Flight of the Butterflies
Director: Mike Slee
Studio: SK Films/Sin Sentido Films
Canada/Mexico, 2012

Review by Martin Boyd

When I founded Diálogos in 2006, my wife suggested adopting a monarch butterfly as the company logo. Apart from its obvious aesthetic appeal, the symbolic power of the monarch seemed perfect; what could be a better logo for a Toronto-based company whose purpose is to promote dialogue between English- and Spanish-speaking worlds than a butterfly that makes an incredible 4,000 kilometre journey between Mexico and Canada every year? But I’d never given much more thought than this to the amazing story of the monarch until this week, when I had the opportunity of seeing Mike Slee’s documentary Flight of the Butterflies at the gala opening of MexFest at Scotiabank Theatre.

As this exquisitely realized film reveals, the whole story both of the monarch butterfly and of the discovery of its migration path is nothing short of extraordinary. The film recounts the story of Fred Urquart, a boy who was captivated by the monarch butterflies he would see every summer around his home in Toronto, and wondered where they disappeared to every autumn. When Urquart grew up and became a zoologist, he embarked on a mission to trace the migratory route of the monarch. It became, in fact, a life mission, as it took him some forty years of tireless research to finally trace the route of the monarchs all the way to their winter home in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. Indeed, in spite of decades of investigation, coordinating with volunteers all over Canada and the United States, which allowed him to track their route as far south as Texas, Urquart might have ended up declaring defeat had it not been for some unexpected help from a couple of amateur scientists in Mexico, who finally helped him to discover the amazing secret of where the monarchs hide out every winter.

The film seamlessly weaves together scientific data on the monarchs with a compelling re-enactment of Urquart’s efforts to discover their winter hideaway. The cinematography is stunning, particularly in the final scenes, in which we, along with Urquart himself, finally get to see the whirling storms of butterflies at their overwintering site in Michoacán. And in addition to its merits as both an educational and inspiring work of art, Flight of the Butterflies also constitutes an ecological alert, as the film documents the destruction of the milkweed belt that sustains the monarchs on their extraordinary journey due to the expansion of cattle ranches along their migratory route, posing a serious threat to their migration pattern. In response to this threat, various milkweed-planting campaigns have been launched in an effort to reverse the damage and restore the milkweed belt.

This extraordinary film was presented at the gala opening of MexFest, a new annual festival to celebrate Mexican arts, cuisine and culture in Toronto that represents yet another of the many laudable initiatives of Mayte Morelos to promote Mexican culture in our city. After the screening of the film, I had the opportunity to speak with the film’s director Mike Slee, who commented to me that although they received significant Mexican government support for the film (from both federal and state levels), no support was forthcoming from any Canadian government source. It is quite baffling and, needless to say, disappointing that a film about an eminent Canadian scientist, filmed by a Canadian film company, shot extensively in Canada and dealing with one of Canada’s most amazing natural phenomena should receive no support from official Canadian sources. We really must be grateful to the Mexican authorities who had the foresight to recognize the value of a film that celebrates such a tangible connection between Mexico, the United States and Canada, both in terms of these beautiful creatures who show such a joyful disregard for our human borders in their annual migration across North America, and of the coordinated efforts between naturalists in all three countries to discover their secret.