This unique local film depicts the lives of people who lived in the ten-year-old Albany Landfill community prior to their eviction.  The film follows them through their eviction and documents them one month afterwards.  But instead of being a documentary about homelessness, about bums, this film considers the question:  What if the homeless ─ the indigent, the bums ─ told their own stories?  

This local film tells the true story of a Bohemian St. Francis and his remarkable relationship with a flock of wild red-and-green parrots.  Mark Bittner, a dharma bum, former street musician in San Francisco, falls in with the flock as he searches for meaning in his life, unaware that the wild parrots will bring him everything he needs.  This is a little gem of a movie that deftly combines beautiful photography with a touching story that gains depth as the film progresses.  The comic acting of the parrots and Mark Bittner, their caregiver, bring us an amusing narrative that keeps the film fun and touching,

Mark is a gentle soul, homeless, looking for some direction in his life and became inspired by a poem by Gary Snyder to seek the nature around him.  He sees parrots!  This is his story, consorting with wild birds living on their wits in the jungles of San Francisco.  The fact remains that these wild parrots of Telegraph Hill have become neighborhood superstars. And Mark became their biggest fan.  He drifted to San Francisco with dreams of being a musician.  He's quiet, gentle, and has been living off the kindness of friends and strangers for his length of time in the city by the bay.  When we meet him he's been living rent-free for three years in a cottage that's a part of another property.  The owners just couldn't find it in their hearts to tell him to go.  After all, he feeds the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill and that's made him a bit of a celebrity himself.
 

Even at a very young age, Elizabeth Wiltsee was different from everyone else.  Behind her wide eyes and gap-toothed smile lay a prodigious intelligence.  With an IQ of 200, she taught herself to read by age four and was reading classical Greek by the time she was ten.  She grew up in Manila, then Geneva, and graduated with the first National Merit Scholarship from the Milton Academy, outside of Boston.  At Stanford University, English Professor John Felstiner found in Elizabeth a deep thinker with the soul of a poet, possessing "an utterly uncommon voice and sensibility."  And thirty years after he first saw her, John Felstiner still found mystery and wonder in her life and death.  Her life was different, strange, beautiful, and haunting right up to the end.