The culprit was never found. The owl, however, was suddenly everywhere.
In February 2023, somebody entered the Central Park Zoo with bolt cutters, opened the enclosure of a Eurasian eagle-owl named Flaco and inadvertently—or perhaps inevitably—created a New York legend.
Penny Lane’s new documentary, Wild Inside, follows Flaco from his bewildering first appearance on a Fifth Avenue sidewalk through an improbable second life above Manhattan.
Born in captivity and housed at the zoo for 13 years, he entered the city with the résumé of an apex predator but almost none of the applicable experience. He could barely fly. He had never hunted. He belonged to another continent. Yet Flaco learned. He hunted rats, strengthened his wings, explored neighborhoods and eventually claimed the city’s water towers, fire escapes and rooftop machinery as his own unlikely kingdom.
This cinematic chronicle is part wildlife documentary, part urban fairy tale and part philosophical inquiry into captivity, freedom and ultimately an unlikely symbol of transcendence that captured the hearts and minds of a city.
Lane, whose previous films include Hail Satan?, Listening to Kenny G and Confessions of a Good Samaritan, recognized Flaco’s arrival—literally out of thin air, outside Bergdorf Goodman—meant that he would be her next cinematic subject.
“I was watching a zoo animal transform into a wild animal,” Lane said of the bird with pumpkin-orange eyes and a six-foot wingspan. “This has never been seen before.”
Wild Inside is assembled from Lane’s own filmmaking and a vast trove of material gathered by birders, residents, tourists and amateur Flaco correspondents. The owl may be the most documented member of his species in history, and the movie turns that abundance into something intimate and comprehensive. New York itself becomes a production partner: its bodegas, museums, barbershops, preschools, tattoo parlors and apartment windows all become pitstops in Flaco’s story—particularly the window.
During one phase of his roaming, Flaco began perching on air conditioners and fire escapes, peering into apartments at the people inside. After years of being watched in a cage, he seemed to reverse the arrangement.
“It was as if he was looking at us,” Lane recalled.
That reversal gives the film much of its emotional voltage. Flaco is both a wild animal and former zoo resident, a creature habituated to people but answering instincts he’d never used. The New Yorkers who encounter him respond with awe, protectiveness and projection. Some see liberation. Others see an animal placed in mortal danger by a reckless human act. Many see both.
Lane does not flatten those contradictions. Wild Inside understands that freedom can be magnificent without being safe, and that human stewardship often slips into human dominion. The question is not simply whether Flaco should have been free, but what obligations follow once freedom has been forced upon him.
Still, Flaco is almost comically easy to love. He becomes a celebrity, a civic mascot and an airborne symbol of liberation and liability.
“This is my eighth feature documentary, but I’ve never had an easier time getting an audience to root for my main character,” Lane said.
Wild Inside is funny, transporting and, ultimately, devastating. Expect heartstrings tugged by talons.
Starts Friday, Aug. 7, at Rialto Cinemas, 6868 McKinley St., Sebastopol. rialtocinemas.com.
