The life of Terry Masear and the lives of the hummingbirds she cares for are the subject of director Sally Aitken’s documentary, Every Little Thing.

Deep in the heart of Los Angeles, Aitken manages to capture a pastoral beauty in the area as she documents Terry’s efforts to rehabilitate injured hummingbirds. Many of the hummingbirds that come Terry’s way are nestlings who have lost their mothers. Others have suffered an injury of sorts, such as being hit by a car or attacked by another hummingbird.

Masear is the expert who can talk you through how to tend to the creature or safely guide it back outdoors. She's also the focus of the uplifting new documentary Every Little Thing about her efforts to personally rehabilitate a handful of hummingbirds who are broken or damaged. Not every one of them has a happy ending, but some do—and each benefits from her care and compassion.

The life of Terry Masear and the lives of the hummingbirds she cares for are the subject of director Sally Aitken’s documentary, Every Little Thing.

Deep in the heart of Los Angeles, Aitken manages to capture a pastoral beauty in the area as she documents Terry’s efforts to rehabilitate injured hummingbirds. Many of the hummingbirds that come Terry’s way are nestlings who have lost their mothers. Others have suffered an injury of sorts, such as being hit by a car or attacked by another hummingbird.

Sally Aitken is shining a light on an under-explored, but important, natural subject in Every Little Thing. Having gotten her start behind the camera with the PBS period miniseries Colonial House, Aitken has helmed both narrative and documentary projects throughout her career, though has largely been focused on the latter genre, ranging from Getting Frank Gehry to Disney+'s Playing with Sharks: The Valerie Taylor Story.

They say the measure of any society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. We could reverse engineer the idea and arrive at another perhaps obvious, though rarely stated (and even more rarely practiced) truth: that healing a society, maybe even a civilization, begins with healing its most vulnerable members. That thought runs through one’s mind while watching Sally Aitken’s Every Little Thing, a documentary as delicately beautiful as its subjects — the hummingbirds of Los Angeles and the woman who has made it her life’s mission to care for them.

The documentary about a Los Angeles woman who has made it her life’s mission to rehabilitate injured hummingbirds has a gentle sweetness that feels like a balm. Terry Masear, the subject of writer-director Sally Aitken’s film, has a no-nonsense demeanor, but her affection for these tiny creatures is unmistakable. She gives them names like Raisin, Cactus and Wasabi. She assigns them narratives as she observes their behavior. She painstakingly builds them elaborate aviaries and lovingly feeds them from a syringe.

The highlight for many will be the extensive slow-motion footage of hummingbirds in their element. It often looks fake because of how impossible the steady-cam nature of their bodies are while their wings flap away. We watch them licking water and bugs from flowers, staring into the camera, and even engaging in some fisticuffs to make good on Terry calling them warriors. And all the while she nurses Cactus, Jimmy, The Wild Boys, and others back to health with precise programs meant to let them regain strength, learn how to fly, and grow accustomed to living outside their cages.

Opening at the IFC Center this Friday* and at the Laemmle Monica Film Center in L.A. on January 17 is this documentary by Sally Aitken about author Terry Masea and her goals to save any injured hummingbird in Los Angeles, following her as she tries to rehabilitate the tiny, fragile birds back to healthy, running the Los Angeles Hummingbird Rescue since 2004. I don’t have a lot to say about this movie, except that it’s gorgeously shot, and the hummingbirds all have interesting stories as Masea nurses them back to health.

I saw Sally Aitken’s beautiful documentary Every Little Thing at Sundance last year and it had me at the Albert Hammond needle drop, grabbed my heart with all the sweet birds, and then proceeded to absolutely wreck me. The film profiles author and wildlife rehabber Terry Masear who has turned her home in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles into a rehabilitation center for injured hummingbirds. Masear is a deeply empathetic individual and it is hard to not to be moved by her love for these birds and the work that she does to help them.

We’re conditioned to think of nature documentaries as educational — probably because we watch them in school — but I think they’re more properly understood as generators of awe. You can’t easily see a cheetah or an octopus or an eagle in the wild, at least not for very long, but in a good movie you get to both observe and marvel.