Short Block 1: Night


Night Owls (Directed and Produced by Sam Moore, Sponsored by Orange Street Food Farm)

Made in collaboration with Project Owlnet and the Maine Natural History Observatory, Night Owls follows migrating saw-whet owls as they are observed at a research station in Downeast Maine.


Flightpath (Directed by David Grabias, Produced by Anne Edgar, Sponsored by Worden's)

Flightpath is a meditation on death and mourning, seen through the eyes of a wildlife researcher. When Sarah loses her boyfriend in a plane crash, she dives into a project studying bird mortality for a wind turbine company in the California desert. She comes to terms with her grief through her relationship with her tracking dogs as they catalog remains.


Counting Cranes (Directed by Mariah Lundgren, Sponsored by Mountain Broadcasting & Digital)

Imagine trying to count hundreds of thousands of birds in a matter of seconds. This is what Andy Caven does every spring… from a plane. In March, almost a million sandhill cranes pass through Nebraska's Platte River Valley. For the past 20 years, the Crane Trust has conducted aerial surveys of sandhill crane roosts to get an accurate count of the number of birds that pass through. Andy and his team take us behind the scenes to show us how this is done, what they have learned, and why it's important.


Batsies (Directed by Liz Unger, Produced by Katy Baldock and Ben Masters, Sponsored by Betty's Divine)

Batsies is a short, experimental documentary which examines two women’s tender relationship with an animal that’s commonly feared and loathed: the bat. Sara Weaver and Sarah Fritts are best friends and ecologists who are leading bat conservation efforts in Texas. These ladies have a wicked sense of humor, they curse like sailors, they’re covered in tattoos, and consider themselves outliers within a male-dominated field.


The Ghost Rainforest (Directed by John Davies, Produced by Vivien Cumming, Sponsored by the University of Otago)

Told from the perspective of activist Narubia Werreria, The Ghost Rainforest follows a group of five indigenous leaders and activists from the Amazon as they make a once-in-a-lifetime journey to a little-known temperate rainforest on the West Coast of Scotland. This visit is set amidst the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, capturing a moment in history when the world needed to listen to indigenous activists, the "guardians of the forests." This film focuses on the importance of indigenous wisdom to protect these habitats before it’s too late.


Nanoscapes (Produced by Kristina Dutton and Arnaud Martin, Sponsored by Topo Real Estate)

The nanoscopic topography of butterfly wings has produced a wealth of data on how structural coloration works. This film is an artistic depiction of how butterflies actually grow these remarkable, infinitesimal patterns. The images that make up this animated film were taken with electron microscopes at magnifications of up to 50,000x.



Followed by a Q&A with Night Owls director Sam Moore, Flightpath director David Grabias, and Flightpath cinematographer Vincent Venturel!