"I've always dreamed of being a pilot," he says. The sheer joy of seeing the birds take flight again, says Nadeem, possibly because his own attempt to take to the skies was thwarted. Over the years, saving the kites has become a kind of compulsion, Nadeem says. They cannot make time for their families because they care for the birds after an impossibly long day at work. On many days, they buy the meat with their own dwindling funds. Throughout the film, the brothers have problems convincing people of the kites' value, and they struggle to find donors to buy meat for the injured raptors. But black kites are also scavengers - and are particularly helpful with cleaning the mountains of garbage that pile up in Delhi, he explains. Most people tend to misunderstand raptors, Saud says. Jains, who believe in the tenets of non-violence, are staunch vegetarians, and the hospital didn't have the capacity to provide the birds with their primary diet of meat. In 1995, a bird hospital run by the Jain community nearby turned it away because it was "a non-vegetarian bird," says Saud, the younger brother. The brothers were particularly drawn to the black kite, Nadeem says, when they found an injured bird as kids but couldn't get treatment for it. They come from Russia, the steppes of Afghanistan and Mongolia." This, and the huge amounts of garbage that pile up every day, attracts hundreds of these scavenging birds. "The scraps from slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants are dumped in Delhi. Delhi is a gaping wound, and we're a tiny Band-Aid on it," says Nadeem, a wildlife rehabilitator and the elder of the brothers. Hundreds of these majestic birds, injured and being treated from cardboard boxes in that makeshift basement - it's cinematically riveting. "Once you visit their house and see their tiny, cramped, claustrophobic basement, you realize the constraints they work under and the sheer scale of the problem. The film tells of the brothers' lifelong struggle to save an unusual bird - the meat-eating black kites that have made the smog-ridden Delhi skies their home. And now it's been nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature film - only the second Indian film nominated in that category after Writing With Fire in 2021. Shot over a period of three years from 2019, the documentary last year won both the Golden Eye Award for top documentary at Cannes and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. "What happens to birds that fall out of the sky in Delhi?" The answer led him to two Muslim brothers - Nadeem Shehzad and Muhammad Saud - who would soon become the subjects of his award-winning documentary, All That Breathes. "After I went back home, I had to Google it," Sen says. Then, one bird just dropped to the ground in mid-flight. Shaunak Sen was stuck in a traffic jam one evening in 2018 when he looked up at the hazy, polluted skies of Delhi and saw dozens of raptors, birds with brown feathers, gracefully circling overhead. The brothers are featured in a new prize-winning documentary, All That Breathes, which was just nominated for an Oscar and is premiering on HBO on Feb. Over the past 12 years, they've treated nearly 26,000 of the raptors. Injured black kites at Wildlife Rescue, a clinic run by brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Muhammad Saud in Delhi.
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