All That Breathes

All That Breathes

The ruminative and moving “All That Breathes” starts with a dark landscape as a camera glides over the littered ground of New Delhi. While other animals lurk in the background, the rats scurry in an out of focus frame; the garbage in the street is food, and their noise gets louder as more of them feed. As their hungry noise grows louder, car headlights grow brighter in the distance a sign of humanity somewhere beyond this existence until that white light takes over the shot. It’s just one of many staggeringly beautiful images in Shaunak Sen’s extraordinary documentary.

“All That Breathes” blends verité-style character study with stunning nature cinematography without ever losing sight of the film’s larger point about man’s relationship to nature or lack thereof, through destruction by apathy or otherwise. But there are a pair of siblings at its core, Nadeem Shehzad and his younger brother Mohammad Saud. Gentle, humble residents of New Delhi, they have spent nearly two decades nursing injured birds known as black kites reportedly treating over 20,000 of them.

Indeed, New Delhi is one of the most polluted cities on Earth; industrial encroachment has forever changed its wildlife population, particularly among these birds that gracefully glide over its horizon. Often framing those kites against a cloud of smoke or smog-shrouded cityscape sometimes almost making their plight as visible as watching a drowning animal Sen renders tangible what we normally do not see.

“But there is so much beauty,” Sen finds in everyday Nature too: There are shots in “All That Breathes” that rank among this year’s very best; certainly some of the top shots-for-shot documentaries I’ve seen recently (cinematographer Amartya Bhattacharyya deserves an Oscar nomination). One features bugs drinking from a pool of water while humans walk by above them; another unforgettable one tracks down a crowded apartment building to a river below, where wild pigs are crossing as horses stand on the banks above. In this city, human and animal life are not separated they are all part of the same tableau, and Sen captures it with equal parts stunning beauty and empathetic fragility.

“All That Breathes” is not a traditional wildlife or climate change documentary; it doesn’t have talking heads or on-screen facts. We learn about the Delhi kites from Nadeem and Saud, who have their own bittersweet tales of trying to keep going in an increasingly fractured region of the world when it comes to social issues, politics and class.

Difficulties between Saud and Nadeem come up when economic pressure and new legislation against Muslim citizens impede their good work; caring for all that breathes isn’t as easy as having a good intention, this film knows very well. Sometimes it takes everything you’ve got just to make sure you’re still breathing at all.

“People always forget that they’re meat too,” says one of the brothers early in the film, and “All That Breathes” is a great equalizer of nature. The kites are fighting to stay up against the dirty sky, just like the brothers who take care of them are fighting an increasing injustice that might make them have to fall from their own sky too. Who would care for them then?

Nadeem and Saud used to look up at the sky to escape their working-class Muslim neighborhood, and they think feeding birds and taking care of them chews on their problems for them and earns some kind of religious brownie points. What if that’s taken away? What happens when kids like them look up and don’t see a way out in the flight of the kite?

What happens when pigs and horses aren’t hanging out with humans in New Delhi? What do we lose when we stop caring about these things anymore? “All That Breathes” is not only an exquisitely poetic celebration of the natural world but also a restatement of why those should matter not only to people like Nadeem or Saud but all of us.

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