Where Animal Stories Come To Life!
Congratulations Shaunak Sen!
The Animalis Fabula Film Festival was proud to be your Texas Premiere in 2022!
Congratulations on all the accolades including Best Feature Documentary Oscar Nomination!
Congratulations on all the accolades including Best Feature Documentary Oscar Nomination!
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And here's Texas Screen Scene Editor In Chief Gabriel Ponniah's Full Review:
It can be difficult, growing up in today’s geopolitical “West,” to think of one’s self as anything other than an individual being, struggling to survive in a world markedly distinct from (and not altogether kind towards) our own life. But life, in fact, can be viewed through a fundamentally different lens. A swath of Eastern traditions, and thinkers working within them, have long championed a worldview which sees all life—the entire universe—as but one singular organism with many facets. Elements of this idea inform Eastern religious practices in Buddhist or Jainist customs, for example, but they were hardly exclusive to the continent of Asia. Nearly three centuries before the common era, the Greek philosopher Zeno, founder of the Stoic school of thought, declared “All things are parts of one single system, which is called Nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with Nature.” Many centuries later, German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz echoed the sentiment: “Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.” Leibniz worked not only as a philosopher, but as a scientist and mathematician at a time when the latter two fields were undergoing tremendous progress. The rapid development of our understanding of the material world from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries may seem at first glance to have squashed that notion of oneness; I can prove with physics and biology that you are you and I am I and this thing we’re in is the universe, so it goes. Not so, says Albert Einstein: “A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space.” Even in the modern age, slews of tumblr pages celebrate the fact that the very same elements forged in the cores of stars make up our bodies. Meanwhile, The Human Genome project revels in the notion that all life on Earth is composed of the same fundamental building blocks. It’s an empathetic way of living, to be sure.
My father grew up poor in Southeast Asia, the youngest of nine siblings. He flies back to visit them as often as he can, and during his most recent trip he sent me a video of his brother rescuing a baby waterfowl from the gutter across the street, intent on nursing it back to health. It’s not the first stray animal to happen upon their kindness. It won’t be the last. In some places, in some ways of thinking, that word ‘stray’ is all but meaningless.
All That Breathes recounts the real-life struggles of Nadeem and Saud, brothers who’ve taken it upon themselves to rescue the fallen Kites of North Delhi. The city’s air quality often reaches such toxic levels of smog that scores of these raptors drop to the ground each day, blinded to buildings and wires by the sheer density of pollution. Stretching meager resources to their maximum, the amateur black kite hospital has rehabilitated more than 20,000 birds. The film emphasizes their singular selflessness and determination. All the while, political unrest threatens from the sidelines, until the flames of the city’s divisions come lapping at their doorstep. The Indian subcontinent comprises an abundance of rich and varied traditions, and in the wake of colonial mismanagement, groups forced into close proximity have the potential to clash—sometimes violently. Why, then, amidst such pressing and dangerous matters, do these brothers so devote their efforts to, as a New York Times piece on the story puts it, “a bird that is neither endangered nor particularly attractive and, in New Delhi, is about as unloved as the pigeon”?
The unity of all forms of life is woven into every thread of this tapestry. Director Shaunak Sen wisely uses considerable restraint; with a light touch, he coaxes out an authenticity in his subjects that pays substantial dividends. The understated approach walks the line between documentary and narrative, telling these brothers’ story through cinematic language more familiar to drama than an investigative report. We live and breathe the lives of our characters, and we hear their struggle, their philosophizing, their dogged persistence straight from their own mouths. In Islam, feeding kites is a means of sin-cleansing, and for the muslim brothers Nadeem and Saud, the relationship is sacred. But Delhi is majority Hindu, which holds vegetarianism as a chief principle and therefore informs a sort of discrimination against non-vegetarian birds. The brothers started up their operation when a bird hospital refused to treat a fallen kite they’d found for this very reason. Themes of change, of persecution, of manmade divisions resonate at every level of this film—most notably in the arresting cinematography, which frequently indulges in long pans across bustling ecosystems or racks focus to place the smallest of insects in the same frame as humans and their folly. The camera constantly insists on that idea of oneness by visually placing creatures of all walks of life atop one another. The kites that struggle to survive in an increasingly hostile Delhi find a friend in the Muslim community currently facing persecution from a discriminatory citizenship bill. And for me, when I watched these men show such empathy for these birds, I saw in them my uncle.
All That Breathes has made waves already at Sundance and brought considerable attention and funding to Nadeem and Saud, building on the success they enjoyed in the wake of the Times feature. No doubt ink has been spilled on the film’s poignant story of brotherhood and facing the efficacy (or impotence) of a life’s work, but for AniFab this is a poster child for what the festival is all about: that all of Earth’s life is worthwhile, and the ways in which we interact with our fellow creatures mirrors the way we treat our fellow human beings (and vice versa). One should not differentiate between all that breathes, indeed.
It can be difficult, growing up in today’s geopolitical “West,” to think of one’s self as anything other than an individual being, struggling to survive in a world markedly distinct from (and not altogether kind towards) our own life. But life, in fact, can be viewed through a fundamentally different lens. A swath of Eastern traditions, and thinkers working within them, have long championed a worldview which sees all life—the entire universe—as but one singular organism with many facets. Elements of this idea inform Eastern religious practices in Buddhist or Jainist customs, for example, but they were hardly exclusive to the continent of Asia. Nearly three centuries before the common era, the Greek philosopher Zeno, founder of the Stoic school of thought, declared “All things are parts of one single system, which is called Nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with Nature.” Many centuries later, German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz echoed the sentiment: “Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.” Leibniz worked not only as a philosopher, but as a scientist and mathematician at a time when the latter two fields were undergoing tremendous progress. The rapid development of our understanding of the material world from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries may seem at first glance to have squashed that notion of oneness; I can prove with physics and biology that you are you and I am I and this thing we’re in is the universe, so it goes. Not so, says Albert Einstein: “A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space.” Even in the modern age, slews of tumblr pages celebrate the fact that the very same elements forged in the cores of stars make up our bodies. Meanwhile, The Human Genome project revels in the notion that all life on Earth is composed of the same fundamental building blocks. It’s an empathetic way of living, to be sure.
My father grew up poor in Southeast Asia, the youngest of nine siblings. He flies back to visit them as often as he can, and during his most recent trip he sent me a video of his brother rescuing a baby waterfowl from the gutter across the street, intent on nursing it back to health. It’s not the first stray animal to happen upon their kindness. It won’t be the last. In some places, in some ways of thinking, that word ‘stray’ is all but meaningless.
All That Breathes recounts the real-life struggles of Nadeem and Saud, brothers who’ve taken it upon themselves to rescue the fallen Kites of North Delhi. The city’s air quality often reaches such toxic levels of smog that scores of these raptors drop to the ground each day, blinded to buildings and wires by the sheer density of pollution. Stretching meager resources to their maximum, the amateur black kite hospital has rehabilitated more than 20,000 birds. The film emphasizes their singular selflessness and determination. All the while, political unrest threatens from the sidelines, until the flames of the city’s divisions come lapping at their doorstep. The Indian subcontinent comprises an abundance of rich and varied traditions, and in the wake of colonial mismanagement, groups forced into close proximity have the potential to clash—sometimes violently. Why, then, amidst such pressing and dangerous matters, do these brothers so devote their efforts to, as a New York Times piece on the story puts it, “a bird that is neither endangered nor particularly attractive and, in New Delhi, is about as unloved as the pigeon”?
The unity of all forms of life is woven into every thread of this tapestry. Director Shaunak Sen wisely uses considerable restraint; with a light touch, he coaxes out an authenticity in his subjects that pays substantial dividends. The understated approach walks the line between documentary and narrative, telling these brothers’ story through cinematic language more familiar to drama than an investigative report. We live and breathe the lives of our characters, and we hear their struggle, their philosophizing, their dogged persistence straight from their own mouths. In Islam, feeding kites is a means of sin-cleansing, and for the muslim brothers Nadeem and Saud, the relationship is sacred. But Delhi is majority Hindu, which holds vegetarianism as a chief principle and therefore informs a sort of discrimination against non-vegetarian birds. The brothers started up their operation when a bird hospital refused to treat a fallen kite they’d found for this very reason. Themes of change, of persecution, of manmade divisions resonate at every level of this film—most notably in the arresting cinematography, which frequently indulges in long pans across bustling ecosystems or racks focus to place the smallest of insects in the same frame as humans and their folly. The camera constantly insists on that idea of oneness by visually placing creatures of all walks of life atop one another. The kites that struggle to survive in an increasingly hostile Delhi find a friend in the Muslim community currently facing persecution from a discriminatory citizenship bill. And for me, when I watched these men show such empathy for these birds, I saw in them my uncle.
All That Breathes has made waves already at Sundance and brought considerable attention and funding to Nadeem and Saud, building on the success they enjoyed in the wake of the Times feature. No doubt ink has been spilled on the film’s poignant story of brotherhood and facing the efficacy (or impotence) of a life’s work, but for AniFab this is a poster child for what the festival is all about: that all of Earth’s life is worthwhile, and the ways in which we interact with our fellow creatures mirrors the way we treat our fellow human beings (and vice versa). One should not differentiate between all that breathes, indeed.
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#AniFab, San Antonio's Animalis Fabula Film Festival is only possible through your generous support. Thank you.
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