All That Breathes

Shaunak Sen's All That Breathes (2022) achieved a rare double, winning the top documentary prizes at both Sundance and Cannes before earning an Academy Award nomination — a level of acclaim almost unheard of for an Indian non-fiction film. A UK co-production shot in Delhi, it announced Sen as a major new documentary voice.

The film follows brothers Nadeem and Saud, who have turned a cramped basement into a clinic for injured black kites, the raptors that wheel above one of the world's most polluted cities. Sen shoots with extraordinary patience and beauty, his camera lingering on rats, insects and the teeming non-human life of the metropolis, framing the brothers' devotion against a backdrop of smog, flooding and the rising sectarian unrest of contemporary India. The result is as much a tone poem as a report.

Critics hailed it as one of the finest documentaries of its decade, praising its painterly cinematography and its refusal of easy uplift. Its meditation on coexistence — between humans and animals, and among a fracturing society — gives it a resonance well beyond its specific place. Contemplative, gorgeous and quietly urgent, All That Breathes is a landmark of modern documentary, finding in two men and their birds a parable for living together on a damaged planet. Sen's success opened doors for Indian non-fiction on the world stage, and the film's painterly attentiveness to the city's overlooked creatures has influenced a wave of contemplative environmental documentary.