and social and urgent. And how it reconfigures how we think of the political, and how the city sort of disaggregates itself differently when seen through the lens of sleep, through the horizontal axis. That's how it started.

Dana Thomas: And how was it received?

Shaunak Sen: It was a very, very shoestring-budget film, which I shot and edited, colored and did sound for pretty much on my own. So it was almost, like, non-funded. So for that it punched above its weight but nothing close to the caliber of the top-tier festivals that this film has had, fortunately.

Dana Thomas: Did "Cities of Sleep" have any impact on how the homeless were treated in Delhi afterwards? Did you have any sort of social impact with the film?

Shaunak Sen: Yeah, there was a bunch of things. So for instance, we screened the film for different target groups like lawyers who are working on the homeless act, for different kinds of social activists, urban researchers, et cetera. There are many small social interventions. For instance, one solar power enterprise in Bangalore saw the film and decided to help part of the sleep community by installing solar generators. So, which meant that, especially in the winters when it gets really cold and there's a resistance to washing and bathing because the water's too cold for the homeless. And, of course, they therefore develop ailments and just a small intervention like hot water from a solar powered device changes things so they went and installed it. That sort of a thing, I think those micro actions, micro gestures go a long way in inaugurating actual material changes. That's what happened there. So these kinds of smaller changes were quite nice, which I think would've helped alleviate some things to some people. But one shouldn't ever simplistically overstate what a film can do.

Dana Thomas: In this film you show how media attention to the bird rescue project brought the brothers and their cousin good fortune, and I don't want to tell more about it cause I don't want to give it away. And this good fortune allowed them to do more. Has the film helped as well? Have they had more of a lift on their project? Are people reaching out and helping them? Are they getting more foundation money or support?

Shaunak Sen: So it's been good in multiple ways, whether it's good enough or not, the jury's still out. Of course, all of them have been traveling constantly with the film. All of them went to Cannes. Nadeem has gone to almost as many film festivals as I have. He went to Krakow, and to Australia, came to New York twice, they went to BAFTAs in London and all three of them are coming for the Oscars. So, it's all exciting in terms of the travel.

Dana Thomas: Who's looking after the birds while they're gone?

Shaunak Sen: Saud usually sticks back, unless it's a special place like Cannes or maybe for the Oscars, in which case they'll have to figure out temporary help.

Dana Thomas: They flip a coin.

Shaunak Sen: I think it's mainly Saud, because he's the one who takes care of the birds, and Nadeem is more outwardly facing.

Dana Thomas: And he's the older brother, right? He's the big brother.

Shaunak Sen: Yes. And apart from that, there's a lot of media attention on their work and since it's come on HBO, I think some donations have been trickling in. But more importantly our producers have very kindly funded the bird hospital for a year to come, which is nice. At the same time, I don't know if the money is enough. Their lives are not easy, they lead difficult lives and one only hopes that when people see the film on HBO, now that it's available, that people are more ready to donate, because what they do is truly singular and brilliant and remarkable and exceptional. So while I think that the film has provided a kind of oasis or some kind of alleviation of their materially but remains to be seen, how much changes in the long run that is, because you don't want to be simplistically–a film can't in one fell swoop change everything for a family. So one hopes that appreciation continues, but I don't know what the future holds.

Dana Thomas: And what can listeners do to support them? Is there a place where they can donate? Is there a place on a website somewhere?

Shaunak Sen: Yes. If you just Google "Wildlife Rescue Delhi," their work comes up. I mean, I would urge listeners to first watch the film and then make up their mind. I imagine that the film and their story is powerful enough for people to feel swayed to help, and contribute. But if you don't watch the film, which is available on HBO right now and HBO Max online, then the way to contribute really is that you just Google "Wildlife Rescue Delhi.” There's a link to contribute and it's fairly straightforward and easy.

Dana Thomas: What do you hope viewers will take away from the film when they watch it?

Shaunak Sen: I hope that the brothers' general perspective have on non-human/human entanglement, and the grace with which they approach and view life without any hierarchies, without drawing any distinction between all that breathes, I think that is an interesting position. But beyond that, like any good film, I don't think that this film should also have a single-point agenda. All my favorite works of art or films are dense objects where there are provocations and they open up questions and it shouldn't be a single one-point message, and there's no utilitarian takeaway or message. But I think the brothers' way of being itself is the message.

Dana Thomas: Do you have any film heroes? Or documentary films that inspired you or moved you?

Shaunak Sen: For this film, cinematographically, it was people like Victor Kossakovsky and so on. In terms of the edit, it was a filmmaker called Gianfranco Rossi. Basically, a legacy of documentary films that are not about information, but about cinematic engagement with a poetic relationship with the world. Generally, I like filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Michael Haneke, I like Claire Denis, I like Wong Kar-wai. So those kinds of...

Dana Thomas: We love Wong Kar-wai. He's working on something, but who knows if it'll ever get finished.

Shaunak Sen: Yes, yes.

Dana Thomas: I ran into a friend of his in Berlin. They told me that he's working on something but it doesn't get finished until he's told it has to be finished.

Shaunak Sen: Right. That's okay. When it's somebody like him, you let him take their time.

Dana Thomas: Exactly. So what's next? What's your next project? Have you started filming anything or laying something out or you have a new deal? I imagine you are in much demand now.

Shaunak Sen: While I might be, I'm also saddled with awards work, and the campaign work, and I'm a slow thinker and it takes me time to really marinate. So I have some ideas, but I don't have any clear answer to give. I might do fiction next. But I don't know what it'll be about or what ... I need to unplug after this and just write it out in the next two, three months.

Dana Thomas: Absolutely. One of my favorite things to read about during the Oscar Runup is the Oscar's luncheon. Did you go?

Shaunak Sen: It was the maddest room I've ever been in. To be in close proximity with the likes of Tom Cruise or Steven Spielberg, or all of that, was just insane. And it's like the childhood cinephile in you comes alive, and I did and it was really amazing. And it was a small, intimate gathering, and you could actually have conversations with people. So it was lovely.

Dana Thomas: What was your moment–were you tongue-tied? Did you lose your words or forget a little?

Shaunak Sen: I think in front of Spielberg, I got a bit inarticulate. My nicest moment was talking to somebody like Colin Farrell, who said that he saw the film just the night before. So that was really lovely. Those kinds of things are nice.

Dana Thomas: Thank you so much for being on The Green Dream. The movie is just incredibly beautiful. I feel like it lowered my pulse.

Shaunak Sen: I'm glad to hear that.

Dana Thomas: It calms you down, and it brings you into beauty, which is so important in this life. We need to appreciate and meditate and see beauty for what it is, and the beauty of nature, which you do so effortlessly. It might have taken 300 hours worth of film, but you do it effortlessly.

Shaunak Sen: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Dana Thomas: Now onto more movie fun for this Oscars edition of The Green Dream. There are more and more movies that have a climate theme, either directly, like last year’s Don’t Look Up, by Adam McKay, or indirectly, like Avatar: The Shape of Water. And, of course, there are loads of documentaries looking at climate impact, such as All That Breathes, or the award-winning Burning, by our second Green Dream guest, director Eva Orner, about the Australian wildfires a few years ago. 

Or Fashion Reimagined, Becky Hutner’s film about how another Green Dream guest, British fashion designer Amy Powney, remade Mother of Pearl, the fashion company she heads, into a sustainable brand. Fashion Reimagined is now in UK cinemas and will start streaming on Now in Great Britain on April 9. You can find both the Eva Orner and Amy Powney episodes in our archive.

Today, we are honored to have Time magazine’s film critic Stephanie Zacharek to talk about new movies that have a climate theme. I have a special love for Time magazine: it’s where I began my journalism career a very long time ago as an intern in the Washington bureau—back when Ronald Reagan was president!—. I met Stephanie at the Venice Film Festival last year, at breakfast at our hotel, and immediately thought: she’s great! I’m thrilled she’s with us here today.

Stephanie, welcome to The Green Dream.  

So, first of all, climate is definitely becoming a regular theme in film, either overtly or covertly, isn’t it?

Stephanie Zacharek: I think these ideas are seeping in sometimes, maybe not as the main theme of a film, but I think what we're saying is that people who have the energy and drive to get a film made are often thoughtful, aware people. And I think the climate crisis is really at the forefront of what thinking people are concerned about. I think we're seeing more of it, and I think we'll probably see more as the years go by.

Dana Thomas: But this isn't a trend like the 1970s disaster movies, where they were just a period of time where these — it was a trend in filmmaking. This feels something deeper and more part of the conversation. Could it be generational? Do you think that young film executives understand that climate is real and they're green-lighting and funding these films?

Stephanie Zacharek: It could be generational, and I certainly hope so, because obviously the younger generation is going to be most affected by what's happening with the climate. I think one thing that I do hope is that film production is wasteful in its very nature–you just need a lot of resources to make a film. And I know costume designers who work on films and they're ordering, like, bolts and bolts of extra fabric, and clothes that they never use, and some of them get returned, but I don't know what happens to the rest of them. So I think even on that level, you see an enormous amount of waste, and I think and hope that going forward people will start to become more conscious.

Dana Thomas: I hope so, too. So what are some of your favorite climate-themed movies right now? There's one that's also an Australian movie you mentioned.

Stephanie Zacharek: Yes, there's a very sweet, beautifully filmed picture called Blueback, which played at Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals. And Mia Wasikowska is the big star, and she plays an Australian marine biologist. She grew up on the West Coast of Australia. And the film is–the story is told largely in flashback. And the actress who plays the young Mia Wasikowska is Ilsa Fog, and her mother is played by Radha Mitchell, and she is an environmental activist, and she's raising her daughter to care about the natural world, and this beautiful coastal area where they live. And the mother is kind of annoying, but also really awesome, and she gets the job done, and drives her daughter crazy. But, obviously, they reach an accord, which is kind of what the movie is about.

Dana Thomas: And there's some very beautiful underwater scenes, aren't there? I saw–I was watching some of the trailer, and it seemed there was some diving, and just gorgeous sea life.

Stephanie Zacharek: There's a lot of diving and sea life. It's very beautiful to look at. And the blue back of the title is a wild blue groper. It's actually Groper,
G-R-O-P-E-R, which I had never…I didn't really know exactly what this was, so I had to Google.

Dana Thomas: They're beautiful and they're, they get to be very old. They're prehistoric.

Stephanie Zacharek: Yeah. And so that is also part of the film–that this fish that she befriends when she's first diving with her mother as a child also carries on into her adult story. And I think that the Groper is, I think he's a puppet. I don't, they may have had, I'm sure they had some real footage of a groper, but there's a little bit of fantasy there. But it's very realistic looking and beautiful and it's just a very sweet story.

Dana Thomas: And then there's EO, by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, which debuted at Cannes, and has been nominated for best international feature film. Tell us about that one and what its message is.

Stephanie Zacharek: EO is one of my favorite films of last year, and it's basically about a donkey who journeys–he's a circus donkey, and then the circus breaks up, and he just travels on foot through Europe, and he meets people who treat him really kindly. And then some people who are, are less kind, and in some places it's kind of a difficult film to watch, but it's very beautifully filmed. There's a scene set in the forest where you have all these animals doing their nighttime stuff that's really sort of hypnotic, and maybe I would say kind of brutally beautiful, but it's really quite something. And I think I can't, I don't wanna give away the ending of the film, but at its heart it is, among other things, I think a plea for vegetarianism, because who wants to eat EO? 

Dana Thomas: No one wants to eat EO!

Stephanie Zacharek: And, and actually that's why Skolimowski chose a donkey for this story. I mean, it is somewhat influenced by [Robert Bresson's 1966 film] Au Hasard Balthazar, but it's not a remake, and it's not–it's different, it's its own creature. But Skolimowski has said that he actually chose the donkey to be his protagonist because the donkey has enormous, soulful eyes that kind of see everything and reflect the world back at us, in addition to really alert ears. And so EO kind of becomes our eyes and ears and the things that happen to him, you know, we feel them really deeply. So, it's really an incredible film. It's a little hard to watch sometimes. I sent some people to see it and they're like, "Oh my God, I was devastated." I'm like, "Well, it's, I think it's a great movie experience!"

Dana Thomas:  And then of course you're a fan of All That Breathes by our guest today, Indian Director Shaunak Sen. What, for you, makes this movie so special?

Stephanie Zacharek: Oh, I love All That Breathes! I think, I mean, just to see those brothers who, they live in New Delhi and they live rather modestly and they give everything that they have, their time, their energy. They, you know, they raise all this money to save these birds, because birds, as we know, birds in the air, like fish in the sea, they're barometers of all of the things–many of the terrible things that are happening in our environment–and the affection that these brothers have for these. I love birds, but I just find them so weird. Like they freak me out a little bit because they are kind of prehistoric. And to see the love and the tenderness that these brothers lavish on these birds–I find that just incredibly moving. And also, it is a really, really beautiful-looking documentary. I mean, I saw it months ago, and I'm still kind of thinking about those, you know, I can just picture those sort of velvety soft gray tones, and it's really lovely all around. And I think it's also an important documentary, because sometimes we have climate-related documentaries, and they're a little, they're clearly works of advocacy, which is important in some ways, but this also just works as a story about people and their relationship with nature that I think is really incredible. 

Dana Thomas: It is. Well, thank you so much, Stephanie, for joining us on the Oscars edition of The Green Dream. 

Stephanie Zacharek: My pleasure!

Dana Thomas: We look forward to having you on more to talk about movies, which is one of our favorite pastimes. And I imagine it's one of yours, too.

Stephanie Zacharek: I will come back!

Dana Thomas: Thank you for listening to The Green Dream with Shaunak Sen, the award-winning director of the Oscar-nominated documentary, All That Breathes, currently available on HBO and HBO Max. Join us in two weeks for our next episode, with Ukrainian fashion designers Ksenia Schnaider and Ivan Frolov, a year after we first spoke with them, to see how they are faring as their homeland remains under siege. We hope you'll join us.

 This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency from Farm to Fabric to Aate. Find another tomorrow on its website, another tomorrow.co at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City and in select stores.

 The Green Dream was written by Dana Thomas. From Talkbox Productions with executive producer Tavia Gilbert, and mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Music performed by Eric Brace of Red Beet Records in Nashville, Tennessee. I’m Dana Thomas, the European Sustainability Editor for British Vogue. You can follow me on Instagram and on Twitter, where my handle for both is @DanaThomasParis. And you can sign up for The Green Dream Newsletter at our website: thegreendream.studio. Thank you for listening.