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Jeff Frost documented the forest fires for five years
The Californian filmmaker Jeff Frost
accompanied
fires
with his camera
for years for his haunting experimental film "California on Fire" . Frost lets the apocalyptic and at the same time strangely poetic images speak for themselves in fast motion and subdivides them like the five phases of mourning from research on death: denial, anger, negotiation, depression and acceptance. "People rarely react quickly to crises, usually only when they are in the middle of it," says Frost. They denied
climate change
like a death, still portrayed as a possible future scenario.
That's why he had to make the fire film about what humans do to the planet.
Frost chases after destruction: 70 infernos in five years.
When he read about a new fire on Twitter, he drove off in his truck and put on protective clothing.
That year, Frost finished work on "California on Fire" - at the same time his homeland is experiencing
the worst fire season
ever.
Here he describes his feelings:
“It feels like chain smoking around the clock, because the whole western side of the American continent is wrapped in a thick blanket of smoke. I call it the coal fog: It makes the sky glow orange. Everywhere. Thousands of miles It feels like a deep trauma that you cannot grasp but that you are aware of.
You have carefully observed the destructive effects of this trauma on your life.
And it makes you treat yourself and everyone else unfairly.
But even though you understand the topic rationally, you cannot grasp it emotionally and you cannot change your actions, because the cause of the problem is not touched.
It feels like chaos and tragedy.
Man lives in a toxic relationship with the earth.
Our skies are orange.
Like our president.
It continues to spread across the world like a disease.
Now the sky already resembles the self-tanner on his skin.
I'm so angry I can barely see - but maybe that's the coal fog again.
Juggling the various self-inflicted end-time scenarios takes a lot of time.
We have to ask ourselves: will we accept this?
Will we follow this path to its end?
Will our behavior today be tomorrow's demon?
Or do we want to go ahead and pollute the earth as much as possible until the basic structure of society collapses under the strain?
"Even if the problems of our environment feel incredibly big, we have to act as if it is possible to do things better"
Jeff Frost
We know what the problem is.
And we also know how to fix it.
We can still limit the damage and undo the devastating effects of the Anthropocene.
Even if the problems of our environment feel incredibly big, we need to act like it is possible to do things better.
The alternative would be to give up and let the orange cover everything.
And I'm really fed up with orange. "
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