This overview is a part of our protection of the 2024 Sundance Movie Competition.
Earlier than watching the Sundance documentary Each Little Factor, I had no concept that the Bob Marley track I might have instructed you was known as “Each Little Factor’s Gonna Be All Proper” was really known as “Three Little Birds.” Marley’s lyrics don’t specify if the three little birds pitched by his doorstep are hummingbirds, although — seemingly not, as a result of in the event that they have been hummingbirds, they wouldn’t keep nonetheless.
The brilliant cute great thing about these hummingbirds is the quick, albeit shallow, draw of Each Little Factor. But as director Sally Aitken’s movie progresses, letting the viewers come to grasp its major topic higher, it grows deeper than that, bringing us to a completely new means of seeing the world.
The middle of the movie, and its dominant persona, is Terry Masear, who operates a hummingbird rescue operation out of her Los Angeles residence, a big sufficient home to include a number of indoor and outside enclosures and cages to facilitate the restoration of injured or deserted birds which can be delivered to her for care. There’s one thing explicit about hummingbirds that makes them particular to her: “You come prepared made with the empathy,” Terry says at one level. “You don’t have to develop it — it’s already there, due to your individual struggles.”
How Terry got here to run this operation, and what components of her previous made it work she’s enthusiastic about, performs a job within the movie, however it’s actually extra a mediation than the rest, one filled with unbelievable visuals. Cinematographer and nature photographer Ann Johnson Prum delivers the small-scale, slow-motion footage essential to showcase the motion of hummingbirds in flight; a few of the photographs are so sharp and detailed that they virtually doesn’t look actual. Then once more, there’s at all times been one thing unreal concerning the hummingbird — tiny warriors battling forces of nature like rain and the savage housecat with their very own peculiar darting grace.
It looks like that’s a part of what attracts Terry to them. That, and their delicacy — she handles every injured chook so fastidiously, like they’re product of glass. Till, that’s, they’ve recovered sufficient for her to encourage them to fly, little nudges from one department to the subsequent which may result in them really chickening out once more. Each Little Factor avoids voiceover, as a substitute letting Terry’s voice ring out by way of the movie in conversations with “finders,” in conversations with herself, and in conversations with the birds she tends. She talks to them a lot, in ways in which show relatable and comprehensible.
For somebody who may solely be used to seeing a hummingbird for the immediate it takes them to fly by, it’s troublesome to think about spending sufficient time with one in every of them to have a way of their persona. However Terry is aware of her flock (properly, not a flock, however “a allure”) so properly that she’s capable of play matchmaker, pairing off birds which may profit from one another’s firm as they recuperate from their accidents.
The movie makes clear that so lots of the birds Terry tends received’t in the end survive. However then, she notes that it’s not the top end result, however the journey, which is essential. “She made a one-inch flight, should you can name it that,” Terry says of 1 chook struggling to heal. Then, she provides, “that’s all she must do at this time.”
Past the restoration (or not) of some particular birds, the narrative is comparatively freeform — the beats of these birds’ journey to wellness may appear a mite predictable, however solely as a result of they lend the movie the appearance of a three-act construction. Each Little Factor isn’t a film you look ahead to story, although — it’s a film you look ahead to understanding. Not simply the nuances of what it means to be a caretaker like this, however what it’s prefer to see the world from the angle of the tiny and susceptible. As a result of this world, in microcosm, is so stuffed with little beauties.
Each Little Factor premiered on the 2024 Sundance Movie Competition. It acquired a restricted theatrical launch starting January tenth, 2025.