This overview is a part of our protection of the 2024 Sundance Movie Pageant.

Earlier than watching the Sundance documentary Every Little Thing, I had no concept that the Bob Marley tune I might have advised you was known as “Every Little Thing’s Gonna Be All Proper” was truly known as “Three Little Birds.” Marley’s lyrics don’t specify if the three little birds pitched by his doorstep are hummingbirds, although — seemingly not, as a result of in the event that they have been hummingbirds, they wouldn’t keep nonetheless.

The intense cute fantastic thing about these hummingbirds is the fast, albeit shallow, draw of Every Little Thing. But as director Sally Aitken’s movie progresses, letting the viewers come to grasp its predominant topic higher, it grows deeper than that, bringing us to a wholly new manner of seeing the world.

The middle of the movie, and its dominant persona, is Terry Masear, who operates a hummingbird rescue operation out of her Los Angeles dwelling, a big sufficient home to include a number of indoor and out of doors enclosures and cages to facilitate the restoration of injured or deserted birds which are delivered to her for care. There’s one thing explicit about hummingbirds that makes them particular to her: “You come prepared made with the empathy,” Terry says at one level. “You don’t have to develop it — it’s already there, due to your individual struggles.”

How Terry got here to run this operation, and what components of her previous made it work she’s enthusiastic about, performs a task in the movie, but it surely’s actually extra a mediation than anything, one filled with unimaginable visuals. Cinematographer and nature photographer Ann Johnson Prum delivers the small-scale, slow-motion footage essential to showcase the motion of hummingbirds in flight; a few of the photographs are so sharp and detailed that they nearly doesn’t look actual. Then once more, there’s at all times been one thing unreal about the hummingbird — tiny warriors battling forces of nature like rain and the savage housecat with their very own peculiar darting grace.

It looks as if that’s a part of what attracts Terry to them. That, and their delicacy — she handles every injured chicken so rigorously, like they’re fabricated from glass. Till, that’s, they’ve recovered sufficient for her to encourage them to fly, little nudges from one department to the subsequent which may result in them really chickening out once more. Every Little Thing avoids voiceover, as an alternative letting Terry’s voice ring out by the movie in conversations with “finders,” in conversations with herself, and in conversations with the birds she tends. She talks to them a lot, in ways in which show relatable and comprehensible.

For somebody who may solely be used to seeing a hummingbird for the on the spot it takes them to fly by, it’s troublesome to think about spending sufficient time with considered one of them to have a way of their character. However Terry is aware of her flock (effectively, not a flock, however “a allure”) so effectively that she’s in a position to play matchmaker, pairing off birds which may profit from one another’s firm as they recuperate from their accidents.

The movie makes clear that so lots of the birds Terry tends received’t finally survive. However then, she notes that it’s not the finish outcome, however the journey, which is vital. “She made a one-inch flight, for those who can name it that,” Terry says of 1 chicken struggling to heal. Then, she provides, “that’s all she must do in the present day.”

Past the restoration (or not) of some particular birds, the narrative is comparatively freeform — the beats of these birds’ journey to wellness might sound a mite predictable, however solely as a result of they lend the movie the semblance of a three-act construction. Every Little Thing isn’t a film you look ahead to story, although — it’s a film you look ahead to understanding. Not simply the nuances of what it means to be a caretaker like this, however what it’s prefer to see the world from the perspective of the tiny and susceptible. As a result of this world, in microcosm, is so filled with little beauties.

Every Little Thing premiered at the 2024 Sundance Movie Pageant.