‘A gaping wound’: how a film about birds of prey is a warning to India’s capital | Movie

Tthe award-winning documentary All That Breathes is a meditation on life in Delhi through the eyes and hands of two brothers caring for injured birds back to health. After winning the World Cinema Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year, it will be screened at Cannes, and in many ways it’s easier to say what it’s not than to define what it is. It’s not a wildlife documentary, nor a table-knocking call to action; it is not a family drama or a political film – and yet it contains elements of all these, woven into a poetic and beautiful tapestry. The events depicted are less important than the overall feeling.

Much of it has to do with the role of the Indian capital in the film: a wretched, warlike character integrated into the story. “Everyone who lives in Delhi knows that you are constantly surrounded by this gray sensory space,” says the film’s director, Shaunak Sen. “This fabric of greyness, this mood, this tone where the sky and the clouds and the buildings like mesh into each other have fascinated me for some time. The sun is this diffuse blob, and the air you breathe in, the whole ecological bubble you is in, feels hostile to your sense of nourishment.

“And the feeling that the spaceship Earth’s air conditioner is going awry is very strong in the city. So the starting point was not so much a story as a texture.”

Sen has previously made his hometown central to his work: his first film from 2015, Cities of Sleep, explored the nature of insomnia as told through the city’s informal shelters and the underclass, who often need a safe and warm place to spend the winter nights. This time, he was inspired while regularly getting stuck in Delhi’s many years of traffic, looking up from his car. “I wanted to see those little, lazy black dots gliding around. They were black kites, and that’s one of the things where once you start thinking about them, you can’t stop noticing them.”

The first experts Sen spoke to were brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud: and the director knew he had his subjects. They tell the film with spoken thoughts. They have loved birds since they were infants and have been treating black kites for almost 20 years through the organization they founded, Wildlife Rescue.

While both are passionate about the birds, it takes its time to get ready for animal hospital tasks in the midst of their daily wear and tear. Saud seems happy to keep doing what he does, but Nadeem longs to see the world beyond their Wazirabad district and wants to study in America.

“One must not distinguish between all that breathes,” Saud says in one of many considerations, and the very idea of ​​breathing is fundamental to every theme the film touches on. Delhi’s chronic air pollution problem surrounds so many aspects of their lives. Saud’s young son has a worrying cough, people wore face masks in the city before Covid hit, and the family’s air purifier appears to be sitting permanently on red because the filters need to be replaced.

The brothers ‘problems keep rising: the meat grinder for the dragons’ comrade is on the fryer (the same goes for their freezer), the city is being engulfed by sectarian protests over a divisive law on citizenship that is considered to target Muslims like them, and they still have to contend with all the other hardships a working family has on a daily basis. All the while the dragons keep falling from the sky. “Delhi is a gaping wound and we are a small patch on it,” Nadeem said.

Sen says that it was both the stoic work ethic mixed with their insightful nature that made them ideal subjects for the project. “They were not typical documentary topics, as they were also interlocutors in terms of form and narrative, and they understood how we tried to balance this noble act of bird rescue with the daily life they lead. It was far more collaborative than traditional documentary dictations suggest. “

If it all sounds like too much chin-scratching, thoughtful stuff, the film also has touching and funny moments that sometimes turn into farce. The bird treatment takes place mainly in a warm, claustrophobic basement that instantly thrilled the senator. “As soon as I saw that garage, I knew it had to be central to the documentary,” he says. “This dingy, cinematic basement that makes soap dispensers, filled with all kinds of junk and metal-cutting machines and industrial decay; then you have these magisterial birds being tenderly cared for by these guys. It’s fascinating. ”

And in the brothers’ young helper, Salik, they find a perfect fashion energy and a captivating stage thief. Everyone knows someone like Salik – a little brother, a cousin, a nephew, a colleague, a friend – who asks innocent and confusing questions about nuclear war and American wrestling at inexplicable times.

At one point, a bird comes in and steals Salik’s glasses, but all he does is smile. But then later he sincerely considers, “why the glasses?” In a beautiful scene where he drives backwards at a pace (a three-wheeled truck), he suddenly reveals that he has a baby chipmunk in his shirt pocket, like an adorable desi Newt Scamander from the Ministry of Magic.

Sen is overjoyed to go to Cannes and says, “Let’s face it, this is the place in terms of status and recognition,” adding that he looks forward to the event as much as a cinefil as an instructor. “The filmmaker in me is honored, and the filmmaker in me is ecstatic!”

Close-ups of the imperial birds – often felled, ironically, by paper dragons flown by children gluing broken glass to the strings for air battles – are compounded with news and social media footage of Muslim areas being ravaged by Hindu zealots, including an extremist thugs climbing up a mosque and tearing the Islamic crescent down on top of one of its ornate minarets. It is a tale of tragedy that slowly hits humans and animals.

Sen largely captures Delhi’s duality in this paean to his hometown, its people and its creatures, in flight and distress.