Portland Documentary & eXperimental Film Festival

A loosely-knit community of birdwatchers in New York’s Central Park; ornithologists with their specimen collections at a dozen different natural history museums; bird banders gingerly extracting birds from mist nets and collecting data in upstate New York; six people searching for an extinct bird in a Louisiana bayou: these are the strands that are woven together by The Birdpeople as it documents a passionate fixation. Part cultural history, part self-reflexive anthropology, by turns humorous and elegiac, The Birdpeople examines the pleasures and problems of looking and naming, and investigates the social construction of nature, centered on ornithology and its amateur counterpart, birdwatching.

The images of birds in the film, optically printed from kodachrome super 8, form a re-occurring counterpoint to the portraits of the bird people. Rather than bringing the birds into an anthropomorphized and sympathetic relationship to the viewer, these worked-over images foreground the birds’ inassimilable otherness and the strange edges of their beauty.

A short documentary about a group of citizens trying to save a local park, or at least trying to compose a paragraph about saving a local park.