With Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes and Vinay Shukla’s While We Watched bagging the Peabody Award, one of the most prestigious honours in the world of media and entertainment, Indian independent filmmakers are continuing their global winning streak. In 2023, Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh had clinched this title for Writing With Fire, a powerful documentary about India’s only newspaper run by Dalit women.
Like in other years, the winners of the 2024 Peabody Awards were chosen unanimously by a panel of 32 jurors from a pool of over 1,100 entries across various categories, platforms and countries. Rather than selecting titles for their commercial values, the organisation seeks to pick “a collection of stories that powerfully reflect the pressing social issues and the vibrant emerging voices of our day”.
To this end, the Peabody win is significant for both films that reflect the social and cultural landscape of India through their powerful storytelling. However, it’s far from being the only international award these titles have bagged. Here’s everything you need to know.
Peabody Awards 2024: Two Indian documentaries win big; Here’s where you can watch them
All That Breathes by Shaunak Sen
Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes is a captivating 90-minute documentary about two brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, who rescue and treat injured black kites in their dilapidated basement-cum-bird hospital in Delhi’s Wazirabad. The documentary has won 17 international awards. This includes the highly coveted L’Oeil d’Or at Cannes International Film Festival 2022 and the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. More significantly, it was nominated for ‘Best Documentary Feature Film’ at the Oscars last year.
Through the medium of these unsung heroes, their daily lives and their zeal to save these wounded creatures, Sen weaves in an emotional story that anchors a larger conversation around the ecological decay and social unrest rampant in the capital city. Speaking to GQ back in 2022, Sen, who had worked on the film for two-and-a-half years, had said: “I had no concrete sense of how ‘All That Breathes’ was going to land. All I had was a kind of hazy-dreamy-gooey-wishful thinking. And now that it’s happened, I can’t believe it”.
