Film review: Overland documentary captures enrapturement with raptors across four continents
The feature offers a breathtaking look at birds of prey and people who devote their entire lives to them
Khalifa Bin Mujren, who’s keeping the ancient practice of falconry alive in the United Arab Emirates, is one of the people Overland filmmakers followed for five years..
Overland streams at the Whistler Film Festival until December 31.
A DIVORCED FATHER of two school-age kids living alone in a small farmhouse in Abruzzo, an Oklahoma millennial who spent two years with Khazak nomads in western Mongolia, and an employee of the Crown Prince of Dubai: what these three unique individuals share is an unfaltering passion for falcons.
Their stories are intertwined in Overland, a gorgeous feature documentary written, produced, and directed by wife-and-husband duo Elisabeth Haviland James (The Loving Story, Althea, In So Many Words) and Revere La Noue.
The two spent five years making the film, capturing magnificent creatures with six-foot wingspans in flight as well as the backstories that help explain why these humans feel so deeply connected to birds of prey.
Lauren McGough rehabilitates birds of prey.
Anthropologist/Ironman athlete/eagle whisperer Lauren McGough reveals how her happiest moments as an awkward teen were spent in the woods with a hawk. In the desert, Khalifa Bin Mujren races some of the fastest and strongest falcons in the world while missing his late father. Giovanni Granati, who lacks a father figure, idolizes Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who wrote De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (On the Art of Hunting With Birds) around 1240. Upon enlisting his unmotivated teenage son to spend three months learning falconry with him as part punishment, part education, Granati describes the ancient practice as a “severe and absolute art”.
In exploring their subjects’ relationships with raptors, the film speaks to broader universal concerns: urban sprawl, lack and loss of natural habitats, people’s disconnection from nature, and the busy-ness of screen-centred modern life, to name a few.
If, since the onset of COVID-19, your eyes have become tired from so many Zoom meetings and your soul is quashed because of not having travelled outside your postal code in months, the 105-minute film will be a balm for both. The filmmakers travel from the sands of the Arabian Peninsula’s Empty Quarter to endless Italian sunflower fields to the barren Altai Mountains to Southern Africa’s grassy Kalahari Basin and beyond, giving a bird’s eye view of so much glorious landscape. But it’s their up-close shots of the piercing, inquisitive eyes of the birds that the characters love deeply enough to devote their entire lives to that will stop you in your tracks.
Overland.
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