In the Line of Fire: Two Docs Wade Into B.C.'s Wildfires

Two documentaries light up the small screen with timely portraits of Canada’s wilderness ablaze. The series Wildfire, streaming on Knowledge Network, and the feature Incandescence, streaming at NFB.ca, illuminate different facets of the fight to protect the wilderness, our homes, and communities. Both docs feature awesome footage from the front lines of the effort—a battle, really, with some of the complicated manoeuvering that Wildfire observes—as courageous firefighters work tirelessly to combat the roaring flames.

In Wildfire, which debuted the last of its five episodes this week, really gets into the thick of the action. Director Kevin Eastwood (Humboldt Strong) joins co-directors and former firefighters Clayton Mitchell and Simon Shave to capture some white-knuckler footage. The series gives a sense of the scale of the wildfires, which reached a peak in British Columbia in 2023, as teams take tactical efforts to control the fires by air dropping water and by undertaking controlled burns, among other measures. Spotters, meanwhile, catch early evidence by following the tried-and-true adage that smoke signals, although the fires in proximity to the U.S. border raise some fine diplomatic points about Canada-U.S. relations. Wildfire looks at the escalating existential threat that these fires pose to Canadians.

The first episode, for example, takes audiences to Lytton, B.C. where nearly all of the small town was wiped out in a single 2021 blaze. Former residents return to the scene of the crime where literally nothing remains, save for a scarred landscape that looks like a community razed for development. Residents try to make sense of lives uprooted in a flash, as the toxic remains of the fire meant that they couldn’t return home to find whatever remnants of their lives—family photos, heirlooms passed between generations—were left in the rubble.

“Lytton was always on my mind,” Eastwood says in an interview with Montecristo. “Lytton is featured prominently as the backdrop of what everything else is against. It hopefully shows the stakes that are present. That you can’t take any chances.”

Other episodes put audiences in the minds of the firefighters who risk their lives, and sometimes sacrifice them, while combatting the flames. The third episode in particular pays tribute to the human costs of protecting the wilderness. A third generation firefighter talks about losing his father when his plane crashed while trying to control a blaze, but nevertheless heeding the same call to protect his community, while the loss of 19-year-old firefighter Devyn Gale in Revelstoke in 2023 is recounted by her brother, who was on the scene with her when a tree fell during their shift. The doc makes these human stories so compelling by giving seemingly unprecedented access to the line of fire: one can almost feel the heat of the flames with the immediacy of the footage.

“They wanted to tell more than just the reactive news stories that they would tell the public about wildfire,” Shave tells Yukon News on the Knowledge doc. “They wanted to have some other way, some other channel, to show the B.C. public what happens.”

While Wildfire offers a cinéma vérité approach to the fires and first responders, Incandescence by Velcrow Ripper and Nova Ami (Metamorphosis) offers a lyrical, but equally immersive, take on a landscape transformed by fire. The film harnesses Indigenous knowledge to consider how nature can harness, contain, and control the fire.

“Indigenous people in the film talk about how they see fire as a creature,” Ripper tells Coast Reporter. “It’s like a sneaky coyote that you see in the distance. You see the smoke in the distance, and then it sneaks up on you.”

Meanwhile, efforts of first responders get their due with equal measure as Ripper and Ami consider the responsibilities entailed in fighting the consequences of human activities driving climate change. The doc doesn’t offer the talking heads approach that Wildfire uses to put a human face on the stories, but instead rhythmically observes human activity in relation to climate change. The two works illustrate different facets of a shared story.

Incandescence features Ripper and Ami’s signature attentiveness to the harmonies of the natural environment as they observe how flora and fauna adapt to habitats transformed by fire. Moreover, the doc, as does Wildfire, considers how first responders understand and harness the life of fire to get ahead of the blaze. These are “good” fires, which prove that you really can fight fire with fire.

“We started to learn more about it,” Ripper told Coast Reporter, “and actually did some pre-interviews with cultural burners and firekeepers. We realized that this is really an important dimension that needs to be explored, because this ancient wisdom is very applicable to current times as well.”

Stream Wildfire at Knowledge and Incandescence at NFB.ca.