In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus turns to the image of birds to describe the love and faithfulness of God. “Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge” (Mt 10:29). In modern New Delhi, that image is brutally literal: The air is so polluted that birds routinely fall from the sky, lying wounded in the streets. Their numbers include the black kite, a small bird of prey that makes its home in New Delhi’s roofs and eaves. When a kite falls from the sky, we believe that God sees them. But it’s the “kite brothers” who pick them up.
“All That Breathes” (2022), an Academy Award-nominated documentary directed by Shaunak Sen, follows brothers Muhammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad and the kite rescue clinic they run out of their garage. Along with a young assistant, Salik Rehman, they care for the birds, tend their wounds and allow them to recover before returning them to the wild. Sen tells the story in a cinematic language that’s closer to narrative fiction than a traditional documentary. But what we see is very real. The brothers struggle to find funding, argue about roles and do their work in the shadow of growing anti-Muslim sentiment. It is at once inspiring and heartbreaking: a portrait of individuals trying to do good, to honor their kinship with the rest of creation, even as the world burns around them.
The brothers were inspired by their late mother, who taught them to honor the interconnectedness of all life. “One shouldn’t differentiate between all that breathes,” Saud explains. “Trees, fungus or vegetation, natural and supernatural worlds were mixed for her.” Their work, while extremely practical, has a spiritual resonance. He says that growing up, adults would take them to feed the kites, tossing chunks of meat that the birds would snatch out of the air; taking care of them was supposed to be a source of spiritual credit. It clearly made an impression, and the brothers see their own welfare bound up with that of the kites.
At one point Rehman and the brothers discuss how much trash the kites eat from Delhi’s massive landfills, estimating 15 tons a month. Without them, Salik notes, the huge dumps would be “sky-high.” Nadeem notes that vultures once filled that role in the local ecosystem; now they are gone, and the kites have taken their place. “Nature will always find a way to absorb waste…. They eat away our filth.”
The brothers and the kites are connected by another reality: They are both trying to survive in an inhospitable environment. The film plays out against a backdrop of political unrest and repression of Indian Muslims by Hindu nationalists. Saud’s wife attends protests opposing anti-Muslim legislation, and at one point the family makes gallows jokes about a law that could potentially strip them of citizenship. Later, the rhetoric explodes into violent riots, tearing through their neighborhood. “Religious riots aren’t a new thing,” Saud says. “But what’s happening now is different. Because this time, it’s not just hatred…. By calling people termites and rats, they’ve somehow made it about hygiene.” To their countrymen, they’ve become another sort of pest to be driven out or exterminated.
Today is the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, who called all of nature “brother” and “sister.” I believe St. Francis would have recognized his own spirituality in “All That Breathes”: not only in the brother’s care for the kites but in how it links environmental degradation with the degradation of human beings. “If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity,” St. Francis is credited as saying, “you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.” Along with his dedication to the poor, St. Francis is also remembered for his groundbreaking interfaith dialogue with Muslims at a time when Crusades still raged. St. Francis understood—better than many in the modern world—that all of life shares a sacred bond, regardless of race, creed or even species.
The law of nature is adaptation. This is as true in the city as in the wild. A brother notes how songbirds have begun to sing in a different key to be heard over traffic, and how other birds have begun to use cigarette butts to repel parasites from their nests. “Every life form adjusts to the city now,” Shehzad says. But there comes a point where even adaptation and evolution can be outpaced by the rapidly changing world, the ceaseless charge of human progress. Can any animal survive that onslaught? Can we?
In “Laudato Si’,” Pope Francis writes: “If we approach nature and the environment without [St. Francis’] openness to awe and wonder…our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters…. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.” The kite brothers would agree. “Life itself is kinship,” Saud says. “We’re all a community of air.” If their efforts feel doomed, it’s because we recognize how rare that spirit of kinship is. “All That Breathes” suggests that for us to survive—for all to survive—it is humans who have to evolve.
“All That Breathes” is streaming on Max.
