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Overlooked & Underrated Docs & Features
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Birders: The Central Park Effect
I learned a new word today, watching first-time filmmaker Jeffrey Kimball's "Birders: The Central Park Effect": 'biophilia'. Although it's certainly not in spell-check programs, dictionary dot com defines it as, 'a love of life and the living world; the affinity of human beings for other life forms.'
Guess that makes me a biophiliac. Although I most certainly wasn't raised as such. I learned in Sunday school that Jews don't have Hell. (Cold comfort in light of our annual lack of Christmas.) But, it wasn't true. Jews do have Hell – camping. Yet despite my hellish childhood experiences in nature, somehow I learned to love it, but just not overnight.
Anyway, in addition to occasional daytime forays into the woods and the hills, I've been watching nature documentaries – beginning with Wild Kingdom in the 1950s – my entire life. Being in nature or watching it at movie theaters or on television is my version of going to temples. A very small percentage of the documentary screeners I receive for review showcase nature. A very large percentage, of course, covers our destruction of it.
So, it's a thorough and rare delight to see a documentary screener about nature – and "Birders" is no exception. Kimball's camera watches bird watchers (birders) in New York's Central Park watching birds. The birders speak lovingly, articulately about their watching – an activity so important to them it's almost a sin or debasement to put a name to it. Their words are profound, revealing their deep love of and connection with nature. We follow the birders through a year of activity at the park the most intense of which is when migrating birds rest there in the Spring and Summer.
And we learn, of course, of the declining population of birds in our world.
But, hopefully, the population of us biophiliacs is rapidly ascending.
"Birders" debuts on HBO, on July 16. Please note that IMDB.com lists the film under the title "The Central Park Effect".