Enchanting Bird Rescue Doc All That Breathes Finds Lyrical New Delhi Ties
All That Breathes, a documentary by Shaunak Sen about two brothers—Muhammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad—in New Delhi who say they have saved more than 20,000 kites (an Indian bird of prey) over the last two decades, is enchanting. There have been other stories about the amateur medic duo, along with their assistant Salik Rehman, but none as lyrical as this documentary.
The brothers, former bodybuilders who grew up in the Chawri Bazaar area of Old Delhi, started treating injured black kites in 1997 out of necessity. These scavenger birds were often prey to another kind of kite—the paper ones commonly flown as a lazy weekend pastime or to mark festive occasions. The string, called manja, used in the paper kites is usually coated with glass particles, in order to cut and capture another person’s kite. However, these razor-sharp strings can be fatal to birds, slashing their wings and sending them careening from the skies, especially during the later summer and fall months when kite-flying is at its peak.
On finding one such injured kite, the brothers took the bird to the Charity Birds Hospital, Delhi’s largest and oldest bird hospital, located on the premises of the Sri Digamber Jain Red Temple, run by people of the Jain faith. Ahimsa, the practice of non-violence and compassion towards all life, forms the core of Jainism. And so, the hospital told Saud and Shehzad that they could not treat the meat-eating bird. The brothers had to abandon it.
As a result, the brothers ended up treating injured birds that they continued to find, with some help from other local vets and based on their own interest and knowledge. They carry out their bird rehabilitation operation, called Wildlife Rescue, out of the basement of their family’s liquid soap dispenser manufacturing office. Their family business substantially funds their personal bird rescue mission, although some grants have now helped the brothers establish a small aviary on the rooftop.
The documentary uses the brothers and their relationship with the carrion birds as metaphors for the state of the environmental and political climate of India’s capital, forming a subtle subtext to the main account. Keeping its lens focused on the bickering brothers, their affable assistant and the seemingly endless cardboard cartons containing injured kites that stack up in the brother’s basement, All That Breathes allows images and conversations about the stifling pollution as well as the mass protests that erupted in New Delhi in 2020—as citizens took to the streets to challenge the Citizenship Amendment Act that was criticized for going against India’s secular constitution—to seep into the storytelling.