Fly Away Home

*Fly Away Home*
New Zealand: Amy Alden (Anna Paquin) and her mother (Deborah Verginella) are driving through the night. Suddenly, a truck crosses their way...
The first person that Amy sees when she wakes up in hospital is her father Thomas (Jeff Daniels) whom she hasn't seen for years. Since her parents divorced years ago, Amy used to be travelling a lot with her mother while her father, an eccentric artist and inventor, has been living on his remote farm in Ontario, Canada. Amy gets to know that her mother has not survived the accident. As there is nobody else to care for her, Thomas Alden takes his daughter with him. At first, Amy has problems coping with the new situation. She misses her mother, she hardly remembers the farm where she spent the first few years of her life, and she	Amy (Anna Paquin) has to come to terms with her estranged father (Jeff Daniels) and his girl-friend (Dana Delany).
is bewildered about her father's strange habits: one day, he runs out of the house with only drawers on to fight back a troop of developers, and early in the morning, he sometimes flies his hang-glider. Her father, on his part, appears not to know how to handle his daughter and how to overcome their mutual estrangement.
The young geese hatch turns out to be the bad guy. He wants to enforce "Decree #9314" which says that the wings of domestically raised wild geese must be cropped to prevent the birds from flying around without orientation and landing on golf-courses and in gardens. Amy, horrified by his try, attacks him with a popcorn bowl, and her father drives him out of the house. Nevertheless, the little geese have to be taught to fly and, as birds of passage, to migrate south for the winter. This is why Thomas Alden	On one of her scattering walks, Amy finds an abandoned nest of Canada geese in the underwood. She carries the eggs home and puts them in a drawer of an old furniture in the barn, keeping them warm with a lamp in the drawer beneath. When Amy's father discovers her secret, the chickens have just hatched. As Amy is the first living being they see, they are imprinted on her, regarding her as their mother and therefore following her everywhere. At this point of the story, a previously friendly and helpful D.N.R. officer (Jeremy Ratchford) develops a daring idea: why not using ultralight flight vehicles to show them the way? At first, Amy is not convinced of this suggestion, being afraid of losing the only relation to her new environment. But when the first attempts seem promising, she at last understands that there is no other way to prevent the geese from mutilation. The common project binds father and daughter together and builds up a relationship between them. But before it can be translated into action, several obstacles have to be overcome...
Fly Away Home received an Academy Award nomination for Caleb Deschanel's beautiful cinematography. The music score reflects the developing relationship between Amy and her father, the opening song being repeated at the end of the film, therefore expressing that Amy has refound family comfort. Although the plot seems simple, the actors' charme and, not to be forgotten, the geese make Fly Away Home an impressive and sympathetic film. The idea of helping orphaned geese to migrate is not a part of fiction. Back in the eighties, Canadian Bill Lishman started his project named "Operation Migration", leading a flock of Canada geese to appropriate winter quarters in North Carolina. Since, in the following spring, the birds managed to return to the exact place where they had taken off in autumn, Lishman plans to extent his project to other endangered species.
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