A handful of productions have already been released examining Australia’s catastrophic black summer bushfire season of 2019-20, including an ABC TV special (Wild Australia: After the Fires), a feature-length documentary shown in cinemas (A Fire Inside) and a six-part scripted drama series (Fires). Each has merits, but shared among them is a “don’t mention the war” tendency to acknowledge the role of human-induced climate change indirectly, cursorily or not at all, as if embracing of that old, denialist mantra that “now is not the time to talk about climate change”.
In front of this backdrop comes director and Oscar-winning producer Eva Orner’s new exposé Burning – one of those rare documentaries that boils your blood and rattles your bones, leaving viewers longing for and (hopefully) demanding political change. Premiering in Australia at the Sydney film festival before its arrival on Amazon Prime Video on 26 November, it is the documentary Australia and – I think it is fair to say – the entire world deserves, exploring a complex subject with courage and clarity, taking seriously three simple but ever-salient words often heard in the climate protest movement: “Tell the truth.”
Although it is always an appropriate time to talk about the climate crisis, Burning arrives at a particularly timely moment, with Cop26 now under way. The Australian government is being justly berated for its rhetorical shift (not to be confused with real action) towards net zero emissions by 2050, following a similar shift in that direction by News Corp, a company whose actions – in the words of Ketan Joshi – “have caused irreversible harm to human life, on a scale no other media organisation on the planet could ever aspire to”.
When it comes to the climate crisis, as in Agatha Christie’s Orient Express, there’s a lot of blame to go around; a lot of fingerprints on the knife; a lot of people (howdy, Mathias!) who would probably like their past behaviour expunged from history. The point of Burning is not to level scores, but, again, to simply tell the truth, working from the vantage point that, as one interviewee puts it: “The greatest tragedy of this terrible black summer bushfire season was that we saw it coming.”