97 min | NR | October 21, 2022 | Submarine Deluxe / Sideshow
Two brothers in Delhi run a basement clinic for falling birds. The city’s air is poison and its streets are on edge. They keep healing kites because someone has to.
Two Muslim brothers run a makeshift clinic in a Delhi basement. Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad treat black kites, the raptors that drop out of the city’s poisoned sky by the thousands. They work with scraps, secondhand tools, and a meat grinder, healing birds that no hospital will take. The film is about these men and their birds. It is also about a city choking on its own air and tearing at its own seams while two brothers refuse to stop the small work in front of them.
Nadeem is the dreamer, the brother who talks about leaving for a degree abroad and lets the weight of the work settle into his face. Saud is the steady one, the brother who stays and grinds the meat and keeps the lights on. Salik Rehman, their young assistant, carries a wide-eyed devotion to the kites that the brothers buried under exhaustion years ago. The three move through their cramped rooms with the unforced rhythm of men who have done this a long time. The camera catches them mid-argument and mid-silence, and the silences say more. Their care for the birds is never sentimental. It is labor.
Shaunak Sen directs with a patience that borders on devotion. There is no screenwriter because there is no script. Sen builds meaning through observation and arrangement instead. The camera lingers on rats swarming a flooded lot, on a snail crossing a wire, on a frog half-submerged in scum, before it ever finds a human face. These long opening takes establish the film’s central claim that the city belongs to all that breathes and not just to the people in it. The sound design layers traffic, news radio, and distant protest under the constant cry of birds, so the unrest outside the clinic never leaves the frame.
This is a film that refuses the easy version of itself. It could be a clean parable about kindness in a cruel city, and Sen will not let it be that simple. The brothers’ work is underfunded and the birds never stop falling, and the film never pretends otherwise. What it offers instead is a way of seeing. The kite falls, the brothers catch it, the sky stays poison, and the work goes on. Sen frames that endurance not as despair but as attention, and attention becomes its own form of resistance.