Common Birds
Silvia Maglioni, Graeme Thomson
2019 - 84 min - Video Ultra HD - Couleur et Noir & Blanc - France, Grèce

No longer willing to pay for the debt, two Athenians decide to leave their city. Guided by mysterious crow calls, they walk through the urban landscape until they reach a zone of passage from where they are spirited to an ancient forest: the realm of the birds. Here they meet the Hoopoe, half-bird half-woman, who becomes their translator.
The birds live by sharing their resources amid the magical forces of the forest. While one of the men is enchanted by these forms of life, the other wants to persuade the birds to take power by building a wall around the sky. The encounter between humans, birds and forest will be illuminating for all. Some 2,500 years after it was written, an experimental adaptation of Aristophanes’ "The Birds".
Between a contemporary Athens marked by crisis and the ancestral forest of la Gomera, Ancient Greek and Silbo Gomero (an endangered whistled language that forms part of a long tradition of resistance), comes a tale of flight, loss and reenchantment in a space of refuge where new alliances can emerge between different species, temporalities and languages.