PLOT: Judy Irving's documentary, shot over several years, shows how a former hippie musician reshapes his life and finds his spiritual centre through his friendship with a flock of free-roaming parakeets in San Francisco.
A world of natural wonder exists just outside our door, even in cities as crowded and developed as San Francisco.
But you have to pay attention. An inspirational documentary film called The Wild Parrots Of Telegraph Hill shows how one man -- all at once a lonely former hippie, failed musician and struggling existentialist with no job and no desire to find one -- started to pay attention. In doing so, he dramatically changed his entire life, all for the better.
The man is Mark Bittner, now a best-selling author of the book that inspired this film. The nature he discovered was a flock of wild birds known in the pet trade either as cherry-headed conures or red-masked parakeets. A few were ecapees, the rest their born-in-the-wild offspring.
Over a period of six years, Bittner befriended and fed the rowdy but beguiling birds, gave them names like Pushkin and Picasso, nursed them when they fell ill and began to monitor their lives, habits and individual personalities. His studies became as detailed as a scientist's log, although the proudly amateur Bittner also believes his birds have cognitive thought and complex emotions, too.
Filmmaker Judy Irving arrived during this process to record on film his extraordinary relationship with these birds, which numbered 24 in the beginning and now exceed 160 birds of several species, with the cherry-heads dominating.
On an intimate scale, the film is a probe into one person's unique life, with an emphasis on an individual hovering on the outer fringes of what is considered normal. Bittner, a spiritual man, is against materialism but that brings challenges which he could not overcome until he met the birds.
On a larger scale, The Wild Parrots Of Telegraph Hill is a quietly profound way to understand the importance of mankind's relationship with nature. Even on Telegraph Hill in the heart of San Francisco, other creatures live and die in dramatic fashion. Open your eyes and heart, as Bittner did, and you are rewarded with a fresh, vital relationship with the environment.
In the film, one cynic sarcastically dubs Bittner as "St. Francis of Telegraph Hill" and questions the wildness of the parrots, especially as an exotic species being hand-fed and named. That, of course, misses the point.
Bittner, who refuses to be drawn into debates about whether exotic species deserve protection, is special because he spent the time that few of us has to acquaint himself with another species that roams free in his neighbourhood. In doing so, he affirmed his feelings about "the sanctity of life."
Take this trip with him and you can share in the joy and in the wisdom that grew out of the journey he took.
(This film is rated G)
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