EXCLUSIVE: This is your first look at the official trailer for All That Breathes, the surefire Oscar contender that has been called “a stone-cold masterpiece.”
The documentary directed by Shaunak Sen won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at Sundance and followed that up with the Golden Eye (l’Oeil d’or) prize as the best documentary at Cannes. With exceptional cinematography, the film immerses viewers in the story of Nadeem and Saud, brothers in Delhi, India who care for injured black kites, a bird of prey living in and soaring above one of the world’s most populous and smog-choked cities.
“Amid environmental toxicity and social unrest, the ‘kite brothers’ spend day and night caring for the creatures in their makeshift avian basement hospital,” according to a synopsis of the film. “…Sen (Cities of Sleep) explores the connection between the kites and the Muslim brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence.”
The film, from Sideshow and Submarine Deluxe in association with HBO Documentary Films, opens theatrically in the U.K. on October 14, in New York on October 21, and in L.A. on October 28. On October 11 and 12, All That Breathes will screen at the New York Film Festival, where the documentary is part of the program’s Main Slate. On Sunday, All That Breathes played at the Camden International Film Festival in Maine.
Sen’s film has also screened at DocAviv in Tel Aviv, the Krakow Film Festival in Poland, Dokufest in Kosovo, and the Hong Kong International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Firebird Award. Jurors there hailed it as “a film with exquisite and poetic cinematography. It prompts its audience to give more profound thoughts about the living conditions of different races and animals.”
“When we got our first kite, I’d stay up at night staring at it,” one of the brothers says in the film. “It looked like a furious reptile from another planet.”
Birds including the kite are renowned for their keen eyesight. But one kite above Delhi apparently needed corrective lenses. Watch the trailer to see what we mean.