FiReFilms Marquee Film
Original mailing October 2021; edited January 2025
BRING YOUR OWN BRIGADE
A Message from the CEO
We’re thrilled to be able to share with our members Bring Your Own Brigade. This documentary hits home with me personally: this past August 9th, I had surprise urgent surgery; on the 11th, my husband had open-heart surgery; and as we were both starting our recovery, on the morning of the 13th, we learned we had to immediately evacuate our home, with our two German shepherds, due to approaching wildfire. The order lasted five days. I don’t recall ever having been so overwhelmed. This great film by Lucy Walker shows how many others in this position deal with, and utilize their resources around, fire, evacuation, trauma, and personal loss. It’s pretty shocking. I learned a lot from this documentary about how to better plan for sudden evacuation, and I hope you will as well.
– Sharon Anderson Morris, CEO
Dear FiReFilms members,
We now know that we can’t talk about wildfire – suddenly faster, bigger, hotter – without talking about climate change. But as director Lucy Walker says in Bring Your Own Brigade, this isn’t the only story. Can we take actions to help prevent, or at least mitigate, the growing threat of this new breed of fire? Can we reach “across the divide” as we take individual steps to avoid or address the ravages of natural, climate-driven, and human-caused disasters?
Walker set out to find answers, including to the biggest question of all – why is this happening? – and found optimism not only in so many of the memorable, passionate survivors who offered their stories (and footage) of two of the biggest fires in California’s history, but also in direct causes and solutions that are available for us to act on.
Parts of BYOB are predictably painful to watch; but interspersed throughout, and most lasting, are examples of “normal” people’s extraordinary humanity, generosity, love – the best in us that crisis sometimes reveals. May we all learn from this profound story, presented with great sensitivity.
– Sally Anderson, Managing Director
BRING YOUR OWN BRIGADE
Runtime: 119 minutes
Release Date: August 20, 2021
Website: https://www.bringyourownbrigade.com/
Synopsis
In early November 2018, raging wildfires killed 88 residents and destroyed tens of thousands of homes in the cities of Malibu and Paradise, two very different California communities. In her new verité documentary, two-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker Lucy Walker captures the heroism and horror of that unfathomable disaster. Her character-driven exposé, Bring Your Own Brigade, also answers a question humanity can no longer afford to ignore: Why are catastrophic wildfires increasing in number and severity around the world, and can anything be done to lessen the staggering death and destruction they cause?
Drawing on hundreds of hours of astonishing wildfire footage and featuring interviews with survivors, firefighters, and scientists, the film reveals that short of solving global warming there are numerous, often simple, steps that can be taken to not only mitigate the catastrophic devastation caused by wildfires, but also restore health and balance to woodlands that have been mismanaged for far too long.
But does society have what it takes to put aside short-term interests and outmoded thinking to confront a crisis that’s quite literally burning our world to the ground?
Director’s Statement
When I moved to California from London, I knew nothing about wildfires. But from where I landed in Venice Beach you could see flames and smell smoke. I couldn’t believe this was “normal.” I was scared and curious. I love making films about the natural world and human resilience, like my film The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom. And I love making films that ask simple questions, like: What does art mean to people in a garbage dump in Brazil? (Waste Land). This was obviously a story about how humans interact with the natural world. And I wanted to ask a simple question: What is going on with these fires?
But I didn’t anticipate what an ambitious goal this was. And as I discovered how many people were dying, how many firefighters were committing suicide, how many lives were being upended, I felt a responsibility to tell the story properly. I didn’t want to simplify it, or give up with unanswered questions still poking out at me. I became obsessed with finding out what was truly driving the fires.
I had made an assumption going into this that climate change was the driver of the worsening of the fires. After all, we’ve had the hottest temperatures and the biggest fires in recent years, so it just correlated so nicely. I was wrong. This made for a less simple narrative structure for the film. But a much richer and more rewarding journey, ultimately. And a much more uplifting story, too. Because it turns out there are things we can do differently.
I wanted to use a lot of people to follow the events and to illuminate them. I like mass storytelling, though it’s a lot of work. We do have a wonderful main character, Brad Weldon, and his arc was a joy to see unfold and to structure the film around. But it’s a big story that needs filling-in with experts, residents, firefighters, historians, geographers, politicians.
One gift that I valued enormously was getting out of my own bubble. There’s a moment I put in the film where I realize that I am not in liberal London, New York, or Los Angeles (the places I’ve lived) anymore, and my new friends start telling me that they “don’t believe in” climate change, or that climate change “is a hoax.” It was a shock to find myself among people I am not used to, hearing opinions I was not used to. But it was fascinating to realize that some of the divide was about language. And it gave me hope that we might be able to find ways to communicate across this divide. I liked the spirit of visiting across political lines. I want to do more of it. Making friends outside of your comfort zone. I got to understand a lot more of the perspective of rural Californians.
– Lucy Walker
About the Director
Lucy Walker is an Emmy Award®–winning British film director who has twice been nominated for an Oscar® and is renowned for creating riveting, character-driven nonfiction that delivers emotionally and narratively. The Hollywood Reporter has called her “the new Errol Morris” and Variety has praised her unique ability to connect with audiences. Walker’s films have been shortlisted for five Oscars and nominated for seven Emmys, an Independent Spirit Award, a DGA Award, and a Gotham Award, winning over 100 other film awards. For her advertising work she has been recognized with three Cannes Lions, two Clios, and two Association of Independent Commercial Producers awards, among many other honors.
Walker’s credits include the feature documentaries The Crash Reel (2013), Waste Land (2010), Countdown to Zero (2010), Blindsight (2006), Devil’s Playground (2002), and short films such as The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom (2011) and The Lion’s Mouth Opens (2014). Her television work includes 20 episodes of Nickelodeon “Blue’s Clues.”
Walker grew up in England and graduated from Oxford University with top honors and a degree in literature. There she directed theater and musicals before winning a Fulbright scholarship to attend the graduate film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. At Tisch she earned an MFA degree and directed award-winning short films. While living in New York, Walker also enjoyed a successful career as a DJ and musician.
Walker is also an acclaimed virtual-reality director. Her first VR experience, A History of Cuban Dance (2016), premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and showed at both SXSW and the Toronto International Film Festival. She has directed branded VR experiences for Airbnb, TOMS Shoes, Vaseline, Vice, and the Buena Vista Social Club.
Walker now lives in Venice, California. In 2017 she took over organizing and curating TEDxVeniceBeach and hosted a wildly successful inaugural event featuring talks by Diane von Furstenberg, Moby, and Agnes Varda, among others.
Updates on FiReFilms-Supported Docs
- UNDIAGNOSED
Sharon and Sally,
So nice to hear from you, and thank you for the attention to Undiagnosed. We are very happy to be on the home stretch to finishing the film!
Below is an update for the Marquee mailer:
From 2013-2021, the Undiagnosed documentary team captured over 800 hours of fascinating footage of undiagnosed stories across the USA. Showing innovative ideas about how diagnosis and data allocation can be successfully done, the film, in collaboration with Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, created a worldwide “Diagnostic Challenge” for the undiagnosed patients whose plights the film has been following. The success of this initiative allowed for the creation of a collaborative consortium of cutting-edge biotechnology companies willing to take this proof of concept a step further.
With the recent miraculous and long-awaited diagnosis of the film’s main character, the documentary team was at long last able to move the project into post-production. Undiagnosed is currently fundraising for its final stages of post-production and will be film-festival–ready for 2022. Sponsorships and donation inquiries are welcome @ info@undiagnosedfilm.com.
– Director Katia Moritz & Producer Crystal Shearman
- TIGRE GENTE (formerly Madidi)
Hi Sharon and Sally,
How are you both? It’s been a bit since we were last in contact, and I wanted to give you some updates about my film, now titled TIGRE GENTE.
We had our world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival in June, and the film has received some fantastic press:
The Guardian:
Salon:
Forbes:
BBC News Mundo:
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-58332662
Our team includes Academy Award–winner Joanna Natasegara (Virunga), who came on last year as Tigre Gente’s producer. Now, the team is fundraising for our impact campaign, which will run parallel to Tigre Gente’s international festival schedule. The impact campaign will be implemented throughout Latin America and China with a focus on curbing the demand for illegal wildlife products for Chinese traditional medicines.
We’ve received a pledge for a $25,000 contribution and we are now looking for a match. I wanted to ask if you might know someone who would be inspired to match this generous donation.
Thanks again, Sharon and Sally. I look forward to hearing about what you’ve been up to this last year as well…
Warm regards,
Liz
Elizabeth Unger
Filmmaker / National Geographic Explorer
[Note: To offer support, please email sally@stratnews.com.]