REVIEW | To Fly Otherwise: Crip Futurity and the Refusal of Disappearance in ‘When Birds Can’t Fly’
DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 9 April) — To watch When Birds Can’t Fly is to enter a room already divided against itself.
The film opens in the bedroom, a space at once intimate and surveilled. Shela peers out a window from behind translucent curtains — already half-seen, half-hidden — before the film teaches us how to look: with an eye trained not on the fullness of the body, but on its reduction.
Shela appears first as a ghost, then as an outline — a white, monoline figure, translucent, almost erasable — before she is allowed to appear as a person.
In the work of disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, the stare is “an embodied and relational visual exchange that carries complex cultural and historical meanings … drenched with significances, scrupulously regulated, and intricately ritualized” — a structuring force that produces the strange, the unexpected, the unfamiliar, as spectacle. As modernity developed, Thomson writes, “institutions lassoed human curiosity by ritualizing the urge to stare at the unexpected.” In this light, the disabled body becomes something to be looked at, fixed, interpreted, contained.
Bea Allado’s intervention is subtle but precise: rather than removing the gaze, she dulls its force. By rendering Shela as a translucent line drawing, the film positions her between visibility and disappearance. She is seen, but not fully graspable. She evades the violence of the stare, but at the cost of opacity, slowly slipping into erasure.
The animated world, where Shela runs freely across vast pink and purple expanses, initially appears as liberation. Here, she is mobile, unbounded, joyous. The guitar soundtrack swells as the white noise of the real world dissolves. I find myself tempted to read this as escape; a utopian elsewhere where disability no longer entraps.
But while the space is vast, it is also empty. There are no “others” here. Freedom, in this world, seems indistinguishable from solitude.
Disability studies has long critiqued narratives that frame disability as something to transcend or overcome. In Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013), Alison Kafer argues against what she calls “curative time”: a frame that “casts disabled people (as) out of time, or as obstacles to the arc of progress” and within which “the only appropriate disabled mind/body is one cured or moving toward cure” (28). The fantasy of walking again, of running again, of flying, often falls into this narrative trap: it reaffirms that the disabled present is insufficient.
Under neoliberalism, where time is calibrated to productivity, and self-worth to self-sufficiency, this curative imaginary becomes a demand, an obligation. The disabled body is rendered legible only insofar as it can “return” to motion: into work, into progress, into usefulness.
Allado’s film brushes against this imaginary before quietly dismantling it: Shela’s animated body can run, but it cannot be touched; Shela can move, but she cannot be accompanied.
A knocking at the door interrupts this fantasy with a force that is auditory rather than visual. Where dialogue in the film is rendered as disembodied text that carries the weight of familial anxiety — Mao lagi na ba akong ingon sa imo, dili nimo kaya! Isa na lang gani na imong anak, gina-pasagdan ra nimo. Maunsa man ang future ni Shela? — the knock insists upon sound, presence, intrusion. It is the sound of an Other.
The film uses silent-film text to render family dialogue. Stripped of voice, these lines become archival: fixed, unanswerable.
Maunsa man ang future ni Shela? What will become of Shela?
This question structures disabled life under neoliberalism: a future measured in productivity, independence, self-sufficiency; a future that often cannot imagine disabled life as anything except lack. It is a question the film refuses to answer.
Where the animated world offers freedom without others, the knock offers an other without freedom. Neither is enough. Neither is sufficient.
What emerges instead is a kind of third space, a liminal zone where animation and reality begin to collapse into one another. The pink hues of the imagined world seep into the bedroom; the bedroom becomes traversable; a door appears within a door.
Rather than choosing between reality (constraint) and imagination (escape), When Birds Can’t Fly constructs what we might call a crip space: a space that does not demand the erasure of disability, but reconfigures the terms of inhabiting it.
This aligns with Kafer’s notion of crip futurity: an accessible future rather than a curative one; an elsewhere — or an “elsewhen” — where disability is understood as “political, valuable, integral” (Kafer 3).
The film’s visual language sounds this argument materially. The curtains — white, translucent — mirror Shela’s animated body. The boundary between inner and outer worlds is not fixed but porous. Her imagination is not a total escape from reality, but is already shaped by it.
The question, for me, then, moves from “How do we escape this body?” to “How do we inhabit it, together?”
The film’s central image — the injured bird — risks the familiar symbolic trap. The bird flies; Shela cannot. But when Shela finally reaches the sea, the real world begins to mirror the imagined painting.
Here, we do not mourn what she cannot do. We are instead made to attend to what she does do: she goes outside, she arrives at the sea, she participates in the ritual. The film shifts the conditions of value from mobility to relation, from flight to presence.
The bird’s flight is not hers. But the act of holding it, of caring for it, of letting it go, is.
The film brings this to a head with its final parting words: Molupad siya sa lain nga paagi — molupad ka ba uban niya? She will fly in another way. Will you fly with her?
To “fly otherwise” is to reject the ableist equation of freedom with mobility. It is to rediscover movement — from neoliberal independence to interdependence. It is to imagine futures where we no longer need to conceal our fundamental reliance on one another to survive: Will you fly with her?
In this light, the earlier knock at the door — that which once disrupted Shela’s imagined freedom — now becomes an invitation: to open the door, to let others in, to build a world where one need not flirt with disappearance in pursuit of freedom.
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once famously claimed that “Hell is other people.” But under these conditions of alienation and precarity, widespread economic instability, and neoliberal abandonment, what saves us might lie precisely in the presence of others — in the messy, imperfect, yet necessary work of being with.
By collapsing the distance between imagination and reality, visibility and opacity, solitude and companionship, limitation and possibility, When Birds Can’t Fly opens us to futures that are neither utopian nor curative, but ones imagined in the in-between, where bodies are not erased in order to belong. (Bea Gatmaytan / MindaNews)
Works cited:
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Staring at the Other.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4, 2005.
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013.
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