Emptying the Skies Review

Emptying the Skies (2013)

Editor’s Notes: Emptying the Skies opens in Toronto at The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema this Friday November 14th.

Based on journalist Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 essay, Emptying the Skies is a harrowing account of the decimation of migratory songbirds in the Mediterranean. Millions of birds are killed every year and many species are at risk of extinction. Though as recently as the last century, they were an important part of the regional diet, nowadays the birds — known as ambelopoulia by Cypriots, some of the biggest consumers of the little birds — are sold as delicacies. The European Birds Directive has made this poaching illegal, but enforcement is weak, and both legal and public support is lacking.

Based on journalist Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 essay, Emptying the Skies is a harrowing account of the decimation of migratory songbirds in the Mediterranean.

Emptying the Skies follows a band of activists as they make their way around the Mediterranean throughout the year, traveling from country to country as the birds migrate, rescuing them from the particularly nasty traps of poachers. Some birds are caught on lime sticks, their feet literally glued to branches they have innocently perched on, their frantic attempts to free themselves only making their condition worse. Others are crushed in rock traps, some are tangled in hidden nets, even more wind up inside cages. The activists sneak onto private property, taking the law into their own hands, by their own admission, and free the birds and destroy the traps.

Obviously, this destruction of property does not sit well with many locals. There are confrontations, arguments, and people have been hurt. There are hints that the mafia is even involved. But what the film doesn’t tell you that Franzen’s article does, is that in Cyprus, it’s legal to go onto private property as long as it is not fenced. Just being there, freeing live animals who were illegally trapped, isn’t the ambiguous legal quagmire the documentary wants you to believe. It’s just one of the many times that the details, which are largely ignored, would have made for a much better story.

At some point, as admirable and exciting as the activists’ work is, the humans involved in the film needed to step aside and stop telling us what the birds are, and let the birds themselves show us. The medium of cinema is more than capable of capturing the beauty and necessity of such complicated, fascinating creatures, but Emptying the Skies seems to think the audience can only relate to birds as pretty and helpless, that revealing anything beyond that would cause our attention to wane. Exacerbating this strange distance from the film’s subject matter are the visuals. The birds are shown in the same mid-distance framing, straight on, with the birds in the very center of the shot time and time again, whether they are trapped or being rescued or just out in the wild. Without much aesthetic variation, Emptying the Skies starts to look more like a statistical review than a film.

Emptying the Skies seems to consider itself little more than a visual companion to Franzen’s 2010 New Yorker article. There are enormous issues of class, wealth distribution, politics, tourism and more that are ignored or only lightly touched on, and if they are, it’s through supplemental footage.

Emptying the Skies seems to consider itself little more than a visual companion to Franzen’s 2010 New Yorker article. There are enormous issues of class, wealth distribution, politics, tourism and more that are ignored or only lightly touched on, and if they are, it’s through supplemental footage. There is an extended clip from a British cooking show, for example, where a bunch of self-satisfied jerks sit around a table with napkins over their heads as they eat these songbirds, then chuckle at the legal loophole that allows them to do so without being prosecuted. It’s one of the most fascinating moments in the film, and as important as it is to see exactly what kind of person drives this destructive enterprise, an old TV clip should enhance a documentary, not become the most interesting part of it.

7.2 GOOD

The birds are shown in the same mid-distance framing, straight on, with the birds in the very center of the shot time and time again, whether they are trapped or being rescued or just out in the wild. Without much aesthetic variation, Emptying the Skies starts to look more like a statistical review than a film.