Short Film Saturday: The Pigeon Kings of Brooklyn

Three New Yorkers find poetry and their own religion, competing for the hearts and minds of a gaggle of pigeons high in the skies above New York City.

You know we love the written word here at Narratively, but today we’re trying out something new. Each “Short Film Saturday” we’ll be sharing one of the narrative video stories we’ve had the honor of working on over the years. This moving piece, about a couple of fascinating Brooklynites and their feathered friends, was a Vimeo Staff Pick when it was originally released in 2015.

Look up from the busy streets of New York City and you might glimpse a flock of purebred pigeons swooping in circles around an abandoned tenement building in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Their aerial acrobatics are guided by their keeper, a streetwise Puerto Rican man nicknamed 2Tone. On the other end of the borough, a guy named Goodwin and his pal Super 13 tend their own pigeon coop and flock of 300 birds. Each man is trying to beat the other, to lure his birds away. It’s about bragging rights but it’s also about poetry. It’s about religion; it’s about finding that “true pigeon that will never break your heart,” as 2Tone says.