‘All That Breathes’ Review: Sundance-Winning Doc Surveys Interspecies Life, Both Ailing and Flying, in Polluted Delhi
variety.comDennis Harvey Film CriticThe sense of a city as a complex, ailing ecosystem is rendered with unusual vividness in “All That Breathes.” Shaunak Sen’s documentary has no formal interviews, onscreen text or omniscient narrator to provide relevant stats on Delhi, where air pollution is reportedly twelve times worse than in Beijing, which ranks second on the global list.
Instead, the environmental impact is felt on the microcosmic level of two resident brothers dedicated to urban bird rescue. Meanwhile, they worry about a different kind of threatened extinction event: anti-Muslim policies that trigger waves of protest and violence.This snapshot of self-harm both societal and planetary nonetheless manages a gentle, impressionistic lyricism.
Like Sen’s prior feature “Cities of Sleep,” which revealed the subterranean networks providing places of rest for Delhi’s homeless, “All That Breathes” — which won the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance’s World Documentary competition — is a portrait more compassionate than bleak, emphasizing individual resourcefulness over big-picture despair.
The interconnectivity of life forms is deftly illustrated straight off with an opening shot that pans across some derelict open space in New Delhi.
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