Wild parrots of Telegraph Hill
Now that they’re proven to be profitable, we’ve entered a golden age of intelligent nonfiction films about every subject under the sun. Made on a shoestring and lovingly passed from one art house to the next, many of the best recent documentaries are made by people who see the world through their lens, with far-reaching ambitions to teach, incite and unearth universality in their subjects. But since Hoop Dreams, it’s been common knowledge that the most resonant documentaries usually are narrow tales about remarkable lives. In storytelling, less usually means more, and it’s hard to imagine much simpler abundance than in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.
This film is one of the most affecting, intimate and wholly unexpected documentary pleasures of recent years. It’s little more than a clever camera crew led by director Judy Irving shadowing a semi-homeless man and the 24 parrots he husbands in one of San Francisco’s most picturesque neighborhoods, but it’s not a nature film, a polemic or an artsy muse. It’s simply a story about a man and his affinity for a flock of birds—a story that’s relentlessly compelling, charming and moving throughout its all-too-short 83 minutes.
Though the neighbors have their suspicions, nobody knows how the parrots got into the trees on Telegraph Hill—not even Mark Bittner, a former musician who hasn’t worked a regular job in 30 years. He fell in love with the parrots while feeding them, and he just never left. He gave them their names, and he knows each bird’s distinctive markings—and their loves, their feuds, their survival strategies and much more.
Several years ago, a rich couple allowed him to move into a cottage on their property, and that’s where he lives among his birds.
They’re all cherryhead conures, with the exception of blue-headed Connor. They’re tropical birds, but they seem to thrive in the Bay Area climate as well. They spend most of their time looking for food, watching out for hawks and scuffling with each other, and everything they do is captured with a detail and brevity that makes you marvel just as much at Irving as her subjects.
Irving—a crew member on Roger and Me who’s known for her nature films—illustrates Bittner’s stories about the birds with footage that’s just as demonstrative as something from the old Wild Kingdom series, but so much more natural. When two birds develop a rivalry, for instance, we see what it looks like in all its pecking, scratching glory. It must have taken countless hours to get this footage, but Irving delivers it almost offhandedly. Combined with Bittner’s soothing voice, this remarkable stuff is made casual.
Bittner reminds Irving of her grandfather, and like Chris Smith in American Movie, she doesn’t judge this strange man and his eccentricities. When you’re this sharp, and when your story is this unique, sentiment doesn’t equal manipulation. Irving doesn’t have the money or technical wizardry of the crew behind 2001’s ingenious Winged Migration, but she still does a remarkable job of illustrating the birds’ survival skills (hawks can be avoided indefinitely by simply flying behind them, since they can’t turn very well). Bittner constantly worries about the birds’ survival, and when a damaged bird named Picasso disappears, his pain is striking—and we also see Picasso’s mate, Sophie, whose loneliness seems just as palpable. Yes, it sounds far-fetched. Perhaps you’ve just got to see it.
Don’t be put off by the title, or the prospect of bird-watching for an evening. Only a few films every year have this much technical acumen to go with this much soul. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is getting a gradual national release largely because of the spectacular word-of-mouth love it has received, and everyone should know.