To Teach a Bird to Fly

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To Teach a Bird to Fly is an documentary-fiction film that explores bird extinction and climate change through a fictionalized story told from the perspective of the future. A woman relates events from the past - today's world - when her grandmother worked as a foster parent to a critically endangered bird, the Northern Bald Ibis. The film follows the Waldrapp project in Germany, where a young woman (the narrator's future grandmother) helps breed and hand-raise the birds. She spends all her time with the birds as their foster parent, teach them to migrate by following a light aircraft across the Alps to their wintering grounds in Tuscany, Italy. The film highlights this process as a locus of hope, not just for the future of the Ibis, but for the future of the environment and the planet.