If you stare long enough at the grey monotone skies in certain parts of North Delhi, at some point you’ll see a bird fall out of the sky. The sheer opacity of New Delhi’s toxic air ensures that bigger birds, especially raptors, regularly collide into buildings or get entangled in wires.
Nadeem and Saud grew up in a working-class Muslim neighborhood with narrow, dingy lanes. The act of looking up – by their own admission – provided a kind of release into an open, liberating expanse. At a very early age, they fell in love with things that flew. They fell in love, in particular, with the black kite.
As children, they lay on their terrace, gazing up as the elders in their family tossed raw meat skyward. They watched as hundreds of kites appeared and maneuvered through the air with great agility to catch the meat. ‘Meat tossing’ continues to be a popular activity in Muslim areas of Delhi. Muslims believe that the act of feeding birds-of-prey washes away the sins of the meat-tosser.
When a black kite first fell to the ground in front of them, the brothers took it to a bird hospital. The hospital, however, refused to treat it – because it was a “non-vegetarian” bird. At the time, the teenage Nadeem and Saud were training to be professional bodybuilders. They used their informal knowledge of muscles and tendons to care for the bird on their own. Since then, they have operated on and rehabilitated more than 20,000 birds in their tiny garage-basement, while dreaming of someday building a proper wildlife hospital.
Today the brothers are unique philosophers of the urban. In 2017, Delhi’s air was 12 times worse than the second most polluted city in the world, Beijing. Such an extreme environment prompts unprecedented changes in nonhuman life. The brothers are expert witnesses to these remarkable ecological changes.
In recent years, the brothers have received invitations from around the world to share their unique knowledge of kite surgery, and to discuss how cities can be understood by looking up at the movements in their skies. In February 2020, the New York Times ran a feature on them that raised their profile globally.
India has recently witnessed increasing social unrest. Things reached a crescendo when the government introduced a citizenship bill that, some argue, potentially discriminates against the 182 million Muslim citizens in the country. Widespread protests against this bill rocked the country.
After two months of unabating street protests, things took a shocking turn. North Delhi was enveloped in deadly violence. Mobs killed more than 50 people and hundreds of houses were set on fire. With the violence threatening to hit their neighborhood as well, the brothers spent many nights patrolling the front of their house in fear of oncoming mobs.
Alongside this violence was the alarming rise in mysterious kite injuries. Delhi has the highest density of these raptors in the world – a growth that, stunningly, corresponds with the city’s rising pollution levels. Yet, more injured kites arrive at the brothers’ each day with inexplicable cases of blindness and neural deformities. With funding for their hospital finally coming through, and opportunities for further training from academic institutions in the U.S. beckoning to Nadeem, the two brothers look to secure the future of their Wildlife Rescue, while wrestling with how they will continue to face the pressures of the environmental and political climates that increasingly assail them.
The combined stories of this human-kite ensemble paint an untold picture of life in the world’s most hazardous urban environment. It tells the story of toxicity - in the air and among people – and shines a light on a remarkable family that chooses to battle on against the backdrop of both.
Shaunak Sen - Director’s Statement
My first feature-length documentary, Cities of Sleep, explored New Delhi through the lens of sleep. By focusing on the 'sleep mafia' of Delhi (these are people who control who sleeps where, for how long and what quality of sleep – for the homeless), I leveraged sleep as a political, philosophical and aesthetic prism through which to consider the city. As a method, I am deeply interested in looking at everyday banal phenomena that usually occupy the fringes of our vision, as objects of rigorous study. Through this film, I want to harness the enchantment of the sky. I want audiences to leave theatres and instinctively look up – to think of the sky and the birds in it as novel, wonderfully alien things.
At the most nascent level, my interest in the 'more-than-human' (as it is called in geography terminology) began during a fellowship in Cambridge University in 2018, under a research project called 'Urban Ecologies'. I began developing a deep interest in the behavioral and evolutionary changes in animals in Delhi prompted by air pollution. Coupled with this was a sense of unease many of us felt towards the escalating social tension in India. Focusing closely on the figure of the black kite opened up not just the environmental but also the most pressing socio-political dramas of our times.
I am not interested in making either conventional 'nature-based' programming or a 'wildlife' documentary. My focus is neither limited to the life of the human protagonists nor the avian ones. The city itself – replete with the many human-animal ensembles in it – features in the film as a character.
In recent months, Nadeem and Saud have felt under siege from factors other than Delhi's ongoing environmental catastrophe. The family grapples with the seismic ecological and political changes taking place around them and their relationship with their work comes under severe stress.
The film experiences many of these macro-level changes through intimate details, as the family processes and deals with them. Sometimes through trepidation, sometimes through instinctive fear, sometimes with wry humour, occasionally with ugly in-fighting, but mostly – with quiet courage.
Director
Shaunak Sen
Date of release
2022
Running time
97 min
Rating
12A
Country of origin
UK, India, United States
Language
Hindi with English subtitles