Critics reviews

Sen’s mixing of documentary with visuals that appear to be precisely planned skirts close to the aestheticization of poverty. But it’s also how All That Breathes manages to be both otherworldly and humanizing, as if it were bridging a gap between different forms of existence.

Here’s something unique: a gripping film about virtue and good deeds... Of the many climate crisis documentaries presented at recent festivals, [All That Breathes] is one of the most persuasive, showing how a whole urban environment can endure such an ordeal, rather than an isolated example, or one individual’s sermon from the pulpit.

[Sen's] is a film with an intimate scope that’s about so much more than it first appears to be. You might not know much about black kite birds going into All That Breathes, but you’ll leave this documentary caring deeply about them. Yet, this is no standard informational doc about ornithology.

With a tone more melancholic and charming than one might expect given the various crises at play here, Sen’s deceptively casual observational documentary prefers dwelling on resistance and resilience to pronouncements of doom.

One of the more dreamily provocative documentaries I’ve ever seen... Portrait of a city? Portrait of a pair of heroic brothers? Portrait of humanity on the brink of COVID? In this tiny marvel of a documentary, it’s a little and a lot all at once.

A vital and transfixing work of urban ecology... “All That Breathes” is determined to illustrate how two peoples’ failure to listen to each other is no different than one species’ failure to acknowledge the rest of its environment — that each aspect of Delhi is sharing the same broken conversation, whether they recognize that or not.

Saud, Nadeem and Salik are engaging and inspirational individuals. Shaunak Sen’s film does justice to their efforts but also allows us to see the bigger picture of a highly connected, complex world that humanity shares but seems intent on destroying.

If Sen were to better connect Nadeem and Saud’s faith and civic identities with the kites and other animals’ desperate fight for balance in an urbanized nature, “All That Breathes” would be an excellent documentary. All the same, it’s a very good one, albeit one that doesn’t persuade this viewer that the brothers’ noble effort to save New Delhi’s avian population intertwines with the city’s cultural crisis.

There might be some justifiable cause for concern a documentary dealing with two very real crises focuses so extensively on its aesthetic attributes, but for this viewer the choices in cinematography further aided its storytelling––highlighting just how invisible devastation to the city’s nature is for those who live there. It’s one of the most powerful cinematic approaches to the climate crisis yet made.

Sen could easily just have made an observational documentary about the brothers' day-to-day work or simply focused on the kites themselves but he stretches its wings much further than that... [All That Breathes] is a complex portrait of the intersection between humans and animals, the environment and the city, politics and social wellbeing.

The pace in Sen’s film is never hurried. But the political and ecological aims always feel urgent. Tender and necessary, “All That Breathes” shares another frightening side of nature’s fragile state.