5 Days of Oscar Docs: All That Breathes
A week-long guide to the Academy Awards' strongest and most overlooked category.
We tend to think of the urban and the pastoral as opposites, either separated from one another by long distances or meticulously cordoned off, like a pocket park tucked away in the middle of a busy metropolis. But in Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, the two exist right on top of each other. The movie, which focuses on two brothers who run a hospital for injured kites in Wazirabad, Delhi, periodically steps away from their story to show us the teeming mass of life that exists all throughout their city. As Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad look after their birds in a cramped basement, we see flies resting on the surface of a puddle that shudders as goats clomp by, boars wading through a shallow stream, and rats scampering across a dirt field, all treated with the same curiosity.
Once teenage bodybuilding obsessives, the brothers say they gleaned their first understanding of anatomy from Muscle Flex magazine, and run a side business assembling soap dispensers while they seek out other sources of funding for the hospital. Caring for animals may be, according to their Muslim beliefs, a religious duty, but they still have to navigate the world of nonprofit funding to keep it going, not to mention trying to cut a deal with the merchant who provides meat for the kites to eat. At one point, one of the brothers idly wonders whether, if they were to climb into a cage and play dead, the kites would try to eat them, too. “Humans forget they’re also pieces of meat,” his brother replies.
Although the first kite they saw looked to them like “a furious reptile from another planet”—a phrase it’s easy to hear Werner Herzog narrating in his characteristic monotone. Although the birds are endangered by both the city’s polluted air and the sharpened kite strings, known as manja, that can cut right through a bird’s body, the brothers now regard them as an integral part of Delhi’s urban landscape, estimating at one point that they consume 150 tons of the city’s landfills a year. After discovering the kites seemed to be hoarding cigarette butts in their nests, the brothers theorize they’re using them to deter parasites. “Humanity,” Mohammad concludes, “is now their natural environment.”
Of course, not every aspect of the urban enviroment meshes so seamlessly. The movie builds towards the anti-Muslim riots of early (just pre-pandemic) 2020, an explosion foreshadowed even as the brothers literally keep their heads down and concentrate on their birds. (When they discuss rumors of an imminent nuclear war between India and Pakistan, it registers as idle chit-chat, perhaps because they’re more focused on the parts of their world where they can actually affect change.) Buoyed by Roger Goula’s burbling electronic score and infused with moments of great lyrical beauty, All That Breathes can almost lull you into a trance. But it doesn’t want you to stay blissed out, because as the brothers admit, their best efforts amount to no more than a band-aid on the city’s “gaping wound.” The kites may soar high above the garbage, but humans, “the loneliest animal,” have to live in it.
All That Breathes debuts at 9 p.m. tonight on HBO Max.
Previously: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed