Saving Pelican 895

Local documentary filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky often captures stories of small human triumphs in the face of adversity—an Indian polio victim's effort to immunize slums against the disease in the Oscar-nominated The Final Inch; and her own parents' struggle after receiving cochlear implant surgery following a lifetime of deafness in the Sundance Audience Award-winning Hear and Now. The star of her latest work, the 40-minute HBO documentary Saving Pelican 895, is not a person at all—it's a gawky young brown pelican covered in petroleum from last year's BP oil spill. 

The film almost entirely ignores the story of the spill itself, the politics, the workers and the disgraced company behind the cleanup effort, focusing instead on the day-to-day minutiae of getting one bird—one of thousands rescued—oil-free and ready to return to the wild. No pointing of fingers, no depressing montages, no preachy diatribes from sanctimonious celebrities. They didn't even pick a particularly adorable animal. And yet by telling the small story of just one ugly bird, the film brilliantly highlights the magnitude of the tragedy. We see the time, money, dedication and manpower it takes just to save Pelican 895—just washing him is a delicate, daylong, multiperson process; teaching him to eat takes weeks—and multiply it by the 894 pelicans who came before him, the hundreds who came after, the thousands every year affected by spills we don't even hear about.

Speaking at the doc's opening night in Portland, Brodsky admitted she was very lucky 895 pulled through—only about 1,250 of the  8,200 birds rescued survived—since he was the only one the crew followed. With those kind of figures, it's easy to wonder whether it really matters if 895 lived or died at all. "Populations are made up of individuals, and if you start looking at individuals as not important, then ultimately, the population becomes not important," says one of the rescue workers, as they scrub every speck of grease from between 895's claws.

And sure enough, when that ugly, bratty bird spreads its wings and flies free for the first time, you could almost hear the audience squeal with delight. Even my cynical little heart melted a bit. It's a human thing.

85 SEE IT: Saving Pelican 895 premieres on HBO at 9 pm Wednesday, April 20. For more on Gulf spill documenting, see here.

WWeek 2015