A new documentary — “burn, scar” — chronicles the humans at the center of New Mexico’s biggest-ever wildfire, from the acequia parciantes seeking federal help to restore their historic irrigation ditches to the federal Forest Service officials defending the use of prescribed burns in the face of sharp community backlash.
Taos-based director Hillary Bachelder said a chance encounter before the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire ultimately inspired the four-year long project, in which she reveals the long strands of history that ultimately collided on a windy April day in 2022 in Las Dispensas, New Mexico, when a group of federal Hotshot firefighters ignited a prescribed burn that ultimately escaped containment.
Both the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon fires resulted from botched federal prescribed burns. The resulting wildfires merged and went on to destroy hundreds of homes and more than 500 square miles of land, mostly in San Miguel and Mora counties. The wildfire upended a way of life among ranchers and farmers, many of whom trace their roots to Spanish land grants that see the U.S. Forest Service’s takeover of their lands as the United States’ “original sin,” Bachelder said.
The 90-minute documentary follows acequia stewards as they try and fail to receive Federal Emergency Management Agency compensation, as well as Forest Service officials who grapple with the wildfire’s aftermath and defend the use of prescribed fires as vital in protecting forests from climate change. The film also delves deep into the tension between land grants and the Forest Service, featuring interviews with Rio Arriba County Commissioner Moises Morales, who was involved in the 1967 Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid.
Bachelder’s film debuted in late May at the Mountainfest Film Festival in Telluride, Colorado. She told Source NM that she hopes the documentary will make its New Mexico debut at the Santa Fe International Film Festival in October. From there, she expects to host additional local screenings, particularly for wildfire victims still feeling the effects of the wildfire more than four years later.
Source NM spoke to Bachelder about what inspired the film and what she learned making it. Her responses below have been edited for clarity and concision.
When did you first hear about the fire?
I have kind of a weird intro into it, in that I was taking a class in early 2022 through the Santa Fe Watershed Association, called Climate Masters, and it was 12 weeks or something of all of these different focus areas around how the climate crisis is impacting New Mexico. As someone new to the state, I was just like, ‘Oh, this sounds fascinating,’ and in early April of that year I was on a tour of the Santa Fe watershed with Dennis [Carrill], who ends up being in the film from the Santa Fe National Forest, showing like a treatment area that they had just done, and talking about prescribed burns. I had a lot of questions for him, because I didn’t grow up with any relationship to fire or connection to it. I just asked him a bunch of questions, and then that was maybe the same week that the Las Dispensas prescribed burn got out of control, and so basically, as soon as it happened, my interest was really piqued.
What was your prior filmmaking background?
I did most of my filmmaking prior to this in the Midwest. So I worked for a company in Chicago called Kartemquin Films, and they made Hoop Dreams in the 90s. They’ve just been making these thoughtful, social issue, character-centered kind of documentaries for going on 60 years now, so I kind of learned everything I know from those guys back in Chicago. And I made one other feature film before this that was following three women running for local office back in 2020. So I’ve been working in kind of character-centered, verite, issue films for a while.
When you started filming, did you know that this was going to be that kind of film?
When I first was thinking about a story, because I just had this interaction and beginning of a relationship with Dennis and the Santa Fe [National Forest], I was thinking about approaching it almost entirely from the Forest Service perspective. I started reaching out to their team to try and get access and permissions, and that’s something that just ended up taking months and months on both the Carson and the Santa Fe National Forest. It was sort of in the meantime that (a story by journalist Alicia Inez Guzmán about existing tensions published) and I started understanding the depth of the dynamic and the history here between communities and the Forest Service and the federal government. Then it became a lot more apparent how important that perspective was going to be.
How did you balance the views of community groups who are devastated by these burns and calling for them to be shut down with what you were hearing from the Forest Service at the time?
I think that’s been something we’ve navigated throughout production and the edit, and now even with the release of the film, because I have my own opinions and understandings around the use of prescribed fire. I feel comfortable saying that the science generally supports the need for healthy fire, depending on the landscape, in these types of forests, but the sort of personal experiences of people here who have lived through it are so incredibly valid, and the reactions the communities are still having around prescribed fire is really understandable. And I wanted to approach all of those sides with empathy and understanding and without judgment.
When did you spot a connection between the reaction among communities in the Santa Fe National Forest and the Tierra Amarilla raid?
I don’t think you can present Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon in a vacuum in northern New Mexico. There’s this overwhelming sentiment that much of the land that has turned into national forest was part of the land grants initially and were taken from the local families here. That is fundamentally the landscape that the Forest Service walks into with a drip torch in April of 2022. When I was wrestling with the story that I wanted to tell after the fire, which is really when the story mostly takes place, it’s this question of, ‘How does the Forest Service rebuild trust? How do you move forward from something like that?’ You can’t start the clock in northern New Mexico in April of 2022. There’s too much baggage and legacy and history that happens before that point in understanding the complex dynamics and the root of a lot of that mistrust.
Why did you feel it was so important to feature the Forest Service officials dealing with that mistrust, and did doing so provide you a better understanding of what really went wrong that day in Las Dispensas?
Unfortunately, not really to the last part. Because of ongoing litigation, no one was really able to give me more details about that. But I think, spending the years that I have shadowing some of those folks on prescribed burns gave me a much deeper understanding and respect for the work they do. It’s maybe not the most popular opinion still in the Las Vegas area to say that the Forest Service employees are people, too, but of course they are. Many of them are locals who were involved in the burns and, once they escaped, in fighting the fire. The story that I wanted to tell was one of feeling and understanding, and I think you can only get that with real transparency and access on all sides, and asking for a little bit of vulnerability.
Is it a spoiler to ask about that last scene? Why did you choose that for the ending and what do you hope people will take away from it.
I do love talking about it, and it is kind of a spoiler, but we can talk about it. In the last scene, we see Ernie [Lovato] who’s had his property devastated by the fire, kind of up on the edge of the forest with his young son. And there his son is sort of discovering wheat that has come up from some of the aerial reseeding efforts that were done post-fire, and Ernie’s explaining that this particular grass has barbs that can injure his cows’ mouths. He’s a rancher. And his son just starts picking up all of the seeds off the ground and Ernie’s kind of saying, like, ‘well, you’re never going to pick those up.’ There’s millions and millions and millions of seeds that have been dropped across the burn scar. But his son keeps doing it, and then after a minute, Ernie gets down on the ground and starts picking them up with him, and it’s probably my favorite scene.
Some people do experience hopelessness when they see that, but I think a lot of other folks actually respond in the way that I do to the scene, which is finding it incredibly powerful. It’s a little bit of a visual metaphor for how I think a lot of us experience the climate crisis, and [are] trying to manage our public lands. It’s just a Sisyphean feat. And each of us is trying to do sort of the best we can.
Where I find the most hope around the film and the story — like it’s a tough story, a tough watch — but I find it so hopeful that people aren’t walking away, and everyone in the film is so deeply passionate about the land and doing right by the land. And so even though there’s so much disagreement around how to approach that, I personally would rather land in a conflict where everyone is passionate, everyone cares deeply, rather than everyone is apathetic, and no one’s interested in sticking it out to do the work that needs to be done.
