Bird’s Eye!
2019 · 7m · New Zealand
Directed by Morgan Albrecht
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Aerial photographer Petra Leary takes her drone and her dog Kodak skyward, turning a different way of seeing into art.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A seven-minute love letter to drone footage—which sounds like the most aggressively conventional documentary premise imaginable until you realize Albrecht's actually made something about the dog, not the sky, and the whole thing quietly inverts what we think aerial photography is supposed to mean.
Albrecht positions herself within the documentary tradition of seeing-as-meditation, but the formal restraint here—letting the dog anchor what could've been pure spectacle—suggests a deliberate pushback against the triumphalism of that lineage.
The decision to keep Kodak in frame, grounded, while the camera soars creates this devastating counterpoint that transforms a technical showcase into something genuinely tender; it's the compositional choice that makes the whole film work.