The film-making does an exquisite job of teasing out these metaphors through the merging of thoughtful voice-over, dramatic cinematography and profound profiling. At one point, the Muslim brothers don’t have the time to attend the anti-CAA protests because they’re too busy trying to save the birds that symbolize them. They can’t change a broken system, but they can perhaps repair the pieces. At another point, the young helper, Salik, passively watches a video of police violence on his cellphone, before switching it off and turning his attention to a playful squirrel in his shirt pocket. As is evident, context and subtext share the same air in All That Breathes. Morbidly beautiful images of busy animals (rats, cows, pigs, snails, lizards and even tortoises) reveal the city’s dissonant social fabric. The creatures are filmed in the language of fiction – long tracking shots, endless stays, lens flares, evocative score – as if to suggest that the real story is rooted in their unnatural setting. Walls separate their garbage dumps and landfills from townships. Like the kites, they consume the filth that pervades the cities – until the filth consumes them. They are then reduced to cheap slurs of hygiene, routinely employed by Hindutva mobs to incite Islamophobic rage.
