Over the sky of the Ornithological Rehabilitation Center of Geneva (Switzerland), very close to the city airport, the planes are flying. Meanwhile, indoors, hundreds of wounded birds remain caged awaiting a cure and "unable to adapt to a world that is no longer made for them," as one of their protectors says. In order to feed them and keep them alive, the workers of this particular veterinary hospital kill rodents and find in the care of others how to take care of themselves.
This place full of paradoxes and contradictions is the setting for Bird Island , a documentary presented at the Rotterdam Film Festival and which the Lanzarote Film Festival has shown in Spain. The film, awarded by the NGO Greenpeace for its environmental discourse, is built through the relationship of Antonin, a young man with a chronic illness who began as an apprentice, and Paul, a man in charge of transmitting the secrets of his trade just before to withdraw.
The film's directors, Maya Kosa and Sérgio Da Costa, started this project by moving to a house in Geneva (Switzerland) whose garden attracted many birds. It was then that they realized that they knew next to nothing about their new neighbors. When they found one of them wounded, they found the center that inspired this movie. What they discovered was a place whose only connection to the current world is the sound of planes flying over the area. “There we met a man, Patrick Jacot, who had been standing there for more than 40 years, practically alone and on a voluntary basis. The center is financed with private funds, while the Administration has limited itself to giving up abandoned land, which cannot be used for other activities due to the proximity of the airport, ”the filmmakers recall by email.
In exchange for being able to use a public space, Mr. Jacot must find employees through social services. "They tend to be people with no real prospect of finding a job, who achieve an occupation there that keeps them integrated into society," says Maya Kosa. "For us, this place appeared as an island of resistance against a global system that is causing the destruction of our planet. It is a sanctuary dedicated to both wounded birds and souls in distress. There, the suffering of these men was equals that of animals, so bonds of interdependence and solidarity are very moving. "
Antonin's real experiences feed the plot of the documentary
Play with fiction
To narrate from scratch the experiences of the people they met in the center, Kosa and Da Costa play lightly with fiction. After months of filming the day-to-day of the center, they decided to include in it an external element, which would undergo this healing process. They invited the young Antonin Ivanidze, a student from the same film school they attended years ago, to learn on camera how the forgotten micro-world works for the rest of society.
Another of the many paradoxes of the Geneva Ornithological Rehabilitation Center that the documentary records is the combination of images of great beauty starring the birds with the pragmatic ugliness of the different processes that their workers face in their day to day, from operations using mice as food for birds of prey. Because, despite the marked ecological discourse of Bird Island , its managers have not wanted to avoid the contradiction that supposes that in the center they kill some animals to save others. It is for them "a way of asking questions about what our relationship with other living beings is like."
Since they do not usually travel to the festivals that show their films so as not to generate a carbon footprint, Kosa and De Costa reply to this interview by email. His gesture connects them with the activism of Greta Thunberg, celebrated and at the same time widely criticized. "She embodies our conscience. It confronts us with our contradictions and our mistakes. By challenging the way we have lived so far, some people respond violently because they are not ready for change. They pay it with a person who comes to destabilize the false statements on which our way of life is based ”, argues Sérgio Da Costa. Critics also set their sights on the film industry. “When I think that every director travels to all corners of the planet to present his film for 15 minutes in front of the public… it's crazy! There is an urgent need to rethink in depth the way we produce and distribute films ”, defends the director.