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2025—Dec 6.
Before We Fight for Better, We Have to Believe in It
Before We Fight for Better, We Have to Believe in It
Max Walker-Silverman
A few years ago I'd just moved home to Colorado after finishing film school. Maybe moved isn't the right word. I was there. My things were all in a pickup truck, and I was staying between my mother's place on one side of town and my father's place on the other. I wrote scripts that would never be made and worked construction with friends. For months it did not rain. There were fires across the west, and all summer long the air was thick with smoke. One day my sister called from my Grandmother's old house.
"There's ash in the air," she said. "We don't have internet. Can you see if there are fires close by?" I checked on my phone. I told her the state fire website didn't have anything close to her, that the smoke must be coming from hundreds of miles away. "Ok thanks, that's a relief." She hung up. A few minutes later she called again. Her breathing was sharp. "There's flames coming over the ridge." She barely got out. Drove all night. Arrived at my mother's with her own car full of things. After a very long hug my mom asked if she'd been able to get Grandma's recipes out. That's still what she misses the most.
Our friends and neighbors began to visit. They brought food, and more hugs, and the sincere offer that we all know too well: to do anything they can to help. And despite the drought the potatoes grew well that year, and the spinach. I was falling in love, and I was able to take my Dad to all his doctor's appointments. Somehow, though I had no home of my own, I'd never felt so clearly where home was. We were all fleeing something: fires in the West, Covid in the east, a marriage down the street. And as a result there were more of us under one roof than there had been for many years.
For a long time I put off returning to my Grandmother's piece of land. It had been so green and magnificent. Tall trees, soft ferns, watercress along a stream. I wanted to remember it like that forever. And I delayed returning long enough that when I finally did there was a surprise waiting. Yes, it was sad in countless ways. A blackened expanse. Charred trees whose needles had turned a haunting dead gold. The scraped ruins of the foundation. But there was green too. Seedlings pushing through the ash. Purple flower buds. And seeing the small stubborn ways that nature returns was so fascinating it left hardly any space for sadness at all.
My family tree is broken and twisted as so many are. Branches go off in strange directions, extend and return, trace strange routes to the sun. But that tree grows ever upwards, and for all its fragmentation, the family—like so many others—always finds a way to love. I began to wonder: maybe a home is like this too. Neither simple nor solid. It's evolving, imperfect, always fracturing and repairing itself. Always reinventing. And I began to think—no, to hope—that there might be comfort in this very impermanence, a strange stability in our ability to reinvent and reimagine.
This paradox began to birth this story. How could a place be so impermanent—it has burned and will burn again, it's changing as all places change, growing and struggling as all places grow and struggle—and yet so clearly be home?
It is a question that so many people have been forced to ask after floods and hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. And fire represents a particularly refined version of this paradox. Its destruction results from elements that are grotesquely man-made (climate change and a century of ill-informed mitigation), but it is also an unavoidable element of the world's ecology. This paradox is matched by the way fire affects us. There is pain and horror and devastating loss. There is also charity and community, brotherhood and sisterhood, overflowing care for our neighbors and for those we do not know at all.
This film became an attempt not to resolve these paradoxes, but rather to imagine a way to live within them. How can we understand disaster as more than an event that begins and ends, but as an ongoing ingredient of our lives? One that deepens, rather than undoes, our sense of neighborhood and community.
My Grandmother's house was built in a forest that requires fire to release new seeds. We have built in places that must burn, in places that must flood, and tried to engineer some idea of permanence that was never going to be. The relationship between humans and nature, between all natural things, must fluctuate, ebb and flow, advance and retreat. It's my wish that we can find some hope in this. Some stability, not in things as they are, but in the inevitability of them changing.
The truth is I've been scared of climate change for as long as I can remember. Since I was a really little kid. Since I was told to turn off the faucet while brushing my teeth in elementary school. It never really let me imagine a future. In the news and in art, climate change is this thing that's presented as a choice: we either stop it or we fail. But it's here. It's here now. And we need art that acknowledges that, that says, ok, here's this thing, what the hell do we do? And maybe the first thing we need to do is imagine a future, a future that is lovely and beautiful, because how else can we possibly fight for it? In order to move towards a better world we first must believe one is possible.
And so this story came to be. At its heart is Dusty, a character who discovers that rebuilding is not just a matter of reconstruction, but an act of re-imagination, and that re-imagination has to come from within. He must learn that as places change so can we, that he can be more than a rancher, he can be a father too, and a neighbor, and that is enough. Sometimes it takes loss to learn what we have. So this is not a disaster movie. It's about what happens after. And time and time again what happens afterwards is love and care and community and a desire to do things better.