THE BIRDWATCHER: Watch This Exclusive Clip From The Canadian Family Drama

The Toronto engagement for Siobhan Devine's family drama The Birdwatcher begins at the Carlton Imagine Cinema on November 18th. Devine will be coming to town to attend opening weekend screenings of her feature film debut. 

ScreenAnarchy has an exclusive clip to share with you which you can watch below. In the clip it looks early on in the film and Saffron is checking out her tent. There would appear to still be a lot of distance between her and her birth mother. 

Saffron (Camille Sullivan) is a dying single-mom with limited options for her two children. Her sole biological kin is a misanthropic ornithologist (Gabrielle Rose above) who gave her up for adoption at birth and avoided contact thereafter.

A social worker, Saffron knows the state-sponsored fate that can await orphaned older children. And she is driven by desperation and determination to find her mother and leave a family legacy to her temperamental teen daughter Lucy (Matreya Fedor) and enthusiastically precocious eight-year-old son Jonah (Jakob Davies).

Online investigation turns up Birdy, a famous ornithologist who has created a blog as a way of connecting with admirers while avoiding human contact. Her quirks are patiently abided by her devoted and more social husband Finch (Garwin Sanford) an artist who shares her life of birdwatching in the B.C. forest while living out of an R.V. in a camping park.

However, Birdy and Finch’s self-contained, somewhat hermit-like paradise is shaken one weekend by the arrival of a family of three tenters. What follows is the opposite of a “lost weekend,” a weekend of discovery, of personal clashes and surprise synchronicities.

We also really respect and appreciate the director's statement that came along with the clip too. ScreenAnarchy backs the rise of women filmmakers around the world. It is especially nice when we here in Canada can support Canadian talent too. 

“The first thing that struck me about the script was that its characters were almost all women,” says the Vancouver-based Devine. “They were strong women, normal women, trying to live out their lives, mistakes and all.

 

“What is isn’t, is a movie about cancer,” she says. “It’s about a woman seeking her birth mother about how they relate to each other, as strangers at first, and then as mother-daughter.” Devine continues “I do think that women have a different way of looking at the world and each other. I like to think of it, not so much as three-dimensional way, but an 18-dimensional way.”