A charming and often melancholic documentary that follows the efforts of two avian- and environmentally-minded brothers, Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes tells the story of Saud and Nadeem as they rescue and care for thousands of New Delhi’s black kite birds. A winner in Sundance World Documentary Competition earlier this year, the film gets a Special Screening at Cannes.
From their makeshift bird hospital in their tiny basement, the “kite brothers” care for thousands of these mesmeric creatures that drop daily from New Delhi’s smog-choked skies. As environmental toxicity and civil unrest escalate, the relationship between this Muslim family and the neglected kite forms a poetic chronicle of the city’s collapsing ecology and rising social tensions.
The brothers’ innate sense of playfulness – they charmingly play their own version of cricket in a small room with colleagues – is balanced by a grim sense of determination as they set about doing their best to rescue the kites within an increasingly challenging city. “Delhi is a gaping wound and we are a tiny Band-Aid on it,” says Nadeem at one point.
The film opens with images of the busy city at night as rats engage in midnight feasts in the piles of garbage and dogs run wild in the busy streets, while at the same time footage of fires and riots juxtapose with images of numerous other animals that reflect the moods and tones of the city. Alongside all of this brothers Saud and Nadeem have chosen to focus on the animal, the black kite, that they describe as “a furious reptile from another planet”.
And there are plenty of them to try and save. Apparently record-numbers are falling from the smog-filled skies as they sometimes crash into buildings. The brothers do their best to rescue them and take them to their home-built bird hospital where they embark on minor surgery; clean feathers and tend to minor wounds.
According to the film, Indian Muslims believe that feeding the kites will bring them a religious reward, and director Shaunak Sen, along with German cinematographer Ben Bernhard, does a wonderful (and often close-up) job of detailing the medical work on the birds as well as footage of the kites in flight as they weave through the sky, often amidst colourful cardboard and paper kites.
As children, the brothers watched the elders in their family toss raw meat skyward, seeing hundreds of kites appear and weave through the air to catch the meat. ‘Meat tossing’ continues to be a popular activity in Muslim areas of Delhi and Muslims believe that the act of feeding birds-of-prey washes away the sins of the thrower.
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 and 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…
The brothers run a soap dispenser business but, along with their discussions about the dangers of war between India and Pakistan and worries about the proposed changes to the Citizenship Act, what ultimately bonds them is a self-sacrificing desire to try and help the birds in the skies outside their windows. They are unlikely heroes but also charming and intriguing ones as their oddball animal rescue service saves more than a few avian lives and fights its own small battles against the gritty brutality of a city almost out of control.
In recent years, the brothers have received invitations from around the world to share their unique knowledge of kite surgery, and to discuss how cities can be understood by looking up at the movements in their skies. In February 2020, the New York Times ran a feature on them that raised their profile globally, leading to increased funding for a working bird sanctuary in the middle of New Delhi.
US/India/UK, 2022, 94mins
Dir: Shaunak Sen
Production: Kiterabbit Films, Rise Films, HHMI Tangled Bank Studios
International sales: Submarine Entertainment
Producers: Aman Mann, Shaunak Sen, Teddy Leifer
Cinematography: Ben Bernhard, Saumyananda Sahi
Editor: Charlotte Munch Bengsten
Music: Roger Goula
