NEW YORK (AP) — 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.
“It was really hard,” the Oscar-nominated filmmaker says now. “I didn’t blame people for not wanting to watch a film about the fires in the middle of the pandemic, because it was just too much horror."
Now, with the devastating wildfires that have wrought havoc on Los Angeles, people may be more receptive to the lessons Walker learned while making the film, with its urgent display of the human cost of the fires and its tough, crucial questions for the future.
“This is probably the moment where it becomes undeniable,” the filmmaker said in an interview last week, after being contacted by The Associated Press to provide reflections on the ongoing disaster in light of what she learned.
She added: "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.”
In “Bring Your Own Brigade" (available on Paramount+), Walker portrays in sometimes terrifying detail the devastation caused by two wildfires on the same day in 2018, products of the same wind event — the Camp Fire that engulfed the northern California city of Paradise and the Woolsey fire in Malibu, two towns on opposite ends of the political and economic spectrum.
She embeds herself with firefighters, and explores the lives of locals affected by the fire. She shares harrowing cellphone footage of people driving through exploding columns of fire as they try to escape, crying out “I don’t want to die!” She plays 911 calls in which people plead vainly for rescue as fire laps at their backyards or invades their homes.
And she conveys a layered message: Devastating fires in California are increasingly inevitable. Climate change is a clear accelerating factor, yes, but it’s not the only one, and therein lies an element of hope: There are things people can do, if they start to make different (and difficult) choices — in both where and how they choose to live.
But first, complacency must be vanquished.
“Complacency sets in when there hasn’t been a fire for a few years and you start to think, it might not happen again,” Walker says.
It even affected Walker herself a few months ago. A British transplant to Los Angeles, she had chosen to live on the Venice-Santa Monica border — too scared, she says, to live in the city's lovely hilly areas with small winding roads, surrounded by nature and vegetation, near the canyons that wildfires love.
But a few months ago, she started wondering if over-anxiety about wildfires had incorrectly influenced her choice. And then, of course, came the Palisades catastrophe —“this God awful reminder that it only takes one event,” she says.
Walker became interested in making a film about wildfires after she arrived in the city and wondered if she was safe. “Why is the hillside on fire?” she says she wondered. “Why do people just keep on driving?” She had considered such fires “a medieval problem."
One thing she learned while filming: Firefighters were even more impressive and courageous than she'd thought. “If you want to watch a firefighter have their heart broken, it’s when they want to do more,” she says. "I was just absolutely wowed by how incredibly selfless and brilliant they were.”
Not that the public wasn’t angry at them — her film depicts angry residents of Malibu, for example, chastising firefighters for not doing enough.
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. Safety takes a back burner to individual choice.
“It was very shocking to be at that meeting in particular, given that people had died in the most horrible way in that community. And you have firefighters with tears in their eyes saying, 'This is what we need to have happen to keep us safe, and then (they) get voted down."
Walker is not the only filmmaker to have made a film about Paradise. In 2020, Ron Howard directed “Rebuilding Paradise,” focused on the effort to rebuild, and the resilience of residents. Walker says she looked at the same set of facts and arrived at different takeaways.
Townspeople were indeed amazing and resilient, Walker says. “But are we right to be building back without a real rethink? Because the tragedy is that these fires are predictably going to be repeating and against the backdrop of climate change, they're getting worse, not better.”
That rethink involves making hard calls about where people should live. “The population is overwhelmingly moving into these wildland urban interface areas,” Walker says, referring to areas where housing meets undeveloped wildland vegetation — exactly the areas most likely to burn.
In California, some of these places are very expensive — like Palisades and Malibu — but others are in more affordable areas. With the great pressure on housing, more people are moving into such areas, she says. But the “braking mechanism” could be that insurance companies “are doing the math, and it’s not sustainable.”
It's not only a question of where people live.
“What does a fire-hardened home look like?” Walker asks. “Design-wise, that that does dictate certain things.” For example: “This lovely wood is going to require tremendous firefighting.”
It’s too early to know, but Walker thinks she may be hearing something different now from those who've lost homes, of whom she knows many.
“What I’m hearing from people is not just ‘I can’t wait to rebuild. Let me rebuild,'” she says. “It’s: 'How could we go through that again?'”
Kevin Marshall sifts through his mother's fire-ravaged property in the the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Saturday, Jan. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Water is dropped by helicopter on the Kenneth Fire in the West Hills section of Los Angeles, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope)
A firefighter walks along a road in a fire-ravaged community in the aftermath of the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Monday, Jan. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Firefighters hose down a burning structure on Lake Avenue, Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025, in the downtown Altadena section of Pasadena, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
MUGHRAQA, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli forces began withdrawing from a key Gaza corridor on Sunday, Israeli officials said, part of Israel's commitments under a tenuous ceasefire deal with Hamas that is moving ahead but faces a major test over whether the sides can negotiate its planned extension.
Israel agreed as part of the truce to remove its forces from the 4-mile (6-kilometer) Netzarim corridor, a strip of land that bisects northern Gaza from the south that Israel used as a military zone during the war.
At the start of the ceasefire last month, Israel began allowing Palestinians to cross Netzarim to head to their homes in the war-battered north, sending hundreds of thousands streaming across Gaza on foot and by car. The withdrawal of forces from the area will fulfill another commitment to the deal, which paused the 15-month war.
However, the sides appear to have made little progress on negotiating the deal's second phase, which is meant to extend the truce and lead to the release of more Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was sending a delegation to Qatar, a key mediator in talks between the sides, but the mission included low-level officials, sparking speculation that it won’t lead to a breakthrough in extending the truce. Netanyahu is also expected to convene a meeting of key Cabinet ministers this week on the second phase of the deal.
Separately on Sunday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said that a 23-year-old Palestinian woman who was eight months pregnant was fatally shot by Israeli gunfire in the northern occupied West Bank, where Israeli troops have been carrying out a broad operation.
Since it began on Jan. 19, the ceasefire deal has faced repeated obstacles and disagreements between the sides, underscoring its fragility. But it has held, raising hopes that the devastating war that led to seismic shifts in the Middle East may be headed toward an end.
On Sunday, cars heaped with belongings, including water tanks and suitcases, were seen heading north through a road that crosses Netzarim. Under the deal, Israel is supposed to allow the cars to cross through uninspected, and there did not appear to be troops in the vicinity of the road.
Hamas spokesperson Abdel Latif Al-Qanoua said the withdrawal showed Hamas had “forced the enemy to submit to our demands" and that it thwarted “Netanyahu’s illusion of achieving total victory.”
The Israeli officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss troop movement with the media, did not disclose how many soldiers were withdrawing. Troops currently remain along Gaza's borders with Israel and Egypt and a full withdrawal is expected to be negotiated in a later stage of the truce.
During the first 42-day phase of the ceasefire, Hamas is gradually releasing 33 Israeli hostages captured during its Oct. 7, 2023, attack in exchange for a pause in fighting, freedom for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and a flood of humanitarian aid to war-battered Gaza. The deal also stipulates that Israeli troops will pull back from populated areas of Gaza as well as the Netzarim corridor.
In the second phase, all remaining living hostages would be released in return for a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a “sustainable calm.” But details beyond that are unclear and repeated stumbling blocks throughout the first phase and the deep mistrust between the sides have cast doubt on whether they can nail down the extension.
Israel has said it won’t agree to a complete withdrawal from Gaza until Hamas’ military and political capabilities are eliminated. Hamas says it won’t hand over the last hostages until Israel removes all troops from the territory.
Netanyahu meanwhile is under heavy pressure from his far-right political allies to resume the war after the first phase so that Hamas, which carried out the deadliest attack on Israelis in their history, can be defeated. He is also facing pressure from Israelis who are eager to see more hostages return home and want to deal to continue, especially after the gaunt appearances of the three male captives freed on Saturday stunned the nation.
Complicating things further is a proposal by U.S. President Donald Trump to relocate the population of Gaza and take ownership of the Palestinian territory. Israel has expressed openness to the idea while Hamas, the Palestinians and the broader Arab world have rejected it outright.
The suggested plan is saddled with moral, legal and practical obstacles. But it may have been proposed as a negotiation tactic by Trump, to try to ratchet up pressure on Hamas or as an opening gambit in a bargaining process aimed at securing a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. That grand deal appeared to be rattled on Sunday as Saudi Arabia condemned remarks by Netanyahu who said Palestinians could create their state in that territory.
Saudi Arabia said his remarks “aim to divert attention from the successive crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against our Palestinian brothers in Gaza, including the ethnic cleansing they are being subjected to.”
In an interview Thursday with Israel’s Channel 14, Netanyahu said: “The Saudis can create a Palestinian state in Saudi Arabia; they have a lot of land over there.”
The war in Gaza, sparked by Hamas’ attack that killed 1,200 people and saw 250 taken hostage, has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians according to local health authorities who do not differentiate between fighters and noncombatants in their count. Vast parts of the territory have been obliterated in the fighting, leaving many Palestinians returning to damaged or destroyed homes.
Violence has surged in the West Bank throughout the war and has intensified in recent days with an Israeli military operation in the north of the territory. The shooting of the pregnant woman, Sundus Shalabi, happened in the Nur Shams urban refugee camp, a focal point of Israeli operations against Palestinian militants in the territory. The Palestinian Health Ministry also said that Shalabi’s husband was critically wounded by the gunfire.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz announced on Sunday the expansion of the Israeli military operation, which started in the city of Jenin several weeks ago. He said the operation was meant to prevent Iran from establishing a foothold in the occupied West Bank.
Goldenberg reported from Tel Aviv, Israel. Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates contributed to this report.
Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
FILE - Israeli soldiers drive near the northern Gaza Strip border in southern Israel, Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit, File)
FILE - Israeli soldiers wave to the camera from an APC as they cross from the Gaza Strip into Israel, Saturday, Jan. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov, File)
Palestinians are seen near destroyed buildings by Israeli bombardments inside the northern Gaza Strip as seen from southern Israel, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025. (Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)