ALL THAT BREATHES

All That Breathes
Dir: Shaunak Sen/2022/India, USA, UK/97 min
Screening SUN 11/20 7PM; FRI 11/25 4PM; SAT 11/26 4PM, SUN 11/27 7PM, FRI 12/2 4PM

$11 General Admission & $8 OFS members

In one of the world’s most populated cities, two brothers — Nadeem and Saud — devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi that has been falling from the sky at alarming rates. Amid environmental toxicity and social unrest, the ‘kite brothers’ spend day and night caring for the creatures in their makeshift avian basement hospital. Director Shaunak Sen (Cities of Sleep) explores the connection between the kites and the Muslim brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence.

The first shot of “All That Breathes” explores a vacant lot at night, tracking rats and feral dogs through puddles and piles of refuse. Your instinct might be to recoil from a tableau of urban squalor, but there is a quiet, rapt attention in the images that suggests a different response. Even in the clogged thoroughfares and crowded neighborhoods of big cities like New Delhi, where this remarkable documentary unfolds, we are closer to the wildness of the natural world than we might suppose.

The three principal human characters in Shaunak Sen’s film have devoted their lives to caring for black kites, birds of prey almost as unloved in Delhi as scavenging rodents and canines. Wounded kites and other raptors, excluded from a local avian hospital because of their nonvegetarian ways, find their way to Wildlife Rescue, a small clinic that doubles as a workshop for the assembly of soap dispensers. There, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, the brothers who founded Wildlife Rescue, work with their associate Salik Rehman to rehabilitate the birds until they can return to the skies. – AO Scott, New York Times

Distributed by:  SIDESHOW and SUBMARINE DELUXE  in association with HBO Documentary Films

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Updated: November 7, 2022

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