Films by Henry Reyels

Germany 2022, 83 min
by Sönje Storm

Birds, bugs and butterflies: The collection of northern German farmer and photographer Jürgen Friedrich Mahrt (1882 -1940) is odd and a little bit uncanny. The documentary Dead Birds Flying High explores the quiet eccentric’s life and work. In 1919 he began to photograph the local flora and fauna and started to observe the extinction of species. In a northern German attic: boxes of pinned butterflies, carefully hand-coloured photographs of the local flora and fauna, hundreds of stuffed and dusty