All That Breathes

Shaunak Sen’s qazi-cinema-verite documentary plays like a narrative feature without drama. That's not to say the story of Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, the two brothers who run a bird hospital in a village in Delhi, isn't compelling. But the film is shot like a narrative in which the two characters play out repetitive scenes that lack the internal dramatic turns one would expect in a work of fiction, while meanwhile the long-term changes to their clinic, their neighbourhood, their city, their country and the world slowly, and dramatically, occur around them. Over the last 20 years, these two men have saved and healed over 20,000 birds of prey—specifically, the black kites whose critical role in the ecosystem is to eat the rotting garbage, dead flesh, and other waste of ground-dwelling animals like humans. Following the Muslim belief that feeding kites will expel troubles, these two guys have dedicated their lives to caring for the growing number of these raptors that fall from the polluted skies, killed off by India's rapid industrialization. An unusual documentary that explores environmental themes in a unique way.