QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Tatvian arthouse director Laila Pakalnina is best remembered for 2020’s dizzying In the Mirror. Her latest film effort at the Tallinn Black Nights revolves around airport workers in Riga, the Latvian capital. No, not about security officers in the terminal, nor is it about pilots or flight hostesses, or any profession you might’ve already been somewhat familiarised with. Instead, Pakalnina is interested in the people who patiently surveil the premises of the runway for wildlife.

This is a safety precaution many of your everyday fliers might take for granted, but it is indisputably vital to airport operations. Native critters to the Baltic region, like rabbits, foxes, and goldfinches, can become genuinely dangerous if interfering with a flight’s takeoff. Nevertheless, the routine of these workers is undeniably tedious, often repetitively chasing rabbits from one corner of a gate-enclosed lawn to another. Pakalnina is adept at capturing this unremarkable regimen from each individual’s perspective. Scarecrows thrives in a delicate display of surreal mundanity.

Tonally, Pakalnina frames herself and her camera as an observant neutral force between the conflict between the airport and the life that finds its way in. The documentary is light-hearted but also quite morbid in its humour. There are these apathetic confrontations with mortality as the workers have to collect the frail bodies of fallen birds. The workers aren’t painted as villainous or uncaring, but instead just that; witnessing these animals’ death and injury is a commonplace occurrence. They’ve even come up with ways to bring some poetry to their menial tasks of evicting animal presence from the airport. At some point, a worker is required to destroy a beaver dam in a nearby stream. A colleague jokingly says, “you’ve just messed up the beaver’s life… or maybe made it more interesting. I don’t know”. This quote serves as a good example of the type of somewhat nihilistic outlook the documentary has when engaging with its core themes of shared spaces between humans and wildlife. What can be categorized as “wild” anymore?

There are more satirical moments of workers loitering, eating cold salami, and taking pictures of a lost gold crest. More attention is given to the poignant subtext of our complicity and interactions with the remnants of natural life in the lifeless modernist atmospheres we’ve created. The film is expertly shot and aims to balance each frame with both presences. A shot will be equally split between the inescapable barbed wire and a seagull-infested morning sky. The doc is never preachy, nor is it judgmental towards the workers we sit side-by-side with in their patrol cars. It’s merely allowing us to use this microcosm to make broader observations about our own clumsy and sometimes unintentionally cruel environmental invasion. It’s not a pessimist film in any regard. Consistently, the cinematography is breathtakingly beautiful for such a bleak setting. There’s a haunting mystery to seeing these creatures isolated in vast, empty fields. The stunningly delicate feathers of an owl are juxtaposed on top of the staggering size of the corporate mechanisms of air travel.

Despite choosing such a hyper-specific and unglamorous topic, veteran auteur Laila Pakalnina is so enthusiastic in her direction, it takes full advantage of its feature-length run-time. The Latvian director is meticulous in her control of the filmic rhythm. The film avoids aimless editing or feeling overly atmospheric, even whilst contained entirely in the Riga airport. Scarecrows might be full of unmoved people doing thankless chores, but Pakalnina finds exciting new ways to frame this line of work as if it were something spectacular. Pakalnina expresses a genuine affinity towards each part of their day-to-day, from lunch breaks to alcohol checks, and manages to make these trivial glimpses feel cinematically engaging. Scarecrows is reliant on a slow-burn ambience, but it is neither lazy nor predictable in its storytelling. A refreshingly ambitious working-class tale of an airport and all the vibrant life on its radar.

Scarecrows just premiered in the Doc@PÖFF Baltic Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.