"Caught in the Headlights"
by Paul Pritchard
May 2006
www.pulpmovies.com

According to the scroll at the stat of Caught in the Headlights, an animal is killed on the US roads every 11.5 seconds. The film then goes on to explore the America’s car culture and its impact on the local wildlife from the people who are regularly and directly involved.

Denley Loge and Bruce Friede are both employed by the Montana Department of Transportation and have the unenviable task of removing the roadkill from the roads. Both men have a dry wit and a matter-of-fact approach to their jobs which keeps them sane amongst the roadside carnage they have to deal with on a daily basis. Between them, the two men very effectively get across both the scale of work involved in clearing dead animals from the roads, and how much it costs.

Marcel Hujser is a Dutch road ecologist whose discussion of how best to ensure that the animals can cross the roads safely reveals, very effectively, the number of factors that need to be taken into account. He also has much to say and made more fascinating by his digressions into the past, present and future of transport infrastructure that is both interesting and illuminating.

Richard Huffman is a car body painter who gets to see both the cause (during his hour long commute) and impact (on the cars) of car-animal collisions. Interestingly, much of what he has to say – about driving at a more reasonable speed and being aware that animals may run out in front of your car – echoes many of Hujser’s remarks.

Roads provide an open space, teeming with things like mice and squirrels, which inevitably attract birds of prey, the majority of which will wind up dead. And this brings us to Kate Davis who runs Raptors of the Rockies, a non-profit raptor education and rehabilitation project.

Peter Bevis is an artist who turns road-kill into sculpture in an attempt to bring people face to face with the effect that car dependency has, not just on wildlife, but on society as a whole.

C. Wolf Drimal, Margot Higgins and Doug Hawes-Davis combine the six peoples’ stories to create a consistent and engaging narrative which manages to thoroughly investigate their subject without becoming either preachy or histrionic.

It also helps that the film is beautifully shot with some arrestingly beautiful nature photography used both to cut from one speaker to another and to underline exactly what the film is talking about.

Overall, Caught in the Headlights is an understated and intelligent documentary which has much to say about car culture that is applicable not only to North America, but to any developed country.

The vast majority of us - no matter where we are - drive too fast, too often and without enout attention. And this is why this film, which really brings these facts home, really does deserve to be seen as widely as possible.