Passenger Pigeons

A young coal miner dies in a small town in eastern Kentucky, which begins the four-story plot of Passenger Pigeons, set in the Appalachian hinterland. All the events take place over one weekend, when the miner’s death disrupts the town’s sleepy atmosphere, and characters’ various ways of dealing with the loss compose into an image of a community isolated from the world and barely able to recall the prosperity of yore.

Martha Stephens’ film develops slowly over 90 minutes. The director takes time to saturate the plot with fatalism and all encompassing resignation, all built on poignant cinematography by the young Gregg Hudgins. The film does not lionize backwater America or try to extrude emotional reactions with scenes of poverty, offering instead numerous thoughtful observations and psychological realism. Passenger Pigeons may be read as a portrait of a community forgotten by capitalism. The town Stephens shows is a zombie: exploited, off the trail of global influence and investments, but still alive. In the town’s soft and gently foggy light, the industrial age is drawing to an end, taking with it a certain kind of social ties.

Samuel Nowak