TEXAS PRMIERE OF FIRST FILM TO WIN BEST DOC AT SUNDANCE & CANNES!
As legions of birds fall from New Delhi’s darkening skies, and the city smolders with social unrest, two brothers race to save a casualty of the turbulent times: the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to their city's ecosystem. 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. Director Shaunak Sen (Cities of Sleep) explores the connection between the kites and the Muslim brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence.  Director Shaunak Sen 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.
If you stare long enough at the grey monotone skies in certain parts of North Delhi, at some point you’ll see a bird fall out of the sky. The sheer opacity of New Delhi’s toxic air ensures that bigger birds, especially raptors, regularly collide into buildings or get entangled in wires.
Nadeem and Saud grew up in a working-class Muslim neighborhood with narrow, dingy lanes. The act of looking up – by their own admission – provided a kind of release into an open, liberating expanse. At a very early age, they fell in love with things that flew. They fell in love, in particular, with the black kite. As children, they lay on their terrace, gazing up as the elders in their family tossed raw meat skyward. They watched as hundreds of kites appeared and maneuvered through the air with great agility to catch the meat. ‘Meat tossing’ continues to be a popular activity in Muslim areas of Delhi. Muslims believe that the act of feeding birds-of-prey washes away the sins of the meat-tosser. When a black kite first fell to the ground in front of them, the brothers took it to a bird hospital. The hospital, however, refused to treat it – because it was a “non-vegetarian” bird. At the time, the teenage Nadeem and Saud were training to be professional bodybuilders. They used their informal knowledge of muscles and tendons to care for the bird on their own. Since then, they have operated on and rehabilitated more than 20,000 birds in their tiny garage-basement, while dreaming of someday building a proper wildlife hospital. Today the brothers are unique philosophers of the urban. In 2017, Delhi’s air was 12 times worse than the second most polluted city in the world, Beijing. Such an extreme environment prompts unprecedented changes in nonhuman life. The brothers are expert witnesses to these remarkable ecological changes. More about All That Breathes here:  A young man with a bright future suffers a near fatal accident and recreates his new life with the help of an unlikely animal friend. Gigi & Nate is the story of Nate Gibson, a young man whose life is turned upside down after he suffers a near-fatal illness and is left a quadriplegic. Moving forward seems near impossible until he meets his unlikely service animal, Gigi - a curious and intelligent capuchin monkey. Although she is trained to assist Nate with his basic needs, Gigi helps Nate find what he needs most of all: hope. Starring: Charlie Rowe, Josephine Langford, Marcia Gay Harden, Jim Belushi, and Diane Ladd.  Director Nick Hamm Nick Hamm is a film, television, and theater director and producer born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Nick won a BAFTA for his drama The Harmfulness of Tobacco starring Edward Fox. Hamm's most recent films, The Journey starring Timothy Spall and Colm Meaney, and Driven starring Jason Sudeikis and Lee Pace, both premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and were later shown at TIFF. In 2020, Hamm formed the London- and L.A.-based entertainment company Free Turn with his brother Jon.
  Director Faye Xia The short film depicts a protagonist full of "hallucinations", who always reveals his "beastly nature" at different points in time or under different events. \ These hallucinations orderly and progressively show the main character's "tiger head and snake tail" day... The film is named "牠", pronounced "tā", which is a pronoun mainly used for animals. The author believes that the simple word "it" can explain the various animal forms that appear in the film. The design of the characters and scenes in the story is relatively brief, and the screen design is mainly in simple black and white lines and some colorful embellishments, with no ups and downs in the plot setting. Through the freshness and curiosity of the changing images of people and animals, the story conveys the life feelings of the protagonist and tries to use the practice of animalizing the characters and personifying the animals to present a picture of the relationship between people and people, people and groups, and people themselves and groups themselves, etc. It is a metaphor for a complex public society and focuses on the social problems of people in terms of identity, position, rights, and collectivity.
 Here's the pinch, Daddy ate my pet lobster. It's never easy to say out loud you have a phobia of seafood. It is not a preference or an ethical decision, but one defined by a visceral reaction I get from the smell and awareness of seafood around me. I created The Lobster to help empathize with others with my experience. With Live action films, we often see performers who have a brand and voice they bring to their art. However, in animation, while still being specific with a character, there still is a level of abstraction that allows for enough non-representational qualities for the audience to subconsciously project and bring their own experience into the characters. This film is my attempt to bring some clarity to others about what I experience anytime a certain smell creeps into my nose.
 Director Joseph Brown A short film that surveils wildlife in one location over 6 months. Shot in the forests of Colorado. Joe Brown is a filmmaker and educator. His film work focuses on the natural world and has been featured by festivals such as: The Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, the Birmingham Sidewalk Festival, the Dallas International Film Festival, the Milwaukee Film Festival, and the Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival. Brown's recent feature film, "Operation Wolf Patrol," played at #AniFab21 in Austin, Texas and has been featured by web platforms such as: World Animal Awareness Society, TakePart.com, The DoDo, and the Earth Island Journal. "Operation Wolf Patrol" is distributed by Journeyman Pictures. Brown teaches video production at the University of Denver in Colorado.  
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#AniFab the Animalis Fabula Film Festival '22 compiles the information presented in the official selections from FilmFreeway our film festival partner as well as from the filmmakers.The Festival Director presents the information as it is presented to AniFab. Archives
October 2022
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