CROWVILLE
Watch Now. 18 minutes. Released 2019
Produced & Directed by Mary Lance and Ben Daitz
Every autumn, thousands of American Crows return to our neighborhood, close by the Rio Grande in central New Mexico. It’s both a visually stunning and mysterious phenomenon--- their migration west over our house at dawn, and east again at dusk, to a massed communal roost somewhere hidden in the Bosque, the vast cottonwood forest along the Rio Grande. CROWVILLE is about a sense of place, both the crows’ and ours, the beauty and peace of a riparian cottonwood forest, nearby urban sprawl, and the fact that these birds seem to find the intersection of these desirable. Underpinning the visuals are reflections on the process of discovering and documenting the phenomenon, using bits of audio from shoots and a voiceover by Mary Lance. There are no interviews.