Screening note: This digital screening is available to view between 12:01am PT on Friday, October 9, and 11:59pm PT on Sunday, October 18.
Questions about how to watch this film online? Click here to read about system requirements and how to watch on different devices.
Rodney Stotts started his young life running the mean streets of Washington, D.C. Today, he's a Master Falconer building a sanctuary for predatory birds in an old dairy barn in rural Maryland. Introduced to raptors through a conservation program that worked to clean up the Chesapeake Bay’s polluted estuaries in the 1990s, Stotts went all in, learning how to rescue and train these majestic birds, rescuing himself in the process. Now he uses the practice of falconry to show others a new path. Through cinema vérité style, director and cinematographer Annie Kaempfer gives Stotts the space to share his journey—at turns harrowing and uplifting—from friends who didn’t make it, to the joy that comes from forming lasting bonds with nature. What The Falconer quietly reveals is that it took much more than these birds, of course. It took family, faith, and Stotts’ own disciplined focus, sometimes a source of loneliness but no less the source of his strength.