Bird racing documentary seems primed for a crowd-pleasing comedic remake
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A few months ago on my morning walk I came upon a lost racing pigeon. At least, I assume it was lost. Maybe it was on the lam. But it was mooching around Toronto’s Ashbridges Bay, with a little ID tag on its scrawny ankle. I saw it every day for about a week and then it was gone, flown off or – well, let’s assume the best.
Was it worth a million dollars? It’s possible. In director Gavin Fitzgerald’s plucky little documentary Million Dollar Pigeons, we learn that in 2019 a racing pigeon named Armando was sold at auction for $1.4-million, more than tripling the previous record price for a bird of this type. Since then, top prices have gone north of $2-million. Baby pigeons (yes, they do exist) with a proven pedigree can fetch tens of thousands.
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The somewhat scattershot doc followers several groups of pigeon fanciers from around the globe, including a bunch in Ireland who pool their resources to purchase a small collection of birds, which they plan to send to a famed South African race with a top prize of a million-plus. But with an entry fee of $1,000 per bird, plus (ironically) plane fare, it’s a costly venture. And some wealthy breeders enter up to 100 pigeons a year.
Million Dollar Pigeons makes a narrative bank mid-movie, after the South African event in embroiled in scandals that include a last-minute change in the race’s distance, charges of theft and fraud, and a virus that killed more than a quarter of the feathered participants before the race could even start. (This was in February of 2020, meaning the human owners were hit with their own pandemic soon after.)
The action then picks up in Thailand, where an upstart company owned by an eccentric billionaire and featuring an all-female crew of pigeon handlers hosts its own race.
I can’t wait for the crowd-pleasing, based-on-a-true-story retelling that I’m half-certain is already in the works somewhere. Million Dollar Pigeons reminded me a little of Dark Horse, a 2015 documentary about a group of Welsh entrepreneurs who sell shares to finance the breeding of a racehorse. It was remade five years later as Dream Horse, with Toni Collette and Damien Lewis. A similar treatment to this one could prove that docs of a feather flock together.
Million Dollar Pigeons opens Feb. 3 at the Hot Docs cinema in Toronto.
3 stars out of 5
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