There will be stiff competition in the documentary category at next month’s Oscars. Films about vulcanologists, Ukrainian orphans, Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, and photographer Nan Goldin’s crusade against the Sackler family are on the shortlist with a rare and beautiful study from India. With subtlety and restraint, All That Breathes (Sky Documentaries) portrays two brothers who have made it their life’s work to care for Delhi’s wounded and ailing black kites.
Put like that, it hardly sounds like a frontrunner. It doesn’t trade in charisma and big wow moments, nor does it overtly tug at the heartstrings. Instead Shaunak Sen’s film builds, layer upon layer, a story of quiet, selfless heroism couched as a plea for humanity to budge up and make room for other species, even the rats we see marauding in the opening images. “Man is the loneliest animal,” says one of the brothers, “trapped by speciesistic difference. It’s like a jail.”
Nadeem and Saud, it emerges in an obliquely constructed set of tableaux, are running a cottage hospital for wounded kites who fall out of the sky. Those polluted skies are crowded, especially over the largest rubbish tip on the planet which, without thousands of scavenging urbanised kites, would tower even higher.
The basement hospital, with a recovery ward on the roof, is also the cluttered and humble home to Saud’s family. The street frequently floods. In overheard snatches of news we hear the city broil with political fervour, much of it directed against Muslims. The brothers fear expulsion: to be sundered from their birds, you sense, would be like severing a daemon in His Dark Materials.
Eventually, because the film has to have an ending, one of them voluntarily goes abroad to study and it’s implied, a little bogusly, that the telepathic link between the brothers has been cut. But this is to suggest the film has a plot. It’s more of a feature-length appeal, framed as an arthouse meditation with slow tracking shots across their ramshackle premises and extreme close-ups of Delhi’s insect-infested puddles.
The photography of the birds is a world away from what we’re used to in natural history films. There’s no anthropomorphising, no sentimentalising, no commentary other than from the brothers. These birds are utterly other, while their rescuers represent the best of us. “Your work is truly noble,” says their meat supplier. Their reward will probably be in Heaven, though Sundance and Cannes have already conferred gongs. If, against the odds, the Academy does so too, it will be richly deserved.
