Burning review – the searing black summer documentary that Australia deserves

Eva Orner’s bushfire exposé boils your blood and rattles your bones as it addresses the climate crisis head on and rips into the dark heart of modern Australia

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.”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mHPYFq
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