When Lucy Walker debuted her harrowing documentary about California wildfires, Bring Your Own Brigade, at Sundance in 2021, it was during peak COVID. Not the best time for a film on a wholly different scourge. And so the film, though acclaimed - it was named one of the 10 best films of the year by the New York Times - didn't reach an audience as large as Walker had hoped, with its urgent display of the human cost of wildfires and its tough, crucial questions for the future.
One of the most stunning parts of Bring Your Own Brigade - the title is a reference to the economic inequity of wealthy homeowners or celebrities like Kim Kardashian hiring private firefighters - is watching the reaction of firefighters at a town meeting in Paradise, where 85 people had been killed in the fire. They've convened to discuss adopting safety measures as they rebuild. One by one, measures are rejected - even the simplest, requiring a five-foot buffer around every house where nothing is flammable.
Lucy Walker commented, 'It does feel like people are now asking the question that I was asking a few years ago, like, 'Is it safe to live in Los Angeles? And why is this happening, and what can we do about it? And the good news is that there are some things we can do about it. What's tricky is that they're really hard to accomplish.'
Collection
[
|
...
]