World Premiere of ‘Fire Tower’ at Hot Docs 2024
TORONTO SCREENING OF TOVA KRENTZMAN’S DOCUMENTARY FILM
In the 2022 fire season, my colleagues and I were excited (albeit, a bit shocked) to learn that Alberta Wildfire granted access to Yukon-based filmmakers, director, Tova Krentzman and cinematographer, Emily Sheff, to interview lookouts for a documentary film about fire towers in the Yukon and Alberta.
Often, it’s exceedingly difficult for media to gain access to frontline firefighters, let alone lookouts, who are rarely publicly acknowledged for the role they play in the early detection of wildfires. There are 100 staffed fire towers in Alberta and 5 in the Yukon today, representing a stronghold in the Canadian boreal forest.
Krentzman’s idea to make a documentary about fire towers won the jury prize for production funding at the 2022 Available Light Film Festival in Whitehorse, enabling her to take on the project.
In July 2022, she and Sheff drove south to Alberta and navigated the pot-hole strewn roads to reach a handful of towers in the Slave Lake, Rocky Mountain House, and High Level districts. As the temperatures soared and fires torched, the filmmakers set up Go-Pros in the cupolas, flew drones above the 100-foot towers, and interviewed lookouts who were contending with marathon days on high and extreme fire hazard. They filmed some of my dearest friends at their respective sites, including my “neighbour” Dianne, a true lifer, who worked a tower 70-kilometres to my northeast.
“It really speaks about the power of the eye…and that it’s still effective having a person live alone on a mountaintop.”—Bryan
Fire towers are largely misunderstood by the public as ‘relics of the past’; they’re seen as an antiquated way of detecting wildfires. We were grateful to Krentzman and Sheff for taking this documentary on. Finally, some of my colleagues and I thought, we’d finally get our story out there in a contemporary visual way—one that went beyond the typical “lonely lookout” trope. Ranger Gord from the Red Green Show, anyone?
Although Krentzman read Lookout, I wasn’t interviewed for Fire Tower (upper management cracked down days before she could make it out), but I was able to contribute footage of the brilliant skies and the bears that wandered around my tower. When the Fire Tower trailer came out in March, I was so moved by the familiar landscapes and voices that I knew I didn’t want to miss out on the world screening at Hot Docs.
In April, I flew from Whitehorse to Toronto to attend the screening with Lookout’s publishing team, including my amazing editor, Amanda Betts at Knopf Canada, and my agent, Marilyn Biderman (who’s represented me since 2015, even though it would be the first time we’d meet in person!)
Fire Tower opened with the narration of my former lookout neighbour, Dianne, whose voice I would recognize absolutely anywhere. For 7 years, I listened to Dianne over the two-way radio as she expertly directed aircraft and firefighting crews to the tiniest of smokes, barely visible on the landscape. I learned a lot from Dianne. Her raspy voice was warm, but no nonsense. She always cut right to the chase. No hesitation. Dianne had been a lookout for over 20 years and “loved every minute of it”, she told Krentzman.
IT WAS SOMEWHAT BIZARRE TO BE SITTING IN THE DARK THEATRE IN DOWNTOWN TORONTO AND HEAR DIANNE’S VOICE FILL UP THE ROOM. AND AS SHE CAME INTO FOCUS, HOW STRANGE TO REALIZE THAT I’D WORKED CLOSELY WITH HER FOR 7 YEARS, BUT I HAD NO IDEA WHAT SHE LOOKED LIKE.
I must’ve cried at least four, or five times through the 47-minute long documentary. I cried seeing the gorgeous drone shots of the expansive forest that I spent hours, days, seasons, looking over. I cried at the moments where my own footage appeared, threaded into the narrative, the bears whom I grew to identify and would write about in my forthcoming book, Black Bear. I cried at the scene of my dear friend, Kim, as she sat at her kitchen table, painting a bear skull with intricate care and spoke about what it means to be a 30-something woman who chooses life at the fire tower.
It was surreal to see what was 7 years of my life—a life I’ve since stepped away from—projected onto the big screen. The lights came on and my face was wet. After the film, I thanked Krentzman. She’s never worked as a lookout, but I feel as though she captured an honest glimpse into the lifestyle, why it matters, and who some of the people watching over our forests are.
During the Q&A that followed the screening, someone from the audience asked a question about how lookouts could withstand “the isolation”.
“I think a lot of lookouts would say “solitude” instead of “isolation,” said Krentzman, gently correcting the individual. I appreciated her answer.
Kim scanning for smokes from her tower in the Slave Lake district.
My review of Fire Tower is unapologetically biased, no doubt.
Writer Alex Hudson called it “a frustrating missed opportunity”, arguing that the documentary leaned on scenic footage at the expense of going deeper with the stories of the lookouts. “There’s a stiffness to the interviews, which rarely get emotional and lack candid spontaneity,” he wrote in Exclaim Magazine.
That may be true, but Krentzman would’ve faced challenges in that regard. Lookouts are government employees. They’re professionals. And like any mindful seasonal employee on contract—with a start date and an end date—they have to be careful in what they say and don’t say.
It’s also a multi-narrative film; by showcasing a diversity of lookouts and their stories, perhaps Krentzman sacrificed the ability to go deeper with one, or two narratives. But the latter, I think, would’ve made for an entirely different film. At the end of the day, Fire Tower clearly has emotional appeal—it won the Hot Docs Audience Award for Mid-Length Documentary.
One thing stood out in my mind: given all the challenges of making a film with limited access, somehow Krentzman scored a copy of the terrifying video footage captured by a camera atop Zama Lookout, when a wildfire razed over the tower site in 2023. The inclusion of this, coupled with cell-phone footage of the lookout being evacuated by helicopter, hammered home the intensity of the wildfire crisis that lookouts are playing witness to.
For more information about Fire Tower, visit: https://www.underwirefilms.com/