Shaunak Sen on why his Sundance award-winning film All That Breathes is far more than an environmental documentary

“It is said that feeding kites earns ‘sawab’ [religious credit]. When they eat the meat you offer, they eat away at your difficulties. And their hunger is insatiable.”

The sawab earned from healing ailing and injured kites must only be richer. But this is not what drives Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad in their mission. These brothers, who run a clinic for injured kites and other birds in smog-addled Delhi out of the garage of their home, share a deeper relationship with kites — one of concern, love, and awe. They are singular in their commitment to ensuring the kites can fly again in a city where hundreds of birds fall from the sky each day, and no one blinks an eye.

Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes captures the brothers’ work and their everyday interactions with these regal birds. The documentary, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, is also an examination of what it is like to live in a slowly deteriorating Delhi — for human and non-human entities.

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One of the brothers sagely says that the city is a gaping wound, and their enterprise is a tiny band-aid on it. “I would like to believe that this is a film about a broader environmental impetus, but more about soldiering on in a world which is on the brink of environmental malaise,” says Sen in an interview to Firstpost.

This sense of soldiering on — with “wry, guarded optimism” — is central to the film. At the end of its run-time, when I began reading reviews of the documentary, I was surprised to find mentions of ‘environmental docu’ in the headlines. Sen was, too; he says that the concerns addressed in the film are more implicit than they are explicit. “I was never interested in making a ‘pollution film.’ We were also sure that we didn’t want to make a regular wildlife feature-doc,” he says.

The intention, instead, was to train the gaze on the brothers, and to mine their inner lives. We learn that when they were young, they were bodybuilders and used their knowledge of bone and muscle to treat an injured kite which was turned away by an animal hospital — citing the reason that it was a “non-veg” [carnivorous] bird. The brothers note the effortlessness of the flight of the kite which glides through the sky, as compared to other birds who must flap their wings. We see their intern bathe a bird with the gentleness of a mother holding her child. In one sequence, the party of three travels to a water body that they will cross themselves, without a boat, to save an injured kite that may have turned into prey the next day.

“I’m wary of bleeding-heart sentimentalism that tinges the discourse around environmentalism. The brothers are unsentimental because they have front-row seats to problems.

The devastation they’re witness to is really enormous,” Sen remarks. All That Breathes tells us about the ways in which fauna has adapted to humanity, thereby demonstrating the power imbalance in this interspecies equation. The most alarming of these is the kites using discarded cigarette butts as a parasite repellent.

But the kites are not the only entity facing immediate danger; the brothers find their own lives upended by the riots and carnage in Delhi, as well as the urgency of the protests against the National Register of Citizens [NRC] and Citizenship Amendment Act [CAA]. At one point, the violence against Muslims almost reached their own doorstep.

All That Breathes showcases the interplay between the brothers’ identities against this context — as people who care deeply about the well-being of nature, and as Muslim residents of a city in turmoil. “The brothers’ worldview was a broader cosmological politics where they’re interested in the relationship between man and sky, between human and non-human life. These for them are profoundly urgent and pressing things, which is not to say that they disregard or are not clued in to what is happening. But as Saud says, if he goes, who will look after the birds? It’s the blunt force of this simple question, and I think there’s a deep beauty to it,” Sen explains. He says that the brothers’ ability to perceive a broader cosmological politics about the kinship of life is deeply political, too.  

What ties the documentary together is a running voice-over composed of the brothers’ philosophical ruminations. Having spent two-and-a-half years with the duo, Sen had long conversations with the brothers, and over time, his questions and their responses increasingly evolved. “With a diary full of notes, I began extrapolating bits that seemed more interesting and arriving at a form where the poetic emerges from the acutely observational,” he explains. In one instance, they wonder what it would be like to be a bird; in another, they say that the kites have saved them as opposed to the other way around. In a third, one of the brothers says that when he dies, his chest will burst open and kites will fly out.

While the voice-over gives the film its lyrical, poetic quality, it is the shots of the birds that make it arresting like a painting. Sen says that one of the main draws of this story was the hypnotic, ravenous love the brothers had for the birds. “Their sense of being awed or charmed by the aerial acrobatics of the bird or how it looked, or about the wondrous otherworldly being it was to them, which seemed to be like an interspecies love story… The audience could not think of them as objects of pity. They are magisterial and regal beings; I find them stunning and hypnotic. The house had a surreal, cinematic quality to it in that in every corner, you’d suddenly find a bird,” he says.

He hopes that everyone who watches the film will end up looking at the sky once they exit the theatres — a rare thing for those of us who live in cities where an omnipresent greyness characterises everything within our line of sight.

Neerja Deodhar is a writer and researcher based in Mumbai. She tweets at @neerjadeodhar.