All That Breathes
“You don’t care for things because they share the same country, religion, or politics. Life is kinship. We are all a community of air.”
The above line uttered by a disembodied voice towards the end of the film pretty much summarizes the spirit of Shaunak Sen’s hypnotic documentary, “All That Breathes”.
It took me a good day to recover from it, rewatch it, and write about it.
The opening shot of this film pans across a vacant lot at night, after a blurry zoomed in vision of the flickering lights at a distance. As the camera zooms out from the distant blurry lights and pans across the lot, we get to track stray and feral dogs and several colonies of rats scavenging through the muddy puddles and the city’s refuse. My first instinct was to recoil from this tableau of urban squalor. But the meditative, quiet and rapt attention to details in the images that Sen captures, suggested a different response from me immediately. Within the first minute or so, Shaunak Sen was able to make me think how even in those clogged thoroughfares and crowded neighborhoods of big cities like New Delhi, we are closer to the wildness of the natural world than we might suppose.
I don’t have to tell you how much toxic the air in Delhi is. But it still comes as a shock when you realize how so inhospitable to life itself the Delhi air is that birds regularly fall from the sky like feathered rain. Some of these urban species have evolved to compensate for symptoms of pollution — For example, one songbird species has begun singing to each other at a higher pitch in order to pierce through the industrial and automobile noise, and some of the rescued black kites, as we get to learn later in the documentary, have started using discarded cigarette butts as parasite repellent inside their cages where they are getting treated. But is there really a substitute or silver lining for the absence of breathable oxygen?
This documentary chronicles the efforts of three New Delhi men (two brothers and a friend) in helping the city’s birds of prey. Black Kites (‘Cheel’ in Hindi). These scavenger among birds are as unloved by the humans of Delhi as scavenging rodents and canines. These birds, the black kites, live off the giant landfills on the gargantuan city’s outskirts — reducing the size of these dumps (as one observer remarks in the film, by thousands of tons a year). And then one of the other observers chimes in likening Delhi to a stomach and the kites serving as its microbiomes.
The three principal human characters, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, the brothers who founded Wildlife Rescue, work with their friend and associate Salik Rehman, to rehabilitate injured and fallen birds until they can return to the skies. Their late mother taught her sons to see the dignity in all living things, and their mutual affection for the black kite, would eventually inspire the brothers to abandon their dreams of professional body-building in order to redirect their knowledge of muscles and tendons towards saving their favorite birds. The brothers have devoted their lives to caring for black kites. Most local avian hospitals would not treat wounded kites and other raptors, because of their nonvegetarian ways. So, many of them find their way to Wildlife Rescue, a small clinic started by the brothers in Wazirabad village in Delhi, that doubles as a workshop for the assembly of soap dispensers. The brothers have saved over 25,000 birds in the last 20 years or so from their tiny clinic.
When a wave of murderous sectarian violence sweeps through Delhi in 2020, we get to witness the causes of the upheaval and its aftermath, mostly through TV reports playing in the background and still images, and the conflicts become part of the film’s atmosphere, like the smog and the noise. Sen manages to overlay the anti-muslim fervor that grips the city as a result of a controversial citizenship amendment/immigration bill passed into law by the Hindu nationalist government — very subtly in the background. But Sen also makes sure that the focus of the documentary stays on the brothers and the hospital, while we feel alongside the brothers’ and their family’s tensions, when they begin fearing how the attacks which have managed to reach two kilometers away from their homes could consume them too.
One of the most poetic and touching moments (there are several) of “All That Breathes” is when Sen captures the brothers’ assistant, Salik, riding in the back of an autorickshaw packed with boxes of incapacitated kites that he is bringing back to the hospital. Salik reassures his mother (who is worried for his safety amidst the riots) that he is okay over the phone — and then pulls a small squirrel out of his shirt breast pocket and begins stroking it delicately. This beautiful moment of human-animal or interspecies symbiosis, like so much of this aesthetically accomplished documentary, feels almost too poetic to be true.
“No matter how much you care for an animal, love it, you can never claim you understand it,” Saud says in one of his voiceovers.
Through this documentary, we get to feel with the brothers Saud and Shehzad, that humans are not the most important members of the ecosystem we live in though many of us think we are. But humans are the most isolated.
At the beginning of the documentary, Saud shares with his brother that the grant that Wildlife Rescue applied for, to modernize and expand its operations has been rejected. The brothers discuss the challenges and the next steps very matter-of-factly. “All That Breathes”, in part, tells a hopeful story of patience and persistence in the face of obstacles that include bureaucratic red tape, family tensions, sectarian violence, and city traffic. Towards the end of the documentary, we get to learn that they do eventually get the grant, and that they are able to to start work on their new hospital building.
“Violence is always an act of communication,” one of the brothers says somewhere in between, and the documentary “All That Breathes” tries to illustrate how two peoples’ failure to listen to each other and empathize with each other is no different than one species’ failure to acknowledge the rest of its ecosystem.
One species’ failure to acknowledge the fact that each aspect of our urban ecology (Delhi, in this case) is sharing the same broken conversation — whether we recognize it or not.
And that acknowledgement must begin with the understanding that all of us, that is, all of us who breathe, are nothing but a community of air.
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“All That Breathes” is one of the nominees in the Best Documentary Feature Film section in the upcoming Oscars.
“The Elephant Whisperers”, another touching documentary from India, is also a nominee in the Best Documentary Short Film section in the upcoming Oscars.
