Filmmaking duo highlights unsung heroes

Published 1:30 am Friday, October 24, 2025

Local filmmakers Amy Herdy and Cali Bagby are on a mission, through their newly founded company Covetower, to tell people’s stories, highlighting those whose voices are not always heard, and shine a light on truth.

“What we do at Covetower is bring journalistic foundation into documentary film,” Bagby said.

The duo’s most recent film “Parrot Kindergarten,” about a woman who went on a journey of healing through teaching her parrot interspecies communication, will be shown at the Friday Harbor Film Festival in the Palace Theater on Friday, Oct. 24, at 4 p.m.

Documentaries follow the subject and story where they go, Herdy explained. It begins with doing a background investigation and checking facts before committing to a project. Having a solid foundation prevents unpleasant surprises, wasting crew and film time.

“It takes the pressure away because you just follow it as it develops. You’re chronicling history,” Herdy said.

Added Bagby: “There have been some films or ideas that we worked on where you know you have something, so you go down the rabbit hole. But, sometimes, whatever idea you had doesn’t always end up being where the story leads. So there are some projects–and that’s very common with investigative journalism–that don’t ever come to be.”

Both have done research on projects before, for other film teams, Bagby continued, and had to come back to the crew and say, “Your main subject is not credible, and you should really rethink the path you’re on. And they did.”

The two have worked together for just under a decade. Their projects together include “Titan: The Oceangate Disaster,” “Justice,” “Harry & Meghan,” “Allen v. Farrow,” “On The Record,” “Britney v Spears,” and “Pups.”

Herdy was awarded the Friday Harbor Film Festival’s Local Hero award in 2023, to which she told the Journal at the time, “Just living here gives me so much already,” said Herdy. “This island’s peaceful, natural beauty is a sanctuary for me, and I have a deep appreciation for the resourcefulness and generosity of my fellow islanders. This award is the cherry on top.”

It was a slightly rocky first encounter. Bagby was editor of the Journal at the time and had published a letter to the editor that Herdy believed inaccurately depicted “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary where she was the investigative producer.

“I’m telling on myself,” Herdy began, explaining that she had called Bagby up to discuss the letter, clarifying she was not in a good frame of mind as her mother was not well, and that she ended up being sharp with Bagby. “She hung up on me and rightly so … After my mother died, I reached out and I said, ‘This is too small of a world and island to have any hard feelings. Can we please have coffee so I can properly apologize?’”

The two met for coffee and quickly developed a mutual respect. Bagby began working with Herdy as an investigative journalist shortly after.

“The relationship that I have had with Amy is the best professional relationship I’ve ever had,” Bagby said.

Herdy responded, saying, “You soften my sharp edges, but you don’t dull anything at the same time. You don’t dull the truth.”

To which Bagby replied, “Amy is a very strong, confident and determined person, but she is also one of the most compassionate people. There have been times in our relationship where she’s reminded me that this is a moment to be compassionate. People might not know the depth of Amy’s compassion. It’s beyond what sometimes even I can access.”

Bagby went on to note that Herdy wrote “Diary of a Predator” about Brent Brents, who is serving 1,509 years for violent crimes. Herdy was one of the first and few people to whom Brents opened up about his own childhood abuse, life and choices, helping her to understand how he became who he is.

“There’s listening to survivors and the next step is listening to perpetrators of violence and what happened to them,” Bagby said of “Diary of a Predator.” “I feel like, as a society, we’re not there yet. But Amy was able to find value in the abuser’s point of view, to shed more light on the cycle of abuse. That’s where the healing has to begin if you’re going to prevent children from growing up to become perpetrators, and change the pain and suffering in our world.”

Herdy clearly has the utmost respect and admiration for Bagby as well, saying, “She’s a brilliant researcher and she’s an even better human. The research on ‘Alan v. Farrow’ shows how integral Cali was. So many key elements of that series came from Cali’s work. She goes deep into the dark to bring back something solid and shining.”

Herdy continued, “The truth isn’t sitting on the surface in a story like ‘Alan v. Farrow.’ It has to be dug up and refined and handled with care. And that is exactly what Cali does.”

The two are a perfect mix. Where Herdy provokes, Bagby grounds.

“I get us through the front door, and she makes sure that people stay in the room,” Herdy laughed.

That rapport continues as the duo bounce documentary ideas around.

“We come up with these ideas and we bounce them off of each other. A documentary is really tough; getting an idea off the ground can be incredibly challenging,” Herdy said. “When we were first working on “Alan V. Farrow,” it started out as just doing an interview with Dylan [Farrow] as part of a bigger Hollywood MeToo project,” Herdy explained, but the more Herdy started talking with Farrow, the more she realized there was a story of its own merit there.

“I began bouncing it off Cali, came back to the filmmakers and said there’s a whole project here about Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow naming him as her perpetrator.” They were initially told no. No, it’s not a good idea, Woody Allen is an icon. Nobody wants to hear about it. But they persisted and the idea became the series that reveals new evidence in that decades-old story.

“I credit a lot of that investigative success on Cali’s research and her work for all these shining moments that come through, these nuggets of gold that come through,” Herdy reiterated.

One of the critical pieces that Bagby found was information against parental alienation syndrome, which Allen had been using to fight charges of molestation by Farrow.

“It was Cali who found that researcher who did the amazing, groundbreaking research that showed what a fallacy parental alienation syndrome was,” Herdy said.

When asked how subjects respond to their documentaries, Herdy and Bagby agreed that it can be cathartic for them.

“Dylan loved that we revealed the truth of it all,” Herdy said. “Working with a survivor like that … you want to make sure that they screen it before it’s released to the public. When Dylan first saw the series, she and I watched it together, remotely.”

Herdy explained that she was on the phone with Farrow all day while she watched the four episodes, talking with her as she watched every scene, listening to her reactions and watching her face as she watched it. “She was incredibly gratified. So was Mia [Farrow], which was tremendously rewarding.”

Regarding their latest project, Bagby said she believes there is potential for the culture or the mindset of the collective thought process to change. “ I think ‘Parrot Kindergarten’ especially really makes you face the truth that animals are expressing themselves today and experiencing pain just like humans do.” Not just pain, but love, grief, joy, all the emotions that humans do, she continued. The film is centered around a woman and a Goffin’s cockatoo, Ellie, their bond and how they learned from each other to form ground-breaking science showing animals do, in fact, communicate.

And the human subject, Jennifer Taylor O’Connor, Herdy said, is inspirational, something she realized in their first conversation that contained a pivotal point where Herdy said she knew Jennifer’s story was a film-worthy project.

“I asked her, ‘Have you had push-back for your research? Have you had naysayers? You know, others try to dissuade you?’ She said, ‘Oh my gosh,’ and started going into detail about how she was repeatedly told no and how she was mocked, and had all these obstacles.”

Herdy said at that moment, she could envision a film about this unsung, quiet hero who faces these obstacles and overcomes them.

“Jen embodies that because she just quietly persevered. What she was able to accomplish was amazing,” Herdy said.

O’Connor, like the Farrows, was incredibly gratified. She told the Journal that the film was created with kindness, intention, care and agency.

“There were three film shoots, and each one was really crazy fun! The filmmakers got to know the parrots ahead of the filming, so they weren’t nervous. In fact, the parrots probably had their favorite weeks ever — there were dance parties and cuddles and treats!” O’Connor said, adding that she loves the film. “Amy Herdy and the Covetower team created about our family. It’s absolutely beautiful, and sticks closely to the parallel narratives of family and science, which are the heartbeat of our lives.”

“We had a screening at home with Ellie and her sisters [O’Connor’s other birds] — complete with Grandma and popcorn!” O’Connor told the Journal. “There was this one moment, maybe 20 minutes into the film, when Ellie seemed to realize it was a movie about her. She gasped and looked at me. It was so, so precious!”

For more information about the filim, visit https://www.parrotkindergartendoc.com/ and

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt35460760/ and https://www.covetower.com/.

For more information about the film festival visit https://www.fhff.org/.