The opening shot of All That Breathes (Sky Documentaries) comes into focus – a ground-level pan across an abandoned wasteland – and not since Pixar’s Ratatouille have so many squabbling vermin been granted so much cinematic dignity.
This is the Delhi of documentary film-maker Shaunak Sen, last captured in his 2015 Cities of Sleep doc about how “sleep mafias” have capitalised on homelessness in the Indian capital. That film was little-seen outside the festival circuit, but All That Breathes is already internationally recognised, nabbing the grand jury prize at Sundance, best documentary at Cannes, as well as Bafta and Oscar nominations. Now, thanks to this Sky Documentaries slot, an even wider audience can be confronted by the strange beauty of a thousand rats by moonlight.
Many other wildlife species also feature – particularly the black kite, which dots the Delhi skies and stalks its landfill sites – but this isn’t a nature documentary. Rather, the subject is brothers Nadeem and Saud, who, through dedicating their lives to the care of these majestic raptors, have developed an understanding of the city ecosystem that cannot be put into words. It has to be seen. Indeed, Sen’s slow-tracking camera captures so much that is beautiful, unexpected and profound, in and around the brothers’ makeshift, basement bird sanctuary, that it seems some of it must have been set up or scripted.
In fact, Sen’s only secret is patience, which – like a napping spot for Delhi’s migrant workforce – has become precious though increasing scarcity. All That Breathes’ 93-minute running time is 93 grains of gold dust, painstakingly sifted from approximately 400 hours of rough footage, shot over several years. “To get a sense of every day mundaneness, you have to let the camera run and just bore the living daylights out of your subjects,” said the director recently. “Until you’ve gotten the first yawn from them, you haven’t gotten any usable material.”
Serendipity is the source of All That Breathes’s most interesting shots, but the skilled (or patient) documentary-makers know how to make room for such happy chance in the frame. For instance, after securing some important funding, the brothers step outside to toast their success with strawberry Cornettos (why not?). It is a whimsical scene, elevated to gorgeous absurdity by the oblivious man who wanders into shot and begins, unappetisingly, to wash his dirty laundry in water from an overflow pipe. In another too-good-to-be-scripted moment, a kite swoops down and swipes the glasses off the face of a volunteer, before flying off with his loot in his beak. This volunteer, Salik, can only stare up in astonishment and admiration.
Salik is himself one of those true-life “characters” that every documentarian must dream of one day encountering. A sweet soul with a steady stream of optimistic chatter, he provides the perfect contrast to older brother Nadeem’s dry-humoured pragmatism. It is hard to conceive of a more perfect encapsulation of Salik’s almost other-worldly purity than the moment when, during a cab ride through the city, a small furry creature – a baby squirrel, perhaps? – unexpectedly climbs out of his breast pocket. Salik gently pets the little furball before returning it whence it came. How often do you see a scene like that outside a Pixar movie?
Yet All that Breathes is never cutesy or sentimental. The daily tasks involved in kite conservation prompt Nadeem and Saud to musings on the human condition that follow the animist example set by their late mother. It is from her outlook on the interconnectedness of all living things that the film takes its title: “One shouldn’t differentiate between all that breathes.”
Sen’s camera is careful not to. Many documentaries are interested in finding “the small story that tells the big story”, but this isn’t that. While Nadeem and Saud’s work continues because of, in spite of and in the midst of such large-scale crises as chronic air pollution and rising Islamophobic violence, there is no hierarchy of importance intimated.
Instead, All That Breathes is meditative, truthful film-making that deserves to be seen anywhere the human animal coexists with others. Television can reach that audience. And yet how this kind of film-making is seen matters too. All That Breathes has soul-transforming magic to perform, but the spell won’t work unless we can surrender to its slower natural rhythms and, like a birdwatcher, become still. That’s easier to do in the darkened space of a cinema than it is in a distraction-filled living room.
All That Breathes is screening on Sky Documentaries in the UK, and streaming on Binge and Foxtel Now in Australia
