The opening shot of Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes is probably the most beautiful and unnerving thing I saw at this year’s virtual Sundance.
It’s a slow pan across a vacant lot in New Delhi at nighttime, initially a litter-filled corner, devoid of life. Then the evening residents come out. A dog here. A cat there. Something unidentifiable, but probably feral, lurking in the corner. The camera keeps panning, adjusting focus for any movement. Was that scurrying a rat? Probably. A truck passes in the background. Another rat. Or two? Or a dozen? Accompanied by a cacophony of squeaking, a mischief of rats emerge. This is their land. The scene ends not with a hard cut, but with the lens flare from the headlights of an approaching car.
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All That Breathes
In a little under three minutes, Sen has encapsulated a vision of New Delhi in which modern life, particularly pollution and overpopulation, have placed new strain on the balance between humans and nature. What follows is one of the more dreamily provocative documentaries I’ve ever seen.
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.
Nadeem and Saud live in a working-class, predominantly Muslim neighborhood of New Delhi. They make money doing something involving soap dispensers, but their passion is their budding organization called Wildlife Rescue. Since 2003, the brothers have been collecting injured kites, birds of prey who seemingly float effortlessly over the city, occasionally coming down to landfills to consume waste. The air quality and air visibility in New Delhi are so foul that fowl literally smack into each other in the air. Nadeem and Saud, when they aren’t lobbying for donations and grants, tend to the kites, primarily in a cramped, dingy basement and a rudimentary rooftop enclosure.
Nadeem and Saud’s pursuit is a noble one, inspired by their late mother, but as a character study, All That Breathes shows the toll that this all-consuming avocation has taken on them. Nadeem knows the impact they’re making on a micro level, but he yearns to see the world and to study abroad, taking what he’s learned global. Saud is more content to remain local, but he’s weighed down by the city’s out-of-whack ecosystem, with more hurt birds than they can handle.
Providing a tiny bit of levity is their new volunteer employee, Salik, who it took me half the documentary to realize isn’t another brother — there are more close-ups of kites than people here, and Sen is fine without spelling out every interaction. Salik brings a childlike enthusiasm and inquisitiveness, instigating conversations that frequently have an apocalyptic slant half-grounded in the real world. Would birds survive a nuclear attack on New Delhi? Is there actually enough water to cover the entire Earth or is that just science fiction?
That line between real and apocalyptic is one that Sen and director of photography Benjamin Bernhard are ever mindful of, one that traces through Roger Goula’s ephemeral and mechanical score as well. That long opening shot is just the first of many times that the camera is left to take in the intersection of natural and human-chaotic in the city. Wild hogs march in procession along a river. Oxen navigate the increasingly decrepit streets. Monkeys teeter precariously on the wires that connect stacked apartment complexes to modernity.
Viewers might notice that, while Saud and Nadeem look to the skies, All That Breathes is formally designed on a horizontal — panning to see what happens when all of nature comes together at street-level — rather than vertical. Even the closing credits are horizontal. Sen and Bernhard’s favorite type of shot is one where the thing you’re looking at gives way, through a rack focus, to something else, whether in the background or foreground, like the man-made bonfire that falls into a distant blur as we watch a snail, slowly inching forward. As with everything in the documentary, you can either appreciate such shots as lovely natural images wrought from a bustling urban space or as reflective of the persistence of flora and fauna in a moment of civilization run amuck.
Set ever in the background are New Delhi’s protests stemming from India’s anti-Muslim Citizen Act.
“This is a fight for empathy and unity,” an unseen speaker declares at one of the gatherings. Saud feels guilt that he can’t be at these rallies himself, but his fight is for empathy and unity of a different kind.
“You don’t care for things because they share the same country, religion or politics. Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air,” Saud says. It’s a big thought, but All That Breathes lets you process it however deeply you choose. Portrait of a city? Portrait of a pair of heroic brothers? Portrait of humanity on the brink of COVID?
In this tiny marvel of a documentary, it’s a little and a lot all at once.
