In one of the world’s most populated cities, two brothers — Nadeem and Saud — devote their lives to protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi, that has been falling from the skies at alarming rates.

Inspired by the ecological philosophy and folk tales recounted by their late mother, who believed that “one shouldn’t differentiate between all that breathes”, the ‘kite brothers’ established a makeshift avian hospital in the basement of their Warizabad Village apartment, from which they have saved the lives of more than 20,000 black kites over the past 20 years. 

Painstakingly edited from around 400 hours of footage, All That Breathes sets no distinction between the human and non-human worlds on screen, meandering between the brothers’ daily work, the birds in their care, and the wider urban ecosystem surrounding them, set against a backdrop of environmental toxicity and rising social unrest. 

Director Shaunak Sen has said of the film’s origin: “We started out by deciding that we would not make a nature doc, we would not make a kind of frontal, political doc, and we would most of all not make a sweet film about nice people doing good things.” 

Instead, All That Breathes is a chronicle of interspecies co-existence, and a call to treat all kin – human and non-human – with equality, dignity and respect.