Feathered Cocaine

Nothing is quite as it seems in this provocative foray into the murky world of raptor smuggling, Middle Eastern politics and one seriously unconventional twitcher, Alan Parrot. We follow Parrot, one of the first to export birds of prey and now deeply regretting it, in his attempts to impose new regulations and a delighfully bizarre segue into why such regulations will never happen. In a nutshell Parrot’s hypothesis is that falconry is at the heart of Arab business practices – the proverbial golf course – and that outlawing the hunt and trade would be tantamount to banning stock exchanges. The film follows an intriguing trail of high-powered ‘knowns’ as they illustrate his point; most sensationally a smuggler who claims Bin Laden spent time in Iran running falcon camps.