BY SAARANG CHARI ‘26
About 20 minutes into Shaunak Sen’s Oscar-nominated documentary “All That Breathes”, I had to pause just to make sure that I was, in fact, watching a documentary. It depicts a sincerity so poetic that it feels like it has to have been scripted. The film follows the lives of two siblings from Delhi, Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, who have been rescuing and taking care of injured black kites since they were children.
Set in one of the most polluted cities in the world, exploring themes of ecology and wildlife conservation, the film affirms that it is not simply a “nature documentary”. If the subject of the film is the brothers Nadeem and Saud, it does not observe just them. Rather, it is a meditation on human-animal relations, on the fraught politics of Delhi, the uneven impacts of our climate catastrophe and the act of survival in the midst of violence. Although it portrays the brother’s relationship with the animals and with the injured kites within this broader socio-political context, to describe Sen’s film as a political intervention would be reductive. Nor is the film overly sentimental or celebratory of the brothers’ (admittedly admirable) work and lives. Sen has stated that he did not want to make a “sweet film about good people doing good things”, a film that is “NGOised and sanitized”.
These multiple themes, instead, work together to present a rich portrait of Saud and Nadeem, of their ethical commitments and of their love for the city and its human and non-human inhabitants. As stated before, their interactions and thoughts are extremely poetic. In a recent interview, Sen has described them as “organic intellectuals” guided by experiential wisdom. Over the three years of filming, Sen would take note of the brothers’ philosophical musings. He said that this collection quickly became very big, and he managed to convince the brothers to record a stylised voiceover for the film. The stylised voiceover is the only part of the film where the dialogue feels (intentionally) engineered, yet its sincerity is unquestionable.
While being thematically broad and fluid, All That Breathes is not reticent or self-effacing. The beauty which it portrays is so captivating that I have to hold myself back from including all of the tiny details which make it special.
