All the Walls Came Down

If you saw this year's “Lost Bus” then you’ll know the fires we are talking about here, and with over fifty square miles of devastation left in the wake of a conflagration started by some dodgy electric cables, this introduces us to some of the families trying to rebuild their lives from the ashes of areas including Altadena in Los Angeles. Understandably, many of the contributors are angry here and so blame is being attributed to the authorities, the power company, the emergency services and there are allegations abounding that not only were the predominately African American communities neglected at the time, but that there are now land grab operations occurring to prevent many of the folks who’d lived in these communities for decades from being able to afford to return. Insurances policies and (reverse) mortgages aren’t always helping, and government is taking it’s own sweet time to establish how it can help and the extent of it’s liabilities - homelessness and foreclosures are becoming more common. This is maybe one of the few films that actually attempts to travel with the after-effects of a natural disaster (albeit a mankind initiated one), but rather than focus on the causes of the fires and offer us some sort of cohesive assessment of the disaster and what could come next, this all too readily resorts to a disparate collection of news footage, home movie photos and angry campaigning against “they”. There are no meaningful contributions from the authorities to explain just what happened or to address the allegations that there were deliberate strategic decisions made to sacrifice some areas to protect others - and if that were to be true, then to justify those decisions. Clearly there is a great deal of frustration amongst the dispossessed, but I didn’t think this really did much more than offer them a media opportunity to vent their respective spleens.