All That Breathes and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed — the two frontrunners for best documentary at the Oscars — split the top awards at the 16th annual Cinema Eye Honors in New York tonight.
Filmmaker Laura Poitras won Outstanding Direction for her work on All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. But it was All That Breathes, directed by Shaunak Sen, that earned Outstanding Nonfiction Feature, the Cinema Eye Honors’ equivalent to the Oscars’ Best Documentary Feature.
Sen’s film examines the work of Nadeem and Saud – two brothers in Delhi, India – who have devoted their energies to rehabilitating birds of prey like the black kite, which suffer in the polluted air of the metropolis. “I was just asking Nadeem today how many birds he thinks they would have saved so far,” Sen commented as he accepted the Cinema Eye Honor. “And he just nonchalantly said, ‘26,000.’ It’s almost like this aspect of the film, we almost forget to talk about, the sheer blunt force of the work that they do.
So, it’s the greatest honor.” All That Breathes also won the cinematography award, recognizing the skills of Ben Bernhard, Riju Das and Saumyananda Sahi.
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