AllMovie

In November 2005, a puzzle master spent hours patiently setting up 23,000 dominos for a special display created for German television. However, before the domino fall could be documented by cameras, it was accidentally ruined by a sparrow, which flew into the hall where the dominos had been arranged and knocked out the blocks with a single beat of its wing. A guard standing by shot the bird and became the center of a short-lived media scandal; the same day the bird was shot dead, the German military suffered its eighteenth fatality in Afghanistan, which passed with little notice. Filmmaker Philip Scheffner draws a parallel between these two events in the documentary Der Tag Des Spatzen (aka Day of the Sparrow), as he explores NATO bases in Germany, follows sparrows in the wild, deals with European military officials reluctant to sit for interviews or give permission to film on their grounds, and speaks with a handful of bird watchers and peace activists arrested for protesting Germany's involvement in Afghanistan. Day of the Sparrow was an official selection at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival.