“Have you ever felt vertigo looking into the sky?” Nadeem Shahzad asks over voiceover roughly fifteen minutes into “All That Breathes.” The accompanying shot looks straight up into a sunny yet smog-streaked sky as a swirl of black kites swoops and careens overhead. The birds are numerous, too many to count, but their movements are mesmerizing. It’s physical poetry, a whirling dance through the air where, as the kites veer, they recreate the shifting patterns their bodies manifest in the New Delhi sky. If the viewer hasn’t felt that sense of vertigo Nadeem describes before, they certainly have now.
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Nadeem asks the question as he recounts feeding kites with his brother when they were children. “Feeding kites earns sawab,” he explains, a concept in Muslim spirituality where certain acts reward the doer with spiritual merit. In this case, appeasing a kite’s appetite is a sacred act in the Islamic worldview. Feeding the birds also feeds one’s soul and contributes goodness to the world. For Nadeem, his relationship with kites has always had this religious dimension, and perhaps that’s why he and Saud pursue their rescue of the birds despite the overwhelming odds against them.
If feeding kites rewards one with religious credit, how much does one accrue from saving their lives? That’s a central question of Shaunak Sen‘s latest documentary, which follows Nadeem, Saud, and their friend Sharik as they rescue New Delhi’s dwindling black kite population through their organization Wildlife Refuge. Thanks to industrial pollution, overpopulation, and overflowing waste, New Delhi’s ecology teeters on collapse. As the local wildlife adapts to the city’s ever-widening sprawl, kites and other birds drop from the sky due to malnutrition, physical injury, and neural illness. Sen follows the brothers as their project blossoms from a small basement room to a full clinic with a rooftop cage for injured birds.
Nadeem and Saud began Wildlife Refuge as a side project to their soap dispenser business, and that amateur spirit runs through their entire venture. For example, the brothers learned how to perform surgery on injured kites through magazines from their time as teenage bodybuilders. As their operation grows, so do the responsibilities. They purchase meat scraps to grind into birdfeed manually, swim across lakes to rescue birds trapped on the far shore, and help neighbors with unruly kites that swoop down onto rooftops to protect their nests. When Nadeem and Saud cannot save the birds, they bury them. They also apply for funding overseas, often to failure. A New York Times article helps garner attention, but the spotlight also forces the pair to seek professional credentials with International Bird Rescue classes in the U.S.
Despite setbacks, Nadeem and Saud remain steadfast to their birds, as they recognize Wildlife Refuge as part of a more profound shift in New Delhi and the world. “Our fight is just a symptom of something much larger,” Saud says, a reference to the world’s environmental crisis and the intermingling of human society and natural ecology that comes with it. The boundaries between nature and culture have always mainly been true in concept only, but in “All That Breathes,” Sen makes that distinction feel porous, even redundant. New Delhi’s sprawl doesn’t displace nature so much as complicate it, enmeshing one within the other. As a result, the lives of humans and animals collapse into a highly complex set of living systems that must reckon together with its toxic issues.
“Every lifeform adjusts to the city now,” the brothers explain, and although every kite has a code, it’s codebreaking that’s natural today. “All That Breathes” is at its most breathtaking when Sen stops to ponder how animals improvise to the city’s strange ecosystem. The film’s opening shot provides the best example. Sen’s camera slowly comes into focus on a nighttime landscape just off a local road. A figure moves, then a pair of headlights cast an interplay of light and shadow on the street. A dog enters the foreground as a truck hurtles down the road. A motorbike heads one way, and a pedestrian another. The camera continues to pan right, low to the ground, as one rat, then two, then too many, scurry across the screen. As a headlight’s glare whites out the screen to reveal the film’s title, Sen means to depict New Delhi as both a city and an ecosystem: a place that, for all its upheaval, remains achingly alive.
While Sen makes this notion especially resonant, he fails to capture the same significance in the mounting social tensions that overtake the film’s final third. When religious riots about an anti-Muslim bill take the city by storm, Sen barely shoehorns the civic unrest into the narrative. Given Nadeem and Saud’s religious background, there’s an easy way to dramatize these events. Likewise, one could also compare most New Delhi citizens’ relative apathy to both environmental and political issues. However, Sen instead chooses to keep these cultural tensions on the periphery. “What amazes me is that people go on as if everything’s normal,” Nadeem tells his wife late in the film. Too true, but Sen fails to bridge these two elements together in a way where both feel equally apocalyptic.
If Sen were to better connect Nadeem and Saud’s faith and civic identities with the kites and other animals’ desperate fight for balance in an urbanized nature, “All That Breathes” would be an excellent documentary. All the same, it’s a very good one, albeit one that doesn’t persuade this viewer that the brothers’ noble effort to save New Delhi’s avian population intertwines with the city’s cultural crisis. It’s also too easy to focus on catastrophe in the wake of such upheaval. “Deteriorating each passing day,” Nadeem says as he and Saud look down at the state of the local road from their new hospital building. Yes, but life persists, much like the animals adapting to their new habitats. And we persist, too, like the kites cascading overhead, and everything else that breathes, ever recreating our patterns in the sky. [B]
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