Birds fall to Earth from Delhi's toxic skies. Two brothers are there to save them
Shaunak Sen was stuck in a traffic jam one evening in 2018 when he looked up at the hazy, polluted skies of Delhi and saw dozens of raptors, birds with brown feathers, gracefully circling overhead. Then, one bird just dropped to the ground in mid-flight.
"After I went back home, I had to Google it," Sen says. "What happens to birds that fall out of the sky in Delhi?" The answer led him to two Muslim brothers — Nadeem Shehzad and Muhammad Saud — who would soon become the subjects of his award-winning documentary, All That Breathes.
Shot over a period of three years from 2019, the documentary this year won both the Golden Eye Award for top documentary at Cannes and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. It tells the story of the brothers' lifelong struggle to save an unusual bird — the meat-eating black kites that have made the smog-ridden Delhi skies their home.
"Once you visit their house and see their tiny, cramped, claustrophobic basement, you realize the constraints they work under and the sheer scale of the problem. Hundreds of these majestic birds, injured and being treated
