{"id":566672,"date":"2026-07-30T10:12:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T10:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/566672\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T10:12:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T10:12:10","slug":"wild-inside-chronicles-how-flaco-the-owl-became-a-new-york-city-folk-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/566672\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Wild Inside’ chronicles how Flaco the owl became a New York City folk hero"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> 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\u2019t 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 \u2014 as well as birders and social media users around the world \u2014 with his surprise appearances on air conditioners, balconies and fire escapes.<\/p>\n

Director Penny Lane\u2019s enchanting documentary \u201cWild Inside<\/a>\u201d 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\u2019s majestic presence. (Flaco and police misconduct are the only good arguments I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

\"AA crowd looks on as Flaco sits on the ground near a crate. (Courtesy Sandbox Films; photographer Benny Polatseck)<\/p>\n

In its gentle, unassuming way, \u201cWild Inside\u201d made me think about the mysteries of the natural world as much as any Terrence Malick or Werner Herzog<\/a> 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\u2019s highest water towers. (There\u2019s a sadness to this striking image \u2014 a lonely owl enacting a mating ritual without knowing that he\u2019s the only one of his kind on the continent.)<\/p>\n

It’s also a story of community, as we get to know the crew of \u201conly in New York\u201d eccentrics and enthusiasts who spent their days and nights tracking the rare bird\u2019s 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

\"PeoplePeople look up at Flaco in still from director Penny Lane’s documentary “Wild Inside.” (Courtesy Sandbox Films)<\/p>\n

All the merch probably wouldn\u2019t have sold so well if he hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Penny Lane \u2014 yes, that\u2019s her real name \u2014 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\u2019s debut feature \u201cOur Nixon\u201d 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\u2019s \u201cHail Satan?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Lane\u2019s hugely popular \u201cListening to Kenny G\u201d and her children\u2019s music doc \u201cHappy and You Know It\u201d prompted me to joke that she makes the best movies about things I didn\u2019t think I wanted to watch a movie about. But I knew from the moment this project was announced that I couldn\u2019t wait to see a Penny Lane movie about Flaco the owl. \u201cSecret Mall Apartment\u201d 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\u2019s is the first face you see in the film, in one of Lane\u2019s not-entirely-convincing reenactments.)<\/p>\n

\"FlacoFlaco the Eurasian eagle-owl in a still from director Penny Lane’s documentary “Wild Inside.” (Courtesy Sandbox Films; photographer David Lei)<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWild Inside\u201d is filled with cutaways to critters and coyotes, flora and fauna, reminding us that wherever we are, we aren\u2019t alone. The movie boasts beautiful drone photography that brings us high above the city, inviting us to take it all in from a Flaco\u2019s-eye view, gazing at the busy world below and wondering where we fit in it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cWild Inside\u201d screens at the Coolidge Corner Theatre<\/a> 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<\/a> and other theaters<\/a> on Friday, Aug 7.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The owl was just sitting there in the middle of the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue across from Bergdorf…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":566673,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[85,46,141,386],"class_list":["post-566672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566672\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/566673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}