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.
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 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. With ‘All That Breathes’ (2022) he won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the Golden Eye for Best Documentary at the Cannes Festival.