All That Breathes Review: A Richly Detailed Look at Changing Urban Ecology in Delhi

Through quiet, observational shots of Delhi’s human-animal ecosystem, Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes obliquely introduces us to a predatory bird species called the black kite. Many of these birds have adapted to the dense and densely polluted environment of India’s capital, roosting on its rooftops and feeding off of its garbage. But as Sen captures in his contemplative, artful look at the tribulations of a makeshift bird rescue hospital, the kite’s adaptation to the unnatural wilds of Delhi can only take it so far.

The birds live off the giant landfills on the gargantuan city’s outskirts—reducing the size of the dumps, as one observer remarks in the film, by thousands of tons a year—but when it gets too hot or smoggy, the noble hawk-like birds tend to fall out of the sky. As human alterations to the environment accelerate, the animals who share our world are finding they can’t keep up.

This breaks the hearts of the sensitive and thoughtful brothers, Nadeem and Saud, who run the hospital at the center of the documentary. In one of the occasional voiceovers that Sen lays over footage of kites soaring through the skies, Saud recalls his parents teaching them to have respect for “all that breathes.” Unfortunately, contemporary India, the tumult of which we can hear percolating in the streets outside the walls of the hospital, doesn’t always appear to share Nadeem and Saud’s expansive sense of which creatures deserve dignity.

The 2020 anti-Muslim riots in Delhi add to the apocalyptic atmosphere established at the start with a slow pan over a trash-strewn, rat-infested empty lot. Nadeem, Saud, their assistant, and their families are Muslim, and in the film’s second half we see them quietly tensing as the violence escalates around them. It’s here that All That Breathes, which generally consists of immaculately composed, richly detailed shots, relies on more conventional documentary material: snippets of news reports, smartphone footage of rioters vandalizing a minaret.

The most touching moment in this section of All That Breathes is when Sen captures the brothers’ assistant, Salik, riding in the back of a moto taxi packed with boxes of incapacitated kites that he’s bringing back to the hospital. Salik reassures his mother that he’s okay over the phone—and then pulls a small lizard out of his breast pocket and begins delicately stroking it. This surprising moment of human-animal symbiosis, like so much of this aesthetically accomplished documentary, feels almost too poetic to be true.

Cinema, perhaps, has a special imperative to document a world that’s always in flux, particularly those parts to which we normally have no access, as well as inject wonder and dignity into the things we otherwise ignore. No doubt facilitated by unobtrusive digital cameras, Sen gives us stirring close-ups on the kites that the brothers keep sheltered while they heal throughout All That Breathes. The oddness of these creatures—their bulging black eyes, their menacingly pointed beaks, their heads that seem to rotate on a mechanical joint—compels us to consider them as unique beings beyond our ken. “No matter how much you care for an animal, love it, you can never claim you understand it,” Saud says in one of his voiceovers.

At times, though, All That Breathes puts too much emphasis on photographic beauty. Even the brothers’ hospital, its upkeep stymied by meager resources, possesses the aura of a film set designed to be moody. The light isn’t too harsh or too weak, but it glows with an ambivalent warmth. Balanced, stable camera movements languidly move us through the cramped space, revealing the damaged wood and the cluttered shelves, but this evidence of the brothers’ struggle to save these animals and keep their business afloat looks oddly attractive in the frame.

All That Breathes is just one of several recent films that eschew the idea—inherited in part from cinema verité—that documentaries on social issues need to be roughhewn, that capturing contingent moments necessitates improvised camerawork. Throughout, Sen’s mixing of documentary with visuals that appear to be precisely planned skirts close to the aestheticization of poverty. But it’s also how All That Breathes manages to be both otherworldly and humanizing, as if it were bridging a gap between different forms of existence.