WILD INSIDE

GUEST SPEAKER ANNOUNCEMENT TBD

In February 2023, a Eurasian eagle-owl named Flaco slipped out of a damaged enclosure at the Central Park Zoo and simply kept going. He'd never lived outside captivity, but within days he was hunting rats in Central Park, and within weeks he was a citywide phenomenon: bird-watchers tracking his every roost, strangers debating on the internet whether he should be recaptured or left alone.

Director Penny Lane (Hail Satan?) doesn't treat this as a straightforward nature story. Working from an enormous trove of footage shot by the birders, tourists, and everyday New Yorkers who followed Flaco block by block, she builds a portrait of a city almost accidentally falling for one owl, and uses that devotion to ask harder questions: what captivity does to an animal, what freedom actually costs, and why this particular bird meant so much to so many people who'd never given owls a second thought before.

The result is funny in places, quietly devastating in others, and never quite what you expect a documentary about a zoo escapee to be. WILD INSIDE is less about an owl finding the wild than about a city discovering, through him, how much it wanted to believe in it.