Albatrosses Are Full of Our Plastic: An Interview with the Directors of 'Midway'

The image of a baby bird with a stomach full of plastic is hard to to get out of your head. And the directors of the new environmental animal documentary Midway, hope you won't forget it.

The film, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, visualizes the largely invisible problem of mass consumption through the microcosm of an island of albatrosses plagued by plastic and pollution. Directed by Chris Jordan and Sabine Emiliani, the film follows two birds as they fall in love, mate, and then raise their baby from egg to hatchling to fledgling. At the documentary's end, it takes off in first flight, like an awkward lanky teen.

Moments of majestic beauty like this one make the scenes with dead and dying birds even more heart-wrenching. Mother Earth is personified in the voiceover and acts as a witness to the island's sickness. A woman narrator's hushed tones, poetic voiceovers, and the music are all evocative of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life—which comes as no surprise, as the same sound designer from that feature worked on Midway.

In Toronto, I sat down with co-directors Jordan, whose background is in large-scale photography depicting mass consumption, and Emiliani, who edited March of The Penguins, to talk about the aim of their powerful film.

How did you first hear about Midway Island?

Chris Jordan: This film is really an outgrowth and a transformation of my interest in visualizing our collective shadow of mass consumption that is destroying our Earth. For the longest time, I was creating these very large-scale images that try to depict these massive invisible problems that we are all contributing to—whether it's our consumption of oil or plastic bottles or the amount of trees being cut down. And, I heard about the Pacific garbage patch.

It's another one of those invisible issues: there is no way to take a picture of the Pacific garbage patch. I thought that until I learned of this phenomenon that is happening on Midway Island. It is only a tiny, tiny tip of the iceberg of the Pacific garbage patch, but our garbage is appearing in the most gutturally horrific and profoundly symbolic way: inside the stomach of baby birds on this incredibly remote island. As soon as I heard this phenomenon was happening, I felt drawn to Midway like a magnet.

It's a film that can really make you feel despair and guilt. Are you conflicted at all by just showing the problem, not a solution?

Jordan: I love that question. It goes to the very heart of my work generally and specifically this film, because here is what I believe: there is a broken aspect to the world of activism and environmentalism. The typical approach of activists is to say, "Here is the problem and here is the solution." Then they say, "You should all go do the solution," with their fingers wagging.

There is a missing piece there, which is what I experienced the very first time I heard Al Gore talk years ago before An Inconvenient Truth came out. He said that we all know what to do already but we aren't doing it because we haven't found the will to do it. And then he went right on wagging his finger about what we should do.

I got fascinated with the question of how do we find the will to change? What is the thing that will shift our collective will? That's the missing piece in the world of activism, and that is the goal of the Midway project, to create a bridge between here is the problem and here is the solution because we don't act until we feel something.

When we feel something deeply enough, then we act. If we get angry enough, or frightened enough for the future of our children, or sad enough about what is being lost every day in our world, or if we can fall in love with things that we aren't connected with, like albatrosses on a remote island or elephants in Kenya, then we act. That to me is the missing piece in first-world culture.

We have become disconnected from the miracle of our world. That is what the Midway project is about.

How did you work to make a narrative structure to achieve that goal?

Sabine Emiliani: It was very challenging to find a way to explain that idea. We were always thinking that we needed a story to tell that, and finally we tried to explain it through a story of love: These birds love each other. This love is the most shared feeling in the world.

We feel like if we are able to talk about a love story, just as in a human film, we will touch people, because we will have this mirror of our humanity. What was important in this project was to help the audience to feel the story happened to the birds. The birds are just the mirror of ourself.

I am a mother and Chris is a father and we were thinking all the time about the fledgling in the film. We were thinking, what kind of future are we leaving for our children? I think it's an important statement in the film. We are responsible for how we have overwhelmed the world with our plastic, but the plastic is a part of our evolution. So we don't to point out that it's good or bad. The point is we know what we know now, and now we have to figure out what kind of world we want to leave for our children.

One thing I find in nature films is that the filmmaker's preconception of what they think of nature always comes through—whether it's violent and ruthless, or chaotic and disordered, or rational and ordered. Would it be fair to say that your view is that nature is beautiful and majestic?

Jordan: Yes, and there is another piece to it as well. I had a transformative experience on Midway, being that close to these creatures and experiencing that they feel love for each other. I experienced the love the partners feel for each other, the tenderness that they show their babies, and the incredible sophistication of their minds to be able to navigate the entire Pacific Ocean, flying thousands of miles with the wind currents and finding their way back to the island.

I experienced the unbelievably sophisticated and graceful dance they do that is perfectly synchronized. We just couldn't help but experience that these birds are sentient. I had the experience of falling deeply in love with the sentience and brilliance of the albatross.

Part of that process was realizing that there is nothing more brilliant or magnificent or lovable about the albatross than there is about any other creature: the dolphins, the gorillas, or the whales. There is this kind of beetle on Midway that is unbelievably gorgeous and I'm thinking about making a film about its story next.

There's something about looking very, very deeply into the consciousness of one creature and realizing how much there is that we don't know or refuse to acknowledge. That's my view of nature: that nature is sentient. It's this alive, living, miraculous thing, and we are only beginning to acknowledge how complex and intelligent it is.

How many trips did you make to Midway for the film?

Jordan: We went out eight times, at different times of the year and in all different stages of their life cycle. What I handed over to Sabine… I think it was over 400 hours of footage.

Were you able to recognize particular birds when you would go back?

Jordan: A couple times I did. They were also banded so we would know. But the fascinating thing about the albatross is that they always make their nest in the same place as they were born, and when the fledgling flies out to sea, they are out there for three to five years without ever touching land. When they come back to the island as adults, ready to find their mates, they go to the very place they were born.

From year to year, you go to the nest and it's the same pair. There was one time where we saw a baby hatch, and then we went back to the spot and saw that it had survived against the odds and it was strong and beautiful. Then later that year we saw it sleeping in its nest before it went and fledged. There was one bird that we followed through its whole cycle.

What do you make of the symbolic meaning the albatross has, that out of any bird that this could be happening to, it's this one?

Jordan: Imagine this for a moment: We've been hired by a film studio to bring to the world a film about pollution that hits like a hammer blow. It's animated, we can make it anything we want, and we have an infinite budget. Let's imagine we have a whole bunch of creative geniuses, and we are sitting around thinking about what would be the most horribly powerful, gut-wrenching place for pollution to show up. Some genius would say that it should be inside the stomach of a super cute baby animal. And everybody would say, bow down to that person's brilliance.

What animal would it be? The fluffiest, cutest animal would be a baby bird. Someone would suggest finding plastic inside a baby bird. We'd look back in our literature, and think it should be a bird that has symbolism. Not a pigeon or a duck, but some kind of grand bird that has a long history in our poetry and in our lore as a carrier of messages. And somebody would say, the albatross!

Where should this bird be? Should it be in a landfill in Cleveland or in the Galapagos? Where would be the most powerfully symbolic place for this to be happening? Well, it would be the most remote place on Earth. It would be our pollution showing up in a place the furthest from any continent. Then, we'd ask, what should the name of the island be? Someone would say, well, let's think of a name that most powerfully symbolizes where humanity finds itself now, where the old paradigms collapse and the new ones are yet to emerge, and humanity is collectively going through the narrow point in the hourglass. We need a name that would symbolize a kind of crossroads. And the name would be Midway.

That's our film, except none of us thought of any of this stuff. It was all happening already. And it just came to me like this radar beacon. My whole process has been to create a container that this incredibly powerful story can tell itself to the world. A big part of the process has been to get ourselves out of the way as much as possible, so that it can tell itself.