‘All That Breathes’ Is One of the Most Mesmerizing Films of the Year

We get it—there is simply too much. So this year, we are giving our editors a last-minute opportunity to plug the things that maybe got away. See all the things you really should have read, watched, or listened to—as well as more of our year in review coverage—here.

This was another great year for documentaries—Navalny, Fire of Love, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, to name a few of my favorites. In fact, there was so much nonfiction filmmaking—especially on streaming services, where multipart doc series seem to proliferate like mushrooms—that it was easy to miss something special. To me that overlooked gem is All That Breathes by the New Delhi–based filmmaker Shaunak Sen. Released in late October and still playing as I write this on very select screens (with an HBO Max release for 2023), All That Breathes is a mesmerizing, unforgettable story about so many things: wildness, urban squalor, intimacy, devotion, entropy, and heartbreak. 

It’s set at a small wildlife clinic in New Delhi run by two brothers who are dedicated to caring for black kites—the carnivorous birds of prey that wheel in the skies above the teeming city—and it quickly becomes a meditation on human persistence and the blurred lines between civilization and savagery. If that sounds heady, just plunge in: All That Breathes is a visually stunning document of a megacity on the edge of chaos and a heartrending account of two men working tirelessly against the odds. Nadeem and Mohammed (and their hilarious sidekick/assistant, Salik) are faced with more and more sick birds, as the air quality in Delhi is increasingly inhospitable to life—not to mention boom-and-bust funding for their operation and poignant episodes of fraternal conflict. And the birds themselves are miraculously strange: bestial and vulnerable, beautiful and terrifying at once. With patient, unforgettable sequences of wildlife persisting amid the toxicity of modern life, All That Breathes is one of the year’s strangest and most haunting films.