Life with Vultures Documentary
For Life with Vultures, I wanted the camera to look at the Cypriot landscape not as a postcard, but as a witness — dry, beautiful, wounded, and old enough to remember everything we pretend is new. What began as a commissioned series documenting the milestones of a conservation project slowly became something more human and more difficult: a film about the people who dedicate their lives to protecting what the rest of us often notice only when it is almost gone.
At the centre of the documentary is the effort by NGOs and Government Agencies to save the last remaining vulture species in Cyprus, along with the wider web of birds and wildlife connected to its survival. But beneath that, the film became about endurance. About the emotional cost carried by conservationists who spend years building hope, only to watch it collapse in a single poisoning, a single electrocution, a single careless act. The story of Nefeli, a young vulture rescued, healed, released, followed, hoped for, and eventually lost, became the quiet heartbreak of the film — the kind of loss that does not need melodrama because the facts already hurt enough.
The black screens in the documentary came from that feeling: the sudden absence, the silence after bad news, the awful blank space where effort and love sometimes seem to disappear. And yet Life with Vultures is not a film about giving up. It is about the opposite. It is about the people who keep showing up, who search cliffs and fields and tracker signals, who carry grief without letting it become paralysis, and who continue to believe that saving one bird, one species, one fragile piece of the world, is still worth the fight.
Directed, shot and edited by Costas Drakos
