The owl was just sitting there in the middle of the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue across from Bergdorf Goodman and the Plaza Hotel. You might recall reading about it at the time. In February of 2023, a large Eurasian eagle-owl named Flaco escaped from his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo. Usually situations like this are resolved fairly quickly, as birds bred in captivity like Flaco don’t have any of the survival skills required to hack it out in the wild. Especially the wilds of Manhattan. But this is New York City, and as Frank Sinatra sang, if you can make it there you can make it anywhere. Flaco made it for more than a year, eluding recapture and learning to thrive on his own, charming jaded New Yorkers — as well as birders and social media users around the world — with his surprise appearances on air conditioners, balconies and fire escapes.
Director Penny Lane’s enchanting documentary “Wild Inside” chronicles how the strikingly handsome Flaco became a New York City folk hero, a fine, feathered emissary of the asphalt jungle. The movie is a miracle of crowdsourcing, pulling together stills and video from professional nature photographers, passionate hobbyists and countless city dwellers who happened to find themselves graced by the owl’s majestic presence. (Flaco and police misconduct are the only good arguments I’ve seen for everyone having a camera on them at all times.) Yet the film is so much more than an amusing anecdote about an exotic animal on the loose.
A crowd looks on as Flaco sits on the ground near a crate. (Courtesy Sandbox Films; photographer Benny Polatseck)
In its gentle, unassuming way, “Wild Inside” made me think about the mysteries of the natural world as much as any Terrence Malick or Werner Herzog picture. It’s a movie about ecosystems and our place in the pecking order, about behaviors that are taught and those that are ingrained through millions of years of evolution. Flaco spent the first 12 years of his life in a cage tinier than my first studio apartment. He could barely fly a few blocks on his first night of freedom. A zoo animal who lived on frozen lab rats that were handed to him, Flaco had no idea how to hunt and no elders to teach him. Yet he soon became the apex predator of Central Park, soaring all the way down to the Lower East Side and hooting from Manhattan’s highest water towers. (There’s a sadness to this striking image — a lonely owl enacting a mating ritual without knowing that he’s the only one of his kind on the continent.)
It’s also a story of community, as we get to know the crew of “only in New York” eccentrics and enthusiasts who spent their days and nights tracking the rare bird’s progress through the city. Lane thoughtfully examines the Flaco phenomenon, exploring why a caged animal discovering his wild instincts would capture so many imaginations. (Though I wish she’d added something about the timing of the tale, since post-pandemic we were all just emerging from enclosures of our own.) As the year wears on, we begin to see images of our favorite Eurasian eagle-owl appearing on tote bags, T-shirts and a ton of Flaco tattoos.
People look up at Flaco in still from director Penny Lane’s documentary “Wild Inside.” (Courtesy Sandbox Films)
All the merch probably wouldn’t have sold so well if he hadn’t been such a good-looking bird. Some owls are frightening, supernatural-looking little freaks. Flaco was stout and regal, with a magnificent six-foot wingspan, staring out at the world with those wide, pumpkin-colored eyes. Owls are generally skittish, secretive animals, but having spent his whole life being gawked at by tourists in the Central Park Zoo, Flaco was used to being around people and seemed to seek out places where he could watch them watch him. For an unprepared stranger in an unknown land who had every reason to be terrified most of the time, he came off as a seriously chill dude.
Penny Lane — yes, that’s her real name — is one of the most wonderfully curious and idiosyncratic documentarians working today. I first encountered her work at the Independent Film Festival Boston back in 2013, when Lane’s debut feature “Our Nixon” won the Karen Schmeer Award for Excellence in Documentary Editing. The absurdly funny, archival portrait of the 37th president juxtaposes tapes of his rambling rants with Super 8 home movie footage of the White House shot by Watergate co-conspirators Dwight Chapin, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman. (I seem to recall Ehrlichman having a surprising eye for photographing flowers.) Her biggest box office hit, 2019’s “Hail Satan?” followed a prankish grassroots organization of half-kidding devil worshipers using their beliefs to frighten right-wing Christians into preserving the separation of church and state.
Lane’s hugely popular “Listening to Kenny G” and her children’s music doc “Happy and You Know It” prompted me to joke that she makes the best movies about things I didn’t think I wanted to watch a movie about. But I knew from the moment this project was announced that I couldn’t wait to see a Penny Lane movie about Flaco the owl. “Secret Mall Apartment” director and IFFBoston regular Jeremy Workman felt the same way. He was one of the first people to spot Flaco hanging out on Fifth Avenue that cold February night in 2023, and immediately texted the director. (Workman’s is the first face you see in the film, in one of Lane’s not-entirely-convincing reenactments.)
Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl in a still from director Penny Lane’s documentary “Wild Inside.” (Courtesy Sandbox Films; photographer David Lei)
Flaco died from a collision with a building wall on the Upper West Side, most likely caused by the amount of rodenticide in his system. This is where the film’s larger questions about the complexities of ecosystems snap into focus. What are our responsibilities to those we share this place with? Of course everyone is in favor of killing rats, but what happens to the birds who eat the rats?
In a quietly insistent fashion, Lane layers the film with not just familiar street sounds of the city, but also the rustlings of animals in the park. “Wild Inside” is filled with cutaways to critters and coyotes, flora and fauna, reminding us that wherever we are, we aren’t alone. The movie boasts beautiful drone photography that brings us high above the city, inviting us to take it all in from a Flaco’s-eye view, gazing at the busy world below and wondering where we fit in it.
“Wild Inside” screens at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Tuesday, Aug. 4, followed by a Q&A with director Penny Lane moderated by film critic and birder Ty Burr. The movie opens at the Cape Ann Community Cinema and other theaters on Friday, Aug 7.