Solstice Film Festival 2008

Woodpecker is the second feature-length film from writer/director Alex Karpovsky, whose award-winning debut, The Hole Story, was released theatrically last year after a hearty festival run. In 2006 Alex was selected as one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine and he was shortlisted for the “Someone to Watch” Independent Spirit Award last year.

As a follow-up, Karpovsky turns to the strange and blossoming world of birdwatching – America’s fastest growing recreational activity with some 15 million enthusiasts. Focusing on a peculiar pair of birders, the film explores the search for the famous Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. Declared extinct in the 1940’s, this mysterious creature has been recently spotted by locals in the murky bayous of Eastern Arkansas. Though additional sightings by reputed ornithologists have followed, concrete proof remains elusive, splitting the community between believers and skeptics. Yet the faith of our heroic pair is unwavering, and it seems their desperate commitment to the search is about to cost them dearly.

Building towards a shattering climax that undermines everything we thought we knew about this extraordinary bird, Woodpecker is an unconventional journey that incorporates a real setting, complete with real characters, into a narrative structure, complete with a pre-conceived storyline. Much like the woodpecker itself, the film explores the twilight of uncertainty between fact and fiction and the ways expectation and context can manipulate our notions of “reality”. Interweaving documentary and narrative styles, all truth becomes subjective in this existential tragicomedy about perception, identity, and some very very strange birds.

Filmed entirely on location in Arkansas, Woodpecker went into production in January of 2007.