Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl gained a cult following after leaving his life in captivity at the Central Park zoo in 2023 and surviving, against all odds, for more than a year as a free bird in Manhattan.

Birdwatchers tracked his every move, capturing his vast wingspan and luminous orange eyes with their cameras. His fans got tattoos in his honor. And now, Wild Inside, a new documentary chronicling Flaco’s year about town, is set to premiere this week.

Penny Lane, who directed the documentary, said she felt compelled to tell the story of Flaco because, like so many other New Yorkers, she too found herself swept up in his magic. “Owls are uniquely magical creatures,” she said. “They’re associated with other worlds, these mystical realms. So the appearance of a creature like that in New York City … it feels like kind of a fairy tale.”

Flaco escaped from the zoo in February 2023, after someone deliberately cut the mesh of the enclosure where he lived for 13 years. Zoo staff and birdwatchers alike feared for his wellbeing. Flaco did not know how to hunt on his own. Observers noticed he had trouble flying. Attempts to lure him back with live lab rats were unsuccessful.

But eventually, he figured it out. Local birders documented him successfully hunting and eating some of the city’s many rats. And after two weeks, zoo officials suspended their efforts to recapture him. Flaco had done the impossible: he had learned to be wild again, in perhaps one of the wildest environments of all – the concrete jungle of New York City. “As the saying goes, if you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere,” one news anchor quipped in a news segment about the owl.

Lane sought to capture Flaco’s wild fairy tale magic in the film, interspersing interviews with awestruck New Yorkers celebrating each Flaco sighting with whimsical background music and dreamy visuals. She spoke to New Yorkers from all walks of life who projected their own experiences onto the owl that triumphed, calling him a survivor and hailing him as another immigrant success story (Eurasian eagle-owls are a non-native species). “Every New Yorker dreams of moving out of their tiny shitty apartment into a nicer neighborhood and Flaco did it,” Seth Meyers joked in a Late Show monologue.

“New Yorkers, we love an underdog,” Lane laughed. But for the local birding community, Flaco’s story went beyond that. “We were watching a zoo animal transform into a wild animal before our eyes,” Lane said. Flaco’s ability to revert back to instincts he never had to use in his life were raising questions over the true nature of wildness – and if it exists within all of us like it did for Flaco.

“He was born in captivity. His parents were born in captivity. His grandparents were born in captivity. As far back as I could trace, he was as close to a domesticated wild animal you could get in the sense that he was of a captive lineage,” Lane said. “But he showed pretty quickly that he was not a domesticated animal.”

But Flaco’s story doesn’t have a fairy tale ending. Just over a year after his escape, Flaco crashed into a building on West 89th Street and died from the impact. A necropsy conducted on his body found that he had been weakened by pigeon herpes virus, which he caught from eating the pigeons that he hunted, as well as four kinds of anticoagulants that are common in the rodenticide used to kill rats – a common cause of death and illness for all wild birds that hunt rats in New York City.

Street art mural honoring Flaco in New York’s Freemans Alley Photograph: Bing Guan/Reuters

“I was devastated,” Lane said. She had planned to film Flaco for the entirety of his life, thinking it would be for at least 10 more years. The birdwatchers and naturalists interviewed in the film grappled with questions of if Flaco would have been better off if he had never escaped the zoo at all – no longer free, but alive and safe. “You can’t help but feel guilty and implicated,” Lane said. “You loved seeing him so much, but you knew in the back of your mind all the while that this was not a safe place for him.”

A few months after his death, the city council approved “Flaco’s law”, an initiative that established a pilot schemes to deploy rat contraceptives rather than poison in an effort to curb the population.

The year Flaco spent hooting from water towers and peeking into apartment windows was brief, yes – but it was extraordinary in how it brought the natural world into the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, a reminder to city dwellers of the magic that exists alongside them, Lane said. “There are certain places in New York City that will forever be changed for me by his existence in those places,” Lane said. “I’ll walk down certain blocks and be like, ‘Oh, this is where I heard him hooting on the Upper West Side for the first time and I couldn’t believe how loud it was’.

“Everywhere he went, he left that place like a little more magical, and that magic is still there.”

• Wild Inside opens on 31 July in New York and at over 40 theaters nationwide