CPH:DOX Festival Abuzz With Hummingbirds

deadline.com:

The hummingbirds of Every Little Thing are migrating from North America to Europe. Sally Aikten’s film about the extraordinary avian aerialists and a Los Angeles woman who tends to injured hummingbirds is making its European premiere at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, after initially hovering over Sundance.

Larry Bird, Raisin, Cactus, Alexa and Mikhail are among the tiny ornithological wonders that appear in the film. Their human caretaker, Terry Masear, wrote the Fastest Thing on Wings: Rescuing Hummingbirds in Hollywood about the many years she has spent looking after hummingbirds – ones that may have collided with a window, say, or babies that have tumbled from their nests. “We follow Terry over the course of the spring-summer season, which — if anyone is in L.A. — they’ll know as peak hummingbird time,” Aitken told us at Sundance. “And literally, if you have an injured or wounded hummingbird that somehow comes across your path, you can phone Terry and she will triage on the phone.

You send her photos; you send her video. She’s a genius. She knows exactly what’s the problem.” Producer Bettina Dalton continued, “[Terry] really is like a first responder for the hummingbirds… She also knows how to treat the [human] finders when they come in.

She knows those that are fragile, those that just really want to get the bird off their hands, they don’t know what to do. So, it also is a reflection of L.A.; the people that come in represent the diversity of L.A., the diversity of personalities.” Masear displays a deep empathy for hummingbirds that recalls the incredible connection between human and animal seen in the documentary Buck, about renowned “horse whisperer” Buck Brannaman.