Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
“All That Breathes” is vying for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars next month, but did you know that the film is co-produced by a studio in Montgomery County, Maryland?
“The film has had a magical ride since it was first recognized at Sundance,” Executive Producer Sean Carroll told WTOP. “A year ago I never would have expected this. We’d had enough success that there was a good chance that it might happen, but you don’t believe it until you actually hear and see it. It was quite an electric thrill [to be nominated this year].”
Carroll runs HHMI Tangled Bank Studios in Chevy Chase, one of several production companies on the film, including Rise Films in London and Kiterabbit Films in India.
“We’re nested in the philanthropy of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, so we’re part of a nonprofit and our mission is to bring stories about science and nature to the public,” he said. “This is one of those stories that we never quite imagined would go this far.”
The documentary follows Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, two brothers who run a bird-healing clinic in Wazirabad, Delhi, to cure 26,000 raptors over the last 20 years.
“Two brothers in Delhi with no formal training see birds dropping out of the sky,” Carroll said. “Just the way they were raised by their mom, they felt they needed to do something about it. … These brothers started taking birds to the basement of their soap-dispenser factory and nursing these birds back to health and releasing them back into the wild.”
The brothers are lovable characters, bantering about WWE as they perform bird surgery.
“They do this on their own time, on their own dime with all of the everyday challenges of living in Delhi and raising a family and making ends meet, so it’s a very noble story,” said Carroll. “We were very drawn to it because we just felt that these brothers really showed us that no matter your walk-in life, you can do something to improve the world.”
At one point, the narrator says, “You don’t care about things because they share the same country, religion or politics. Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air. That’s why we can’t abandon the birds.” Thus, we should all care for “all that breathes.”
“They’re inspiring a lot of people to care,” Carroll said. “The most powerful thing about the human mind is our ability to empathize with other people even though we have nothing in common. We can watch a story in Delhi, be moved by these brothers’ struggle, share the triumph of an animal nursed back to health and ask ourselves: ‘What are we doing?'”
According to Carroll, Indian filmmaker Shaunak Sen directs with “patient intimacy,” from puddle reflections on the streets of Delhi to frames within frames inside the hospital with slow dolly shots.
“The accomplishment of the film is to give us a fly-on-the-wall view where the brothers are not aware of the camera,” he said. “Those long pan shots, there was some great cinematography involved. … Rather than having great cuts form place to place inside the rescue hospital and assembly area, one long pan gave you a sense of the whole interior.”
The 91-minute film is streaming on HBO Max in the Hindi language with English subtitles.
“Get into a dark room, turn off the phone, take away the distractions, don’t have other stuff going on,” Carroll said. “The best reward is to get immersed in this world and the only way that’s going to happen is patient immersion. That happens easily in the theater on a giant screen, but if you’re watching on HBO Max, you’ll be rewarded for filtering out the noise.”
That’s exactly how the film won the World Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, then won the Golden Eye for Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival. Next up, it’s the Academy Awards on March 12 — and Carroll will be there in the auditorium.
“The three official nominees are the two producers, Aman Mann and Teddy Leifer and the director Shaunak Sen, then the executive producers, myself and David Elisco, we’ll be up off the floor in higher-perched seats,” he said. “… We feel we’ve already won. I don’t mean that as a cliché. This has so exceeded our wildest imagination, so we’re just trying to enjoy it.”
Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
