Passionate, personal and profoundly moving.
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Writer-director Lucy Walker casts an immigrant s eye over California s catastrophic wildfires for this essayistic documentary.
Bring Your Own Brigade isn t the first cinematic report on the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, in 2018, or even the first one to screen at Sundance (Ron Howard s
Rebuilding Paradise played at the festival in 2020). It almost certainly won t be the last film about the devastation wrought by uncontrolled wildfires, particularly in California, by a long shot.
But it s probably the smartest, most interesting documentary so far on the subject as it adroitly balances views of survivors, first responders and observers while sifting in an accessible way through the complex science that causes such fires, focusing primarily on the Camp Fire as well as the Woolsey Fire that ravaged Malibu around the same time.