Wings of Life

The documentary is about pollination. Bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and bats move from flower to flower, and the flowers produce colour, scent and sugar to draw them in. The camera films it very close and very slow: pollen caught in the hairs of a bee, a butterfly's proboscis, a hummingbird beating its wings dozens of times a second. What the film says is simple: a large share of what we eat depends on the work these animals do, and their numbers are falling. Louie Schwartzberg directs; seventy-seven minutes, narrated by Meryl Streep. Schwartzberg has been shooting time-lapse and slow-motion nature footage for more than thirty years, and some shots here come from filming that took years. It is one of the Disneynature releases.