It's foggy January afternoon. Mohammad Umar has just counted the day's deliveries: A dozen cartons containing 12 injured birds, eleven of them black kites, that Umar has transported in an auto rickshaw from three hospitals in the national capital on the day.
"Most of them are wing injuries," says Salik Rehman, who joins Umar in carefully collecting the cartons from the auto rickshaw and placing them on the floor of the treatment room of Wildlife Rescue, a hospital for birds near the Yamuna river in the northern region of the national capital.
Wildlife Rescue on Gali No. 9 in Rehmani Chowk of Wazirabad village in North Delhi is the subject of All That Breathes, the Indian documentary film that has been nominated for the Best Documentary Feature, announced on January 24. Both Umar and Rehman appear in the film, shot in Wazirabad over three years, along with Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, the two bird-loving brothers who founded the hospital two decades ago.
Directed by Delhi-based documentary filmmaker Shaunak Sen, All That Breathes tells the story of the city's black kites and their carers who pull out all the stops to keep the majestic predator birds alive in the sky. The film, which premiered at the Sundance film festival in January last year, has had a dream run at major film festivals across the world over a year picking up big prizes, including in Cannes.
The story of Delhi's black kites and an extended family of traditional metal workers from the walled city in Old Delhi that has been caring for them ceaselessly for decades tell a heart-rending yet inspiring tale of love and devotion to life in all its forms. It also reveals the disastrous effects of blatant development that focuses only on the humans, disregarding other forms of life that sustain the planet.
"There is a huge number of black kites in Delhi. They are intelligent and confident birds," say Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, the two brothers who took birds injured in kite flying incidents to a local hospital as young kids while growing up in the walled city in the '90s. "The first black kite we rescued had an injured wing. It was in 1995. Saud and I took the bird to the hospital. After treatment we released the bird where we had found it," says Shehzad, reminiscing about their early entry into bird care.
The bird hospital in Old Delhi near the brothers' home was the Charity Birds Hospital in Chandni Chowk, one of the oldest bird hospitals in the country founded in 1929. Today, the same hospital sends injured black kites to the hospital run by Shehzad and Saud for specialised treatment.
As they grew into young adults, the brothers kept their love for the birds going, taking an occasional injured owl or squirrel they found lying on the road to hospital. Shehzad and Saud, who joined their father's soap dispenser business after school, then began bringing injured birds home to "a small cage we built on the roof".
"It was initially four or five birds in one month, but the number kept growing. The neighbours noticed the birds and started bringing more injured birds," says Saud, who soon joined the Sanjay Gandhi Animal Care Centre, the country's oldest veterinary hospital at Raja Garden in West Delhi, as a volunteer. "Saud would bunk classes to work in the veterinary hospital as a volunteer," says Shehzad. In 2003, the brothers founded their own bird hospital, which they would register as a charitable trust under the name of Wildlife Rescue in 2010.
Three years later, Shehzad and Saud moved the hospital from their Old Delhi home to a new facility in Wazirabad, where they ran their family business of making liquid soap dispensers and treating injured black kites from the same basement facility. Slowly they added two part-time employees and a part-time veterinary doctor. Today, the hospital has a full-time doctor, three full-time employees, Umar, who works part-time while studying for a business administration degree at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, and a few volunteers across the city.
Between 2010, the year the brothers registered Wildlife Rescue, and 2022, the hospital rescued 24,000 birds, up from the 500 during 2003, its first year, and 2010. "We get calls daily from hospitals, individuals and government organisations like police, civil bodies and fire service about injured birds requiring treatment," says Shehzad.
In 2018, filmmaker Sen and his Delhi-based producer Aman Mann met the two brothers. "Mann said they were interested in making a documentary about our hospital," recalls Saud. "Many people had approached us earlier with the same plan, but Mann said, 'You don't know us, but our film will be unique'," he adds. "We agreed."
Sen and Mann's film crew started shooting at Wildlife Rescue in January 2019. First came the practice scenes. "Shaunak told us to stop caring about the camera and think of the crew as a fly on the wall," jokes Shehzad. "We will start filming when you start yawning in front of the camera," Sen told the brothers.
It turned out that the two brothers were natural actors. "We were doing our daily jobs (liquid soap business and treating birds) and they were shooting. It went on for three years (interrupted by the pandemic), three to four days a week," says Saud. The hospital moved to a new facility next door where the last scene of the movie was shot in October 2021.
Mann's crew shot about 400 hours of footage and after six months of editing, the documentary was as long as 93 minutes. The film debuted at the Sundance festival after another six months. Rehman, who lost his spectacles to a black kite during the shooting -- a scene that won him some sympathy and a lot of laughs -- got an acting offer from a Marathi director after the film was screened at the Cannes festival last year. It was promptly rejected.
While the film has been winning awards at nearly every festival it went to, the hospital has been continuing its care for the birds injured in kite flying or storms or dehydrated in the summer. The highest number of injured birds came last year when record high temperatures were witnessed last summer. The Wildlife Rescue received 3,385 birds, including 3,001 black kites, last year compared to 2,767 birds, including 2,470 black kites in 2021.
A year after the film's international festival circuit tour, the Wildlife Rescue hasn't received the support in donations they expected to increase the numbers, both staff and patients, and upgrade treatment and equipment. "The film has helped increase public awareness abroad about the problems faced by the black kite population in India," says Shehzad.
In India, the brothers expect the same increase in public awareness when the film is released next month by HBO. The film already had its theatrical run in the United Kingdom and the United States. The film's American producer has helped the hospital with money while the awards' money won at festivals too had been shared with the hospital. There were some occasional foreign donations too, but all these were not enough to upgrade the functioning of Wildlife Rescue.
On the second floor terrace of Wildlife Trust, at least 100 birds, most of them black kites, are staying back within a metallic fence and tin roof after the completion of treatment. In two large separate cages, a few black kites, fresh from surgeries, remain under observation before they are released too. Though the birds that are completely cured can fly away through a partially open roof, most of them are happy to rest on the roof, eating and drinking the hospital's regular supply of food and water. A few healthy black kites sometimes flock in to join the others, creating an extended family of birds at the Wildlife Rescue.
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