All That Breathes Documentary

[Shantelle Wenske]

Attention to the macro and micro infuses nearly every frame of this nonfiction masterwork, which earned prizes at Sundance and Cannes this year and is maybe the most beautifully realized documentary in recent memory."

An ambitiously intricate study of the intersection of environmental collapse, religious tension, and the love of two Muslim brothers for a feathered scavenger unnervingly falling from a smoggy Delhi sky.

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Following its winning the Grand Jury Prize in World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance, All That Breathes won the L'Œil d'or, le prix du documentaire at Cannes. Ahead of its theatrical run in Los Angeles and New York, and eventual HBO rollout, Documentary caught up with Sen over a long, early-morning Zoom call. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The basement, the house, and the sheer absurdity of their living conditions draw you in. It was clear that the two brothers, their work and the family could become a kind of a metaphor where they encapsulated a large number of currents I wanted to be in conversation with.

While there are some overlaps, our struggle is nowhere close to being that kind of an existential battle for survival. For them, even though they do run a business for a kind of a baseline livelihood, what it would mean for the workaround birds to stop, is foundationally incomparable to what it would mean for a film to not fructify, for me.

We were able to pace ourselves and were better prepared to scale our jumps, especially because the ambition of the film was to be poetic and cinematic, which requires its own kind of resource-intensive infrastructure departments.

The bird is a figure of phenomenal literature, art, and poetry because it makes us hope. So verticality becomes a really delicious kind of lens through which we can look at human-animal relationships. But I was also, in particular, very interested in this love affair between man and bird.

D: When it comes to duty of care towards participants in your documentary, things are less formalized and less contractualized within India. I wanted to know how you approach relationships with the people in your film.

The question of talking to subjects and generating a conversation about active consent in terms of what is okay to shoot, what is not okay, what is the grammar of that shooting, is a constantly ongoing thing. It begins right when you start talking about the project, to when you are shooting, through the edit and so on.

SS: We had to carefully choose the things that communicate what we want people to sense. Obliquely. But at the same time, we have to be careful enough for it to not be egregiously foolhardy.

D: You made this film in India with funding that is largely international, and then the film is having this global journey. I wanted to talk about the difference in scale between your last film, which you showed widely but independently through your own networks and.

In this case, the scope was much bigger. There it was an investigation of sleep or Delhi at night through renegade sleepers. Here I began with man-bird, human-animal, so the platitudes at play were far bigger now and it required a more expansive treatment.

D: With your film, Writing with Fire and A Night of Knowing Nothing, there seems to be an uptick in South Asian nonfiction storytelling. A growth of interest, even. Why would you say that is happening?

There has also been an efflorescence of documentary schools and courses in India. Like the Sri Aurobindo Center for Arts and Communication in Delhi. Broadly there seems to be some kind of a churn happening.

Depending on your level of investment, All That Breathes could be a documentary about climate change and the crucial need to understand how animals are adapting and how humans need to adapt. It could be a spiritual piece about the webs of synergistic connectivity between, well, everything that breathes. It could be a humanist meditation on how we treat each other, how we tear people down by comparing them to animals, but how really we should treat everything and everyone just a bit better. Or it might just be 91 minutes with a couple of brothers who really like birds.

Director Shaunak Sen screens his 2023 Oscar-nominated documentary, All That Breathes, about birds and the men who tend to them in Delhi, India. The film will be followed by conversation with Professor Chris Cagle.

This event is part of the Arts Interdisciplinary Research (AIR) initiative. AIR is a holistic research center and forum for creative and scholarly research across the arts that includes cutting-edge colloquia, exploratory seminars, lecture demonstrations, launches of research publications and creative works, reading groups, faculty talks, and stand-alone conferences initiated by the faculty of the Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts.

Brothers Saud and Nadeem are both devoted to helping black kites and other birds, which are under threat by the pollution of their natural habitat. They are also thoughtful about the environment and wildlife, and how people's behavior -- including their own -- can impact them.

Setting is localized to New Dehli in India. Shows many of the country's customs and cultures. News footage and discussion of tensions between Hindus and Muslims within the country and neighboring Pakistan. The documentary's human subjects are two Indian brothers who show great compassion and dedication to their bird conservation work. Some female participants feature very briefly.

Discussion of nuclear war and death, persecution of Muslims. Children play with toy gun; one shoots another. Animals shown debilitated and in some distress. Discussion of professional wrestling violence. Dead birds shown but no blood or gore. News reports of shootings and property damage. Footage of fires and civil unrest.

Parents need to know that All That Breathes is an Oscar-nominated Indian documentary about two brothers who care for injured birds in New Delhi. The two brothers the film revolves around, Saud and Nadeem, are caring, compassionate, and determined in their mission. They also engage in conversations while they work, ranging from the the trivial to shrugging off gossip about a potential nuclear war between India and Pakistan. To the camera, they talk in depth about climate change and how pollution is harming the bird population of their city. Dead and distressed animals are shown. There is also discussion about the persecution of Muslims, and news footage shows civil unrest and reports on shootings. Occasionally the brothers argue, which includes occasional swearing such as "f---ing" and "s--t." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails.

This Oscar-nominated documentary is a thoughtful and layered meditation on a remarkable slice of modern life. All That Breathes might revolve around two brothers and their dedication to caring for the ailing black kite population of their New Delhi home, but in reality it is about much more than that. Director Shaunak Sen captures not only a passion that drives his subjects to do something admirable, but also the predicament that makes the brothers' lives unique. Environmental change and neglect cause them to contend with flooding, disintegrating infrastructure, and polluted air, which affect their home lives as well as the birds'. Meanwhile, they must be both patient and persistent in their attempts to bolster their Wildlife Rescue clinic with a government grant.

Threaded through the main narrative we get glimpses of the sectarian tensions that blight modern India and cause additional anxiety. But, wisely, All That Breathes avoids trying to lean heavily on metaphors or push an agenda. Instead it does what all good documentaries do, and asks its audience to look inward to see the world through different eyes.

Families can talk about the relationship between Saud and Nadeem in All That Breathes. How does their relationship compare to that of other siblings you know? What motivates them and what character strengths drive them on?

All That Breathes, directed by Shaunak Sen, was one of the three Indian titles that were contending at the Oscars this year. Set in Delhi, the documentary follows two siblings, Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, who have devoted their lives to rescuing and treating injured birds, especially black kites.

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It is a travesty that All That Breathes lost out on the Oscar race to the politically-tinged documentary Navalny. If not for the Russia - Ukraine war and the western world's eagerness to show their antagonism towards Russian, All That Breathes should and would have won.

This extraordinarily moving film made history when it became the first documentary to win the top non-fiction awards at both Sundance and Cannes. All that Breathes is the second film directed by Shaunak Sen, shot in Delhi in 2019/2020 during the violence that followed the Citizenship Amendment Act that discriminated against Muslim migrants.

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