The movie centers around a little girl, Amy (Anna Paquin) whose mother dies in a car accident and she is left to be taken care of by her father Thomas Alden (Bill Lishman) who she has practically never seen in all her life. Her parents had separated when she was very small and her mother had settled in New Zealand moving away from her father who stayed in Canada.
Thomas is a somewhat eccentric but caring man who tries his best to put his daughter at ease even as he struggles to balance his life and work and the responsibilities that that are his, now that Amy is living with him. Amy is somewhat fragile and jittery as she adjusts to the sudden changes in her life, a completely new place, new people(some of whom she doesn't quite like).
Anna Paquin does a brilliant job as Amy, speaking very rarely, but portraying all the emotions with the ease of a pro.
Then one day she discovers eggs of wild geese near her house and takes them home. The eggs hatch into tiny little goslings that Amy takes care of and soon enough her life begins to revolve around playing with them, feeding them, deciding on a name for each one of them, and so on. Her father is somewhat perturbed by the advent of the geese but decides to let his daughter keep them when he realises how attached Amy is to them.
The scenes here are wonderful, especially the ones where Amy rambles around in the fields followed by her tiny companions waddling along in a line. Amy becomes the Momma Goose.
The story then takes a turn when Thomas decides to guide these migratory birds to a sanctuary down south in his aircraft, since these geese did not have a mother to teach them how to fly and where to migrate to. And the latter half of the film deals with the preparations, that include engineering the aircraft to make it capable of taking the long flight down south, getting the geese not only to fly, but to follow the aircraft all the way to the sanctuary.
And here Amy gradually starts forming a bond with her father as well as his girlfriend-a bond that was missing so far. She truly starts knowing her father as they work along, together. Some of the conversations here between the father and the daughter are truly touching. The movie ends with the birds reaching the sanctuary down south, not before they have flown thousands of miles over some breathtaking landscapes. I specially loved the scene where the aircraft flies over the Great Lakes and the shot shows the reflection of the entire fleet of geese, the clouds, the sky and the craft on the water. All that with the beautiful music by Mark Isham.
The movie deals with quite a lot of issues without seeming to be zealous or preachy. Apart from addressing serious environmental issues it also tells the story of how Amy finds her home far away from where she had grown up. Away from people she had known to be her own. The journey of the geese was in fact, also, a journey for Momma Goose. They found home. Away from home.
: Amy? It's your dad.
: Dad?
: I came down from Canada. I've come to take you home.
This film is based on the true story of William Lishman's and Joseph Duff's experiments on migrating birds. Lishman and Duff provided actual "imprinted" birds for the making of the film, as well as the actual aircraft used.
