All That Breathes (2022)
Black Kites are falling from the sky in New Delhi, where they’ve long been seen by the local Muslim population as a necessary evil. If they throw meat at the birds and keep them happy, the birds won’t dive bomb them and will even protect them.
Saud and his brother, Nadeem, along with their friend Salik, want more than anything to help out these birds. When they originally tried to take the birds to a local hospital, they were told the birds couldn’t stay because they weren’t vegetarian, so they started their own hospital. It’s not clear where the money comes from; what the men do for day jobs isn’t apparent, but maybe the city appreciates the care the men give the birds, who can sometimes be nuisances.
Sometimes their fight seems fruitless. The birds don’t always live; in one scene Saud surveys a dozen or so dead birds with obvious sadness. Help might be around the corner, however, as a reporter from the New York Times has heard about Saud, Nadeem, and Salik’s fight and has written an article about them. If they can only get a grant and set up decent facilities, they might have a better chance at succeeding.
This film is beautifully shot, although some of the sights may be a bit shocking. It has no score, so many of the scenes are almost silent, and there aren’t many filters over what our three heroes see on a daily basis. It goes out of its way to present the constant crossover of wildlife with human life. We hear the chanting at a protest from the next street over while looking at an alleyway covered in trash.
There are also constant pans and extreme closeups of very unpleasant scenes, and the film lets us know what we should expect right out of the gate, as the camera pans very slowly over a field full of rats that only gets fuller as the scene goes on, and then it’s thankfully broken up by a passing car. There’s another scene of bees walking around in a puddle of water while humans and animals trudge past. Or there’s a long tracking shot of a turtle crawling over the heaps of trash in a junkyard. All over we see livestock and wildlife mixing freely with humans and no one batting an eye.
Even where humans have sole domain, everything looks messy and decaying, but at the same time we see people watching the news on their smartphones or using a laptop. Every apartment has a satellite dish. On the flip side, kids can’t go swimming until the water is clean enough, and it may be a whole year before that happens. Instant gratification is completely unknown, which is a refreshing change of pace.
The funny thing is that even though what we see feels like squalor at first, by the end of the film it’s normal. When Nadeem goes to college in the United States, the clean, pristine white of the buildings is almost jarring, like a film set instead of a real town. Obviously, clean streets are better for everyone’s health, but sometimes beauty that has to be won means more in the end, and no matter where one lives, the eye has to be trained to see that beauty.
For Saud, Nadeem, and Salik, helping their local kites is their way of finding joy and beauty while improving life in New Delhi, even in a small way.
All That Breathes is currently streaming on HBO Max. Not rated.
My grade: A+
Principal Cast: Salik Rehman, Mohammad Saud, Nadeem Shehzad
Directed by Shaunak Sen