Wild in the City
1985 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Gordon Fish
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
A short documentary surveys the wild creatures that have made a home in Vancouver, ranging from everyday pigeons and starlings to herons in Stanley Park and even a coyote on farmland.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Looks like a nature doc on the surface, but the real move here is how Fish treats the city itself as an intrusion into the animals' world—it's almost a sneaky inversion of the wildlife-in-habitat genre that makes you question who's really 'wild' and who's displaced.
A formally restrained observation piece that sits comfortably in the Canadian documentary tradition (NFB pedigree obvious), where the elegance lies in its refusal to sentimentalize—just measured framing and the creatures themselves doing the philosophical work.
The precision is in the editing rhythm, how Fish cuts between a pigeon on concrete and a heron in the park without commentary, letting the visual juxtaposition carry the weight—a smart formal choice on what could've been a conventional survey.