With a Keen Eye for Character, ‘The Falconer’ Soars
This February, I read H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald’s moving memoir of death, depression and falconry. When I look back at my Kindle highlights for the book, they’re mostly esoteric words, loaned down through history by the practitioners of this medieval, even ancient art: clap (lower beak), pinion (outer wing), austringer (falconer), tiercel (male falcon), falcon (female falcon, and the larger, too). But I learned, too, “the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it.” Such is MacDonald’s poetry, which loans the story of her father’s death and her subsequent attempt to train a goshawk — frightful by reputation — a sense of gut-punching beauty in observations of a world all too often defined by loss.
MacDonald becomes obsessed with falconry at an early age, but maintains an outsider’s eye. One of her through arguments in the book is that falconry has often, in England, Germany and elsewhere, been held up by nobility eager to claim from their falcons virtues that, of course, belong to nature, rather than any single bird. On the one hand, falconry is a high art, civilized and requiring immense control, not to mention resources for keeping birds. On the other hand, all this is window dressing for the act of killing, savage as ever; falconry may have a special word for it, but blood is blood.
It was in this frame of mind that I learned about Annie Kaempfer’s new film The Falconer, screening now as part of the DC Environmental Film Festival. And, while it’s true that H is for Hawk was just about my only reference for falconry, it’s also true that The Falconer draws on many of the same themes: long-held ideas about who can be a falconer, the relationship between humans and nature, and, most effectively, loss.
[Spoilers ahead.] The Falconer is Rodney Stotts. Stotts is a real DC character, and Kaempfer’s film follows him on his journey to create a raptor sanctuary and wildlife education center in Laurel, Maryland. Soundtracked by go-go beats and reggae Stotts sings to himself, his birds and his dogs, we see a community come together not around birds, but around Stotts and the dream he found for himself after witnessing tragedy.
Over the course of the film, Stotts moves closer to this dream. But barriers past and present loom. His mother takes sick. Police harrass him, saying to this Black falconer, “You don’t fly birds, you eat them.” He works hard to get the materials and labor together to build the barn for the school, and runs education programs for city youth.
“You never know who’s going to be the next avian specialist,” he says ahead of a new class. Earlier in the film, he convinces a teenage girl to hold a hawk; she flinches, and the bird reacts, scaring the teenager even more. Stotts stoops down to deliver the message: “When you do this, you’re really scaring yourself.” He’s looking out for others, which of course includes raptors — at one point, his son captures jubilant cell-phone footage of Stotts risking his neck to free a bald eagle stuck in a fence.
That bald eagles are in DC at all is part of Stotts’ legacy. He worked with the Earth Conservation Corps, a group which helped restore the Anacostia and other rivers, making the habitat hospitable for eagles again.
It was also as part of Earth Conservation Corps that Stotts, having finally found stable work, ran into unexpected horror. Corpsmate Monique Johnson, 23, was murdered in her apartment while the group was out on a job in Houston. Stotts, 22 at the time, was among the group who found her. Now middle-aged, the tragedy remains part of his story — but it doesn’t define the film or Stotts, either. By the film’s end, he has accomplished so much, but you also get the sense he’s just beginning.
Check out Rodney’s Raptors here, including educational opportunities.
Kaempfer and her crew do a great job of telling the story. Some of my favorite moments follow Stotts around in the course of his day, a process that Kaempfer gives room to breathe. The hawks aren’t the only charismatic animals in the film — the dogs are cute, too — but ultimately, it’s the people that make this one worth it.
Check out The Falconer via DC Environmental Film Festival, from now until March 28.
How did you get into film & documentary? I understand you have a background with the Environmental Film Festival.
Annie Kaempfer: In college my favorite professor John Bisbee took his sculpture class to see Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time. It was the first time I’d see a documentary on the big screen and I was just enthralled.
After I graduated, I went to work at The Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital for Flo Stone, who founded the Festival in 1993. I love everything about Flo’s vision for DCEFF — from programming in collaboration with venue partners all across the city to meet viewers where they are, to promoting accessibility by keeping as many screenings as possible free to the public, to programming films that one might not traditionally think of as environmental. Impact has become such a buzz word now in the film industry, but Flo was creating impact before anyone! Working with Flo at DCEFF was an education in the power of film as an art form in its own right and as the most effective medium for inspiring change.
How did you find out about Rodney’s Raptors in the first place? How did you approach Rodney and get his buy-in for the project?
AK: My aunt actually met Rodney at a DCEFF screening of falconry shorts. She got his card and told me I needed to meet him, so I did. Rodney was nothing but generous with his time from the start, but he also didn’t quite know what he was signing up for when we met back in 2013. Neither did I for that matter!
I originally planned to make a short film over the course of six months, but as I got to know Rodney, I just fell in love with the essence of who he is as a human being and my short film about his work morphed into a feature-length portrait. So Rodney ended up having to put up with me following him around with a camera for much longer than either of us expected.
Did you always know the general arc of the movie would build to the ceremony at the end, or did you just start shooting and see where it took you?
AK: I didn’t! I filmed Rodney for so long wondering how the film would ever end. But there was one shot, nearing sunset after a long day of hard work when Rodney’s family and friends were there, everyone was just happy together. Someone rode by on a horse. And one cadet held up a bird against the sunlight, his arm high, and walked out of my camera frame and I just thought — this is it! It was so magical to realize in that moment that the end of the film wasn’t about the sanctuary being finished, it was about friends, family and volunteers coming together to help Rodney work toward achieving his dream. That was success.
Filming with all these animals — especially the birds but also the dogs and horses — has to be really unpredictable, but it also provides some of the most incredible moments of the film. Did you come into the filming as a bird person or even an animal person, and as a documentarian what kinds of elements does that bring? It’s a film about connecting with animals, in a lot of ways, but the most powerful moments are probably when people connect to one another through those animals; maybe my favorite moment in the whole thing is when Rodney is first appearing at Oak Hill for the assembly and explains to the girl that when she moves her arm, she’s scaring the bird, whose attempt to balance scares the girl — he says something like “You’re scaring yourself.”
I love that moment too! It’s so magical to see Rodney give someone new confidence when they’re brave enough to handle one of his birds. There’s so much trust there and you can just feel that the confidence will extend past meeting his bird.
I’ve always been an animal person to the level that my dog has his own instagram account (@theclydebear!). I adored Rodney’s dogs so I probably shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was during editing by how many hours of footage I had shot of them.
I wasn’t a bird person before I met Rodney, but I definitely am now. The first bird I ever held was “Stuff,” the Red-tailed hawk Rodney releases in the first scene of the film. I was so sad to see him go, I felt so attached to him from just holding him for a few minutes. Mr. Hoots, Rodney’s Eurasian Eagle Owl is another big favorite of mine. Whenever I talk to Rodney now, I always ask how he’s doing — I actually miss him! Before I met Rodney I guess I thought a bird is a bird. It was pretty incredible to learn how they’re all just such individuals, with their own unique personalities.
There’s a lot of great archival footage, especially of the Earth Conservation Corps. Where did you get all that? Was it always the plan to work backwards slowly, showing us the story of the people who were in the ECC together, with that footage?
Earth Conservation Corps provided a lot of the archival — they have just a wealth of footage because Robert Nixon, who founded the organization, is a filmmaker himself. I’m so grateful they were willing to share that footage with me. Burrell Duncan, who appears in the film, helped me dig through hundreds and hundreds of tapes in their archive, and I digitized as many as I could afford to do on the film’s small budget. Being a part of the Corps in the “original nine” as Rodney puts it was such a transformational experience in his life. I really wanted to honor that time, and the bonds Rodney formed at ECC by including some of that archival footage in the film.
Tell us a little bit about how the soundtrack came together — there’s some more typical film score type music but also some DC go-go and Rodney sings some reggae here and again.
I wanted the soundtrack to be all Rodney. We started with the reggae songs that I had heard Rodney play, and sing, most over the years, and Music Supervisor Megan Currier was absolutely amazing. She managed to clear songs that we never thought would be possible, and where we couldn’t afford the rights, or couldn’t track down all the rights holders, she came up with songs that fit in so seamlessly I have trouble remembering now which songs are Rodney’s and which are her additions. In terms of score, composer Nathan Larson is Rodney’s age, and he grew up in the punk scene in DC so he had an innate sense for what would work. I love the way he infused the score with elements of go-go (the official music of the city as of 2020!), a genre that most people outside the DC area have never even heard of.
Alright, let’s end with two quick ones. Favorite DC to-go order?
Bammy’s Vegetable Curry.
Favorite DC park?
Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens.
Thanks so much, Annie.
