international wildlife film festival
Wildlife Film Festival Kicks Off in Missoula
By Dana Green, 5-12-06
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| Caption: Mark Bittner, the subject of the award-winning documentary, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Photo by Daniela Cossali. | |
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This year’s crop of noteworthy films include a short on the killing of wild birds by domesticated cats; the “bug-eat-bug” world of the African driver ant; and a film – shot by a 16-year-old teenager from Texas – on the vanishing Costa Rica rainforests.
This year’s winner for Best Independent Film is The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a documentary on a homeless man, Mark Bittner, and his relationship with a wild flock of South African parrots in the heart of San Francisco.
Bay Area filmmaker Judy Irving, 59, had been making environmental documentaries for 30 years, struggling to get by and find funding for her films, when Wild Parrots became an unexpected hit.
A lifetime bird lover, Irving heard about the flock of wild parrots, their origins unknown, that had made a home in the city’s downtown. A friend told her about Bittner, who was feeding and caring for the flock.
Irving intended to make a five-minute short film about the man and his parrots. Instead, after four-and-a-half years of filming, it became a feature movie about one man’s struggle to find meaning in life – and how he found that in his feathered charges.
The movie has since taken on a life of its own – Bittner has written a best-selling novel about his life, put up http://www.markbittner.net" title="his own Web site,">his own Web site, and the film’s success has led to a string of offers to Irving direct other feature films – but it came as a surprise to the filmmaker after years of hard work and little financial gain.
“I’ve always picked topics I wanted to find out more about … it was a joy to make,” she said. “It’s the first film that made money the whole time I’ve been making films.”
As a student at Stanford’s film school in 1971, Irving’s first documentary was a short about a woman tortured by the noise outside her apartment.
“That was my very first student film – it was about noise pollution,” Irving said.
Through the 1970s, Irving made a number of films about Alaska’s native villages and wildlife, in an effort to promote the creation of national parks in the state.
She then shifted her focus to the nuclear arms race, making three feature-length movies on the nuclear showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union.
After two decades “depressing the hell out of myself,” Irving says, she needed a break from doing issue-oriented films. She decided to take her camera and shoot whatever struck her as meaningful – which eventually led her to Bittner and the parrots.
Irving would spend hours with her camera and tripod, patiently waiting for the birds to arrive to shoot film.
“I (just) let myself go out and shoot what I wanted to shoot,” she said. “It just grew and grew, and changed, as I saw the relationship Bittner had with these birds.”
An environmental filmmaker’s work is a constant struggle to find money for projects. Over the years, Irving has funded films out of her own pocket, sent out hundreds of letters to foundations to secure grants, and thrown countless fundraisers, all to scrape together enough money to make her films.
“I’ve made a living out of it, (but) it’s not a field you want to get into if you want financial security or high pay,” she said.
Irving hopes that filmmakers will continue to tackle larger environmental issues – not just make “pretty” films that focus on wildlife apart from their surroundings.
“A lot of nature films separate animal populations from humans,” she said. “You watch a one-hour film about tigers, and never hear anything about their disappearing habitat. It’s not real, and it doesn’t serve the animals well.”
A well-done environmental film can tell the truth and entertain and empower its audience at the same time, Irving believes.
“In the 1970s, it was ‘cool’ to make a film full of bad news, but people got sick of that,” Irving said. “You do have to send people away with some hope, and the desire to take action.”
Irving’s next film is inspiring – focusing on the federal and state efforts to restore the salt marshes edging the San Francisco Bay and reclaim habitat for harbor seals, marsh birds, and native fish.
“You don’t do this to make money,” she said. “You get into it because you want to have your say in the world. That has its own reward.”
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill will be shown at the Wilma Theater in Missoula on Wednesday, May 17, at 12:30 p.m., and again on Friday, May19, 7:30 p.m. For a complete list of the IWFF schedule and more information go to http://www.wildlifefilms.org.
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