2023-07-03 21:30:12
Image taken from Gavin Fitzgerald’s documentary “A Race, Pigeons and Millions”. ARTE
ARTE – MONDAY, JULY 3 AT 12:30 AM – DOCUMENTARY
Armando, sold for 1.25 million euros ($1.4 million) in 2019; New Kim, sold for 1.6 million euros in 2020 ($2 million): nothing surprising for athletes a priori, except that Armando and New Kim are… two pigeons. The astronomical prices achieved at auctions on the PIPA Pigeon Paradise website (Pipa.be) by these two winged competitors are all the more surprising since pigeon racing remains associated in the collective imagination with that of nice, slightly eccentric and aging amateurs. .
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This is forgetting the revolution caused, since the beginning of the 21st century, by the appearance of “single loft” racing pigeon races, whose prize money has exploded. At the first of them, born in South Africa a quarter of a century ago, the competitors are no longer trying to win a basket of food, but 1 million dollars. And that changes everything.
Five races of this type exist today. In order to grasp the planetary repercussions of this financialization, the Irish director Gavin Fitzgerald set out to meet enthusiasts, with various profiles – pigeon racing breaks down social barriers, it’s well known. He brings back a subtle and endearing film, with multiple readings.
“Sport” unknown
First of all, it introduces an unknown “sport”, established in northern Europe – the French Pigeon Federation has 8,000 members -, in the United States and in Asia, with a historical reminder, immersion behind the scenes of the $1 million race and in the Pattaya International Pigeon Race, Thailand, owned by a billionaire.
The screenplay benefits from the best ingredients: money and its share of betrayals; fear – the stress in races is palpable; then the drama, unpredictable. Everything is served by a staging that is sometimes offbeat – an obese man falls from a bench – and neat images. The soundtrack, meanwhile, oscillates between Chinese auction music, like harpsichord rap, and Thai rock.
Thus paired, the film paints, in hollow, the portrait of heterogeneous social circles: that of the Ganus couple, in Indiana, known “like the white wolf” for having won the famous million; that of Belgian Remi Gyselbrecht, who split his house in two: one half for humans, the other for pigeons; that of Dr. Henk de Weerd, a Dutch veterinarian specializing in pigeons, who fights against epidemics, the scourge of these mass races…
It is in Ireland that we meet the most endearing character. In a working-class housing estate, John O’Brien, a handyman, in his thirties, is a breeder “of two children and [de] sixty pigeons ». The camera follows him for several months, active, determined, spending the little he has for his birds. He will convince the members of his small local club to participate in the race to 1 million. “If my pigeons wonhe said, it would solve all my family problems. I would start from scratch. »
A race, pigeons and millions, by Gavin Fitzgerald (Ir., 2021, 91 min). On Arte.tv until April 29, 2026.
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