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After two years Lucinda Spurling’s cahow documentary is finished. Just don’t confuse it with another documentary on the Cahow that’s being released just before Spurling’s. They’re completely separate and different.

For one thing, Spurling’s documentary ‘Rare Bird’ is an 80-minute feature-length film. The other documentary, ‘Bermuda’s Treasure Island’, is a 50-minute television programme by the Audubon Society.

Spurling is also a Bermudian, and her film offers that local perspective in a “story- and fact-based film style.”

“It tells a larger story about Bermuda’s environment and includes all the people here who helped preserve it,” Spurling said. “The film is centred around the crux of rediscovery after the cahow was thought to be extinct for 300 years.”

Interestingly ‘Rare Bird’ offers the first-ever filmed footage of the Cahow in flight. Spurling said, “Because it [the Cahow] is nocturnal, they can only really be caught in flight over the ocean, during November in the hour or two before sunset they congregate off of the east end of the island right before dark. Then when the sun sets they come into the nesting islands. This is during their courtship season.”

‘Rare Bird’ has already been accepted into Hot Docs, a prestigious documentary film festival in Toronto, and has also received interest from two big film distributors: Warner Brothers Independent Pictures — which is perhaps best known for ‘March of the Penguins’ — and Think Film.

Spurling has also entered her film into the Bermuda Film Festival and hopes to find out soon whether or not it will be accepted.

“I want to make films that are important locally but that will also appeal to an international audience. This is the first film made up to that standard,” she said.

She also wants to utilize the film for much more than just entertainment. “We’re going to have a fundraising campaign for community outreach to create a website, a DVD, a study guide and take it to every school and the Bermuda College,” she said.

Spurling’s film enjoys a long list of support including sponsors like Bank of Bermuda Foundation, Shell, BBSR, the Department of Conservation Services and the Bermuda Zoological Station as well as “a long list of financial and in kind donors.”

While a bit disappointed that ‘Bermuda’s Treasure Island’ will air just before her ‘Rare Bird’, Spurling still hopes people will go out to see both films and compare the two.

“I’m confident,” she said.[[In-content Ad]]

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