Omar Zúñiga Hidalgo | The Ducks’ Migration / 2012

eyes on the ducks

by Douglas Messerli

 

Omar Zúñiga Hidalgo (screenwriter and director) The Ducks’ Migration / 2012 [12 minutes]

 

I have now watched, over several years, Chilean-born Omar Zúñiga Hidalgo’s short film The Ducks’ Migration 5 times without ever being able to coherently describe it as a LGBTQ+ film. Or why it might even be interesting to the community.

     A nerdy young high school student, Jeremy (Ryan Leach) is being visited by the son of Jeremy’s mother’s best friends, Alphonse (William Moody), who lives in France. Evidently Jeremy and his mother have previously visited Alphonse and his mother previously in Paris and visited the Eiffel Tower; but that has little to do with the plot of this US visit.

     Alphonse has been consigned to a mattress on the floor of Jeremy’s bedroom, but already in the first scene, having grown tired on sleeping there has crawled into Jeremy’s bed. But nothing seems to have happened. Jeremy, watching the ducks in Prospect Park every morning to detail their soon-to-be migration, is up early to speed off to the park, his one major topic of conversation concerning the methods in which they take off on their flight.

     It is apparent that Alphonse has other things on his mind. First of all, while Jeremy walks or jogs to the park, Alphonse bicycles, and is far more interested in the beauty around him than in the ducks. For some rather inexplicable reason, one of his other interests just happen to be the sexuality of his American friend.

     Evidently at some moment in the recent past, in the midst of Jeremy’s endless conversation about the ducks, he has got him to promise to run naked in the park as he cycles, equally in the buff, beside him. And he now challenges Jeremy to live up to the bargain, who quite reluctantly joins in on the stunt.

   They pull off the event, and end in a near-hug, with the confused Jeremy hurriedly, ducking out of the intensity of what might have happened, and running back home. A long scene of dinner with the mother who cannot seem to stop gushing over her friendship with Alphonse's mother follows. Was there’s a lesbian affair? If so, it is of very little interest to us. The mother, Julia (Kathryn Danielle), couldn’t even imagine that her friend’s relationship with a man was possible, yet here is the son to prove it was. No explanation is given what happened to Jeremy’s father except that the bicycle the boy refuses to ride was his.

     The following day Alphonse is scheduled to return to France. And on the morning of leave-taking the two boys awaken in bed together, with every Jeremy daring to touch Alphonse’s sleeping head in a manner that we might suspect that the two boys may have actually did a little more in bed that night than sleep, particularly when Alphonse turns back to watch his friend now pretend to sleep.

      In fact, Jeremy, as he gets up to brush his teeth, Alphonse attending to his shower, seems for once to have forgotten his ducks.

      But suddenly, he remembers and rushes off to the park, discovering that, yes, this was the morning of their migration, which he has missed.

      He has evidently forgotten that a more important migration has also taken place, and by the time he returns home, his mother tells him that Alphonse has headed off to the airport without even so much as goodbye from Jeremy.

     Again, without much logic, except a subliminal kind of recognition that he now might be free to study human beings instead of ducks, Jeremy suddenly places his body on the bicycle he claimed he was afraid to ride, and speeds off down the street, as if he were on his way to the airport. But no, of course he cannot bicycle clear to Jamaica, Queens to JFK International Airport. His foray is strictly personal, as suddenly he is imbued, perhaps after his first sexual encounter, with a kind of new confidence.

     He life may, in fact, be changed, although one can hardly imagine, as the promotional material for this film hints, that Alphonse’s life has been so radically changed, unless he can be said to be glad to have left his wimpy, inattentive friend behind.

      I guess we can imagine this film as being a sort of “coming out” film, but it’s so muted and so secretive about its cinematic motives that it’s hard to tell. It all depends upon how one reads the boy’s behavior as they arise on that last morning. I like subtle, intuitive films rather than those who emphatically state and restate their messages; but just a little more clarity of what these two boys really have in common or what they did about it, might help us to feel more about them. As it is, Jeremy just seems like a selfish nerd who may or may not have finally gotten laid, and is maybe just a little pleased that he’s gotten the ducks, at least for a while, off of his mind.

      I should note, that the cinema itself is quite beautiful, with its images of the forest world of Prospect Park wherein the boys hide their lives.

 

Los Angeles, June 19, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).