TIFF21: Burning

As far as big picture documentaries go, Eva Orner’s Burning is pretty good. It’s quick paced, informative, and filled with a lot of righteous anger over the Australian government’s mishandling of the yearly bushfires that are growing increasingly catastrophic each summer. The mishandling culminated in the “Black Summer” of 2019-2020, when extreme heat and drought saw a record 59 million acres of forest torched across the continental nation in the Southern Hemisphere. In early 2020, the images of scorched earth and charred marsupials seemed to be as bad as things could get. Now, in the wake of the pandemic and the devastation of 2020 that continues to this day, it’s easy to forget about the bushfires. Burning serves as a sobering reminder of a crisis that predates the pandemic.

Like many documentaries of this sort, most of Orner’s film relies on news footage, talking head interviews, and the occasional cellphone footage recorded by survivors or firefighters. It’s a useful, if conventional, approach for a documentary that seeks to relay a lot of context and information about its subject without zeroing in on a specific niche. Most prominent among the film’s interviewees is Greg Mullins, the former fire commissioner for New South Wales, the largest Australian state, whose first-hand experience with the fires convinced him that Australia needed to act fast on climate change in order to stave off further devastation. And as is made clear time and again throughout the film, the current Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, and the majority of the Australian government and state media apparatus have no intention to act fast.

Australia is a carbon fuel state. It’s one of the world’s largest suppliers of coal and natural gas. The economy has run on fossil fuels for more than a century and Morrison and the nation’s industry don’t intend to change that anytime soon. That’s where the film’s anger comes in. Orner, and many of the interviewees in the film, including Mullins and teenage activist Daisy Jeffrey, see Morrison and the government as abdicating their responsibilities to the future. Through some of the dire footage of the fires and the laughably blasé reactions of politicians like Morrison (who once brought in a piece of coal to the Australian parliament to harangue opposition parties about being scared of a rock), the film makes the case that further delay is unacceptable. The Black Summer was a vision of the apocalypse and if you believe climate change is contributing to these sorts of disasters, there’s no time to wait.

Some may quibble with the film’s aggressive but rather conventional argument about climate change, but such a blandly progressive bent is par for the course with most documentaries these days. Furthermore, it’s refreshing to watch a documentary about a natural disaster that puts climate front-and-centre in the conversation. About a decade ago, climate change was only talked about in advocacy docs like An Inconvenient Truth, which put forward anodyne solutions to apocalyptic problems. In other documentaries, it was usually reserved for a few activists to discuss on screen or held for the closing minutes, to offer a “dark night of the soul” for the film’s narrative before some “you can do your part” solutions were offered during a treacly and sentimental ending that reset the status quo.

Burning may not have anything new to say about climate change in general, but at least what it does say, it says with passion. Some moments are a little too familiar or comfortably drawn from mainstream media hits. For instance, extended moments with Daisy Jeffrey and other teenage activists who went on “strike” in 2019 to protest inaction on climate change seem to mistake protesting as material change. But interviews with some of the key survivors are interesting and the actual footage of the fires is downright horrifying. 

There is a moment in the film when someone mentions that six billion animals were killed in the bushfires, casually stating a number of such overwhelming horror that it almost requires a double-take. As we hear discussion of the ecological cost of the fires, we see images of cockatiels and kookaburras having burst into flames and fallen from the sky. One haunting shot shows the view through a car window driving down on a country road; we see a few scorched remains of kangaroos and other animals, but as the car moves to the left, the piles grow bigger until mounds of charred creatures fill the frame. You can tell Orner and her editors, Forrest Borie, Dave Shulman, and Kimberley Hassett, restrain themselves from using more of this kind of footage in order to not overwhelm the viewer with despair.

But the film is at its best in such moments, which force you to stare the horror right in the eye. Burning and docs of its sort are constructed around emotion first, rational thinking second. Sure, it discusses scientific consensus and bolsters its argument with figures built on decades of research, but it relies on emotion to stir you to action, not critical thinking and intellectual analysis. So, it’s these moments of helpless animals burnt beyond recognition that register with the most urgency. Frankly, the mentions of some people losing homes or having vacations ruined that come in the wake of these scenes seem callous in the face of such destruction to animal populations, as if both events are equal tragedies.

Still, you understand why Orner and her fellow filmmakers hold back from taking the viewer right to the brink of hopelessness. This is a film that will premiere on Amazon Prime Video in the hope of playing to as large an international audience as possible. At a brisk 86 minutes it still covers a lot of ground. It’s meant to be the kind of film someone can watch on a whim and come away from knowing more about how climate change causes natural disasters. It’s meant to inform and maybe inspire a bit of political action. Going full-on black-pilled regarding climate isn’t something you should expect a big picture documentary to do. But I can’t help but feel it may have come by that approach more honestly than the cautiously optimistic one it settles on. It’s a film that makes a passionate argument that the world is on fire without ever truly convincing me that the fire can be put out.

6 out of 10

Burning (2021, Australia)

Directed by Eva Orner.

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