Documentary
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the Golden Eye at Cannes, Shaunak Sen’s superb documentary focuses on two brothers working to protect birds in New Delhi, while telling a more expansive story about contemporary life as a citizen of both India’s capital and the wider world.
Nadeem and Saud live in a working-class, predominantly Muslim neighbourhood. Their business is soap dispensers, but their passion is their budding organisation Wildlife Rescue, as part of which they save black kites injured by mid-air collisions caused by the city’s terrifyingly poor air quality and opaque skies. Lobbying for donations while lovingly tending to these magisterial birds of prey, Nadeem and Saud are a two-man band intervening to make change while the city faces life with pollution, overpopulation and climate change, and as violent protests around India’s anti-Muslim Citizen Act begin to grow.
Everything is connected in Sen’s dreamy and impressionistic film, which provokes thinking around the intersections of the climate and environmental crises and the people they most affect, the relationship between humanity and the natural world, and the value of individual actions against an edifice of systemic problems.