Movie Review: Bring Your Own Brigade

 

Title: Bring Your Own Brigade

Genre: Documentary

Release Date: January 29th, 2021

My Rating: ★★★★★

IMDB Rating: 7.4/10

 

Summary from IMDB: 

An investigation into our landscape's hidden fire stories and on-the-ground experiences of firefighters and residents struggling through deadly fires.

IMDB Trailer

 

Review:

If you want a good cry, this is your movie.

My husband and I watched this documentary, not really realizing how impactful it would be on our minds. The movie documents the wild fires in California in 2020, and the mass destruction and pandemonium that occurred during that time.

We experienced a massive wild fire last year in my area of Oregon as well, and the impact that event had on my community was all too real. Watching this movie, really brought back those feels and put into perspective what we still had vs what some had lost. I sobbed through the whole movie. I could feel the pure grief of the families that survived and thought to myself, what if that had happened to me? What if I had lost everything?

The second part of the movie highlighted the reason the fire swept through town so quickly and the impact that people have had on the world around us. Deforestation and replanting caused the forests to be crowded, and the path out of town away from the fire was poorly planned and caused a bottleneck.

Even after the town began to rebuild, people pushed back against town mandates that would save their homes and possibly their lives if this situation ever occurred again, all for pure aesthetics of their homes. I was flabbergasted at the amount of people who refused to make things better. But then again, I hadn't lived through the fires and it wasn't my home. I can only hope that if this kind of destruction ever took my home, that the people around me would want to make things better.

This was an incredible look into the power of mother nature and the pure resilience of human beings.

2 comments:

  1. Oh wow this sounds amazing. and terrifing and heartfelt as well, as you point out. My heart goes out to everyone affected by those fires. And the sad thing is it will almost certainly happen again multiple times. I hope we can find ways to minimize the destruction and learn to live in ways that don't contribute to it!

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    1. I agree. It was sad to think that people lost their lives due to something that might have been avoided.

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