Documentary “Watching People Watching Birds”: These are cedar waxwings

A married couple sits on the couch at home and plays bird songs to each other, the other has to guess which bird it is. Two men stand at a fence, first in front of it, then behind it, and look at seagulls. An older man walks calmly and yet excitedly around a tree. Finally he bursts out: “Those are cedar waxwings!”

In their documentary “Watching People Watching Birds,” Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken look at people who watch birds. Some of them have been doing this for a long time, others only recently. Most bird watchers encounter Franke/Loeken in the industrial landscapes of North Rhine-Westphalia, but sometimes also in the USA.

Photos of the couple from the couch prove that bird watching has been part of their lives for a long time. At her workplace, a bakery, Brigitte Handy reports how happy the casual encounter with birds is in the early morning, and how the migration of the cranes always brings her to tears. Her husband Neil listens to bird calls while behind the wheel of a truck for a German steel manufacturer and practices recognizing them.

“Watching People Watching Birds.” Directors: Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken. Germany 2026, 92 mins.

“Watching People Watching Birds” is a documentary that is as unexciting as it gets. It's not primarily about connections to the big issues of the time, but first and foremost about observations and encounters. Over the course of the film, recurring themes emerge: on the one hand, the human view of nature and, on the other hand, the discovery of natural space by the very people who look at nature. Often it is precisely this discovery of a natural space, which unfolds in the landscapes, parks and, in one of the stories, even in a blind box in the shell of the parents' house, that changes the view of and relationship to nature.

People who have been watching birds for a long time also see the changes in nature caused by climate change. One of the people portrayed is quite surprised at how many lesser spotted woodpeckers he still found in his notes in the 1960s. These descriptions of loss also make it clear that knowledge of nature is needed to recognize the changes in nature. Anyone who misunderstands every green space as nature will hardly be able to understand the warning calls about the irreparable losses in flora and fauna.

Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken have been working as a documentary film duo since 1996. Your films repeatedly revolve around the Ruhr area and the decline of industry. In “We Are All Detroit” in 2021, they traced similarities and differences between the dismantling of the auto industry in Bochum and Detroit. Franke has been teaching author documentary film at the Cologne University of Media Arts for almost ten years. Most of the films were commissioned and co-produced with public television.

One of the strengths of “Watching People Watching Birds” is that the film never loses sight of the people the film follows through the possible connections to current issues. The human fascination with birds remains the anchor from which the film explores the world. This gives him astonishing freedom, which, following in the footsteps of Jonathan Franzen, also allows him to find his way to a community garden in the USA, where some of the homeless people who work on the garden talk, with similarly bright eyes, about bird sightings with which Franzen himself initially reacted to the cedar waxwings.

In “Watching People Watching Birds” Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken invite their viewers to discover the world of birds in their respective surroundings. To discover a world that you may not have seen before and that can be a gateway to other worlds that follow. This discovery may sometimes be followed by melancholy and sadness as the realization sets in that all of these worlds are threatened with loss. And perhaps growing interest will even lead to growing commitment to politically prevent the worst effects on these newly discovered worlds.

Either way, “Watching People Watching Birds” is a documentary journey of discovery and a plea for the appreciation of the small moments of happiness that make going to the cinema worth it.