USA,
2003, 83 min
Shown in 2004
CREDITS
- dir
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Judy Irving
- prod
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Judy Irving
- cam
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Judy Irving
- editor
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Judy Irving
- mus
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Chris Michie
- source
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Pelican Media, 1736 Stockton St., Ste. 2, San Francisco, CA 94133. FAX: 415-362-2421. EMAIL: films@pelicanmedia.org.
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COMMENTS
Judy Irving, Mark Bittner in person.
OTHER
We meet Mark Bittner on a Telegraph Hill stairway, feeding a rustling, impatient flock of cherry-headed conures and insisting to a small crowd of intrigued tourists that the birds clambering over his shoulders and pecking lightly at his glasses are wild. “Does the city pay you to take care of them like this?” asks one obviously baffled onlooker. Longhaired 42-year-old Bittner, like the parrots who fly over San Francisco, is an anomaly—a penniless North Beach dharma bum living in one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods and devoting himself (without pay) to studying these wild parrots. The film is a beautiful and eccentric love story of an articulate, formerly directionless man and the birds he names and befriends. Connor is a lonely blue-headed misfit who insists on remaining wild, Mingus a lame cherry head who would like to live indoors, Pushkin a harassed single father and Tupelo a badly crippled member of the flock who Bittner rescues and shelters. All of these threads combine to tell a single tale of bonding, goodbyes and self-discovery that comes to a satisfying—and delightful—conclusion. Anyone who sees this film will be glad to know that Mark Bittner has written a book about the parrots, too.
—Pamela Troy
FACTOID #171
When Festival Executive Director Claude Jarman addressed journalists at the 1977 Festival press conference, he announced that the SFIFF was launching an ’important experiment’ by screening films at the Castro Theatre (at the urging of Mayor George Moscone to take the Festival to the neighborhoods) The experiment must have worked, as the Festival still has screenings at the Castro to this day, in addition to many other satellite venues.
