It is a shame that this film was marketed as a children's movie, because it has a double layer and is just as enjoyable for grown-ups as for children. The story is quickly told: An elderly couple finds a girl with wings instead of arms. The man, a birdwatcher, insists that it is a bird, but his wife has motherly feelings for the creature and insists it is a child. What it really is, we will never know, but she sure has a lot of bird-like features, and when fall comes, she has an urge to fly south. The growing group people that go on a chase to find her eventually all come to terms with their own issues.
Children will love the cuteness of the little bird girl and the adventurous storyline, but grownups enjoy the fantastic dialogs and the absurdity of the situations, that reminds some of the best Van Warmerdam films (without having the same gloomy atmosphere).
This is the first Dutch film ever where the director had here name taken off the credits (the director is now 'Ellen Smits', Alan Smithee's Dutch sister), because 15 minutes were cut out of the film without the director's permission. I don't know if this was a good decision. Fact is that the whole pace of the movie is rather slow. If some action scenes were cut out, this was a bad decision, but if the deleted scenes were more static and introspective, it may have actually been a good decision. Of course I would love to see the deleted scenes, but unfortunately they are not included in the DVD.
