The day after his World Premiere at Sundance, we sat with Shaunak Sen, the director of ALL THAT BREATHES, to discuss the many resonances of his work. In this heartfelt conversation Sen shares with us his creative process in making this film and the ecological philosophies underpinning ALL THAT BREATHES.

  • 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.

  • Christina is a researcher, filmmaker, and the founding editor of Docs in Orbit. Christina holds an M.A. from the University of Texas in Austin and an M.A. in Documentary Filmmaking from DocNomads, where she studied at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels, Lusófona University in Lisbon, and the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest.

    She participated in an artist residency at UnionDocs in 2020, where she worked alongside other artists engaged in political media production with the intention of providing aid to social movements. In 2021, she was invited to share her experience in film journalism at the Berlinale Press Talents in Sarajevo with other emerging film critics from Southeast Europe. Christina is also part of the screening committee at the Camden International Film Festival.

In this episode, we recap some of the films we encountered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival with special guest Milton Guillén - an award-winning filmmaker and programmer at the Camden International Film Festival.

Films discussed include:

4:58 FIRE OF LOVE by Sara Dosa
9:12 ALL THAT BREATHES by Shaunak Sen
15:53 WE MET IN VIRTUAL REALITY by Joe Hunting
25:38 DOS ESTACIONES by Juan Pablo Gonzalez
29:58 I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE by Reid Davenport

  • Milton Guillén is an award-winning Nicaraguan filmmaker, editor, and the senior programmer for the Camden International Film Festival in Maine, USA. His work explores the cinematic intersections of radical collaborative non-fictions and political dreamscapes. Milton’s films have screened globally at CPH:DOX, Hot Docs, DOK Leipzig, Rooftop Films, DMZ, and more.

    In 2017, his debut feature, an interactive choose-your-own-adventure film, The Maribor Uprisings, received the Society for Visual Anthropology’s Best Feature Award. Milton recently received support from the Tribeca Film Institute and ITVS.

    He also was named a North Star fellow at the Points North Institute, a MediaMaker Fellow at Bay Area Video Coalition, a Kartemquin Diverse Voices in Documentary, and is the recipient of several international artists’ residencies and grants. He currently oscillates between Maine, Los Angeles, and Costa Rica.

  • Christina is the founding editor of Docs in Orbit.

  • 4:58 FIRE OF LOVE by Sara Dosa

    9:12 ALL THAT BREATHES by Shaunak Sen

    15:53 WE MET IN VIRTUAL REALITY by Joe Hunting

    25:38 DOS ESTACIONES by Juan Pablo Gonzalez

    29:58 I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE by Reid Davenport

Sundance 2021: Taming the Garden with Salomé Jashi

A conversation with Georgian filmmaker, Salomé Jashi about her film TAMING THE GARDEN which premiered at Sundance Film Festival.TAMING THE GARDEN is an ode to the rivalry between men and nature, the story of how a powerful man indulges in an unusual hobby by having century-old trees uprooted in communities along the Georgian coast and transplanted to his private garden. As the film follows this process of uprooting and rerooting, it portrays the needs and values of today’s Georgian society and reflects on the theme of forced migration, where "uprooting" is more than a metaphor.

  • Salomé Jashi was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1981. She first studied journalism and worked as a reporter for several years. In 2005 she was awarded a British Council scholarship to study documentary filmmaking at Royal Holloway, University of London. Salomé’s The Dazzling Light of Sunset (2016) was awarded the Main Prize at Visions du Réel’s Regard Neuf Competition as well as at ZagrebDox, Jihlava IDFF, Valdivia IDFF, and several other festivals. Her earlier work, Bakhmaro (2011), made in co-production with ma.ja.de. filmproduktion and MDR/Arte, received an Honorary Mention for a Young Documentary Talent at DOK Leipzig, was awarded as the Best Central and Eastern European Documentary at Jihlava IDFF, and was nominated for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards and Silver Eye Awards. Salomé is the founder and works through two production companies: Sakdoc Film and Microcosmos, both producing documentaries and fiction of high artistic quality. She was a fellow of Nipkow Scholarship in 2017 and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2020.

  • Kopal Joshy is a filmmaker and cinematographer currently living in Lisbon, Portugal where she is working on expanding one of her short documentary films into a feature-length with Terratreme Filmes.

    Prior to moving to Europe, Kopal spent extensive time in Digital Video Production at Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology in India. She received multiple scholarships to continue her studies in Europe where she explored photography at Edinburgh College of Arts, Edinburgh, Scotland and a Master of Arts in Documentary Directing through DocNomads where she spent time immersing herself in three different countries (Portugal, Hungary, and Belgium) making films as an Erasmus+ scholarship student.

Sundance 2020: Acasa, My Home with Radu Ciorniciuc

In this episode, we feature a conversation with Radu Ciorniciuc about his award-winning feature-length documentary, ACASA MY HOME (2020).

The film is set in the wilderness of the Bucharest Delta, an abandoned water reservoir just outside the bustling metropolis. Here we meet the Enache family consisting of nine children and their parents living in perfect harmony with nature: sleeping in a hut on the lakeshore, catching fish barehanded, and following the rhythm of the seasons. Their life changes dramatically when they are forced to leave the area and move into the city so the city can transform the Delta into a public national park.

With their roots in the wilderness, the nine children and their parents struggle to find a way to conform to modern civilization. With an empathetic and cinematic eye, filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc offers a compelling tale of an impoverished family living on the fringes of society in Romania, fighting for acceptance and their version of freedom.

  • In 2012, Radu co-founded the first independent media organization in Romania - Casa Jurnalistului (http://casajurnalistului.ro/eng/), a community of reporters specialized in in-depth, long-form, and multimedia reporting. Since then, he has worked as a long-form writer and undercover investigative reporter. His research focuses on human rights, animal welfare, and environmental issues globally. His investigative and reporting work was published on most of the major international media organizations in the world - Channel 4 News, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, etc. - and received national and international awards. In addition, his journalistic work was acknowledged by the Royal Television Society UK (2014), Amnesty International UK (2014), Harold Wincott Awards for Business, Economic and Financial Journalism (2016), and other international and national prestigious institutions.

  • Cristina is a filmmaker based in Oradea, Romania. Her film "António and Catarina" won the Pardino D'oro Award for Best International Short at Locarno Festival in 2017. The film was screened in over 20 film festivals around the world. She is an alumna of DocNomads and Aristoteles Workshop. She completed her BA in Cinematography in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.