Kogan: The new documentary ‘Hotshot’ takes viewers to the frightening front lines of wildfires

CHICAGO — We are a fire town. Though it was long ago and there exist no photographs of the Chicago Fire of 1871, it shadows and defines our history, even as we are awash in contemporary conflagrations. The images flash before our eyes of the flames that leveled parts of Maui recently. And TV has been giving us a steady visual diet of wildfires that rage across the country, most frequently destroying parts of California.

That is the shattering subject of a new and astonishing documentary titled “Hotshot,” which is both terrifying and enlightening.

It takes viewers into the relatively unknown world of firefighters who are known as “hotshots” with an intensity and intimacy.

It is the work of Gabriel Mann, its director, writer, narrator and cinematographer. It has been more than a decade in the making.

I asked him, “What is a hotshot?”

He paused a moment before saying, “It is the most dangerous profession in the world.” Asked to elaborate, he continued with, “Put simply, a hotshot is one who puts out fires without the use of water.

“They will roll their eyes when I say this, but they are like the Navy SEALs, going to the most remote parts of fires to clear the land and few ever get to see what they do, the danger and work involved.”

He entered this world through a woman named Justine Gude, a squad boss of one of the hotshot crews in southern California’s Angeles National Forest. They met through mutual friends and fell in love during the six months of downtime that hotshots have every year, a break from flames roughly from November to May.

“She never wanted to talk about her job, never wanted to talk about fires,” he says. “But after we were together for a while, living in a house in Santa Clarita, there was a fire nearby and we went to it together. I carried my camera.”

He got what he calls “a front seat to what looked like the end of the world. I ran up this hill and started filming. There is something that happens to people when they see a wildfire up close. It happened to me. There is something primitive that connects you to it. Once you see it you can’t look away.”

Thus hooked, he was able to eventually win the trust of Gude and her team. For the next six years, for six months every year, he followed them through their intense training and accompanied them to fire after fire after fire.

“More than once I was terrified, sure I was going to die,” he says.

It was never his intention to make a film. “I did not consider myself a documentarian,” he says. “But I knew I had been allowed into this privileged position, this rare place where I might be able to understand what they did and try to capture it.”

After years of filming, he called Phil Donlon.

Chicago-born and Bridegeport-raised, Donlon was an actor on local stages before becoming a film and TV actor, director and producer. Mann was the cinematographer for the 2017 movie “High and Outside,” in which Donlon played a washed-up baseball player opposite venerable character actor Geoffrey Lewis in what would be his final film.

“We became friends then,” Donlon says. “I knew what he was doing with the fires, but did not really get the impact until I saw what he had shot. It was unbelievably exciting and when he asked if I might help turn all this film into a cohesive story I was honored and all in.”

Donlon quickly learned about fire. “We were in some frightening situations,” he says. “I was staying with Gabe and he would hear about a fire on his scanner. ‘Should we put on our boots and go to this fire?’ he’d say. It’s 3:30 in the morning and off we’d go.”

Over the locked-up pandemic years, the pair (along with another producer, Sage Seb) sculpted the mass of film into its 90-minute length.

“This is the most important work I have ever been involved in,” Donlon says .

The footage is arresting throughout, giving us fire tornadoes, smoke columns, waves of fire washing over the land. The camera moves over charred and twisted ground that was once a suburb, gnarled limbs that were once trees and animals once alive. Some scenes are haunting but are essential to the storytelling. Here and there we see firefighters, the water from their hoses barely able to stop the flames. We watch a variety of aircraft — tankers, helicopters — dumping water and retardant unsuccessfully on raging blazes.

There is an enlightening section that details how, as Mann puts it, “wildfires were a vital part of the ecosystem for 10,000 years, managed here by Native Americans who used fires to act as nature’s cleaning crew.” He further tells me that Florida is “doing things right, proactively burning 2 million acres of forest every year and that is why that state doesn’t have the same problem as we have here in California. This state needs to burn 4 million acres a year and what is it burning? Sixty-five hundred.”

You will learn much from this film and though you will see some off-duty playfulness from the members of the hotshot crew, you won’t hear from any of them. Even Gude, no longer in a relationship with Mann after seven years, but the main hero of this film, does not speak on camera, though we do see her at home (with her pet pig) and watch a heartwarmingly brave segment in which she rescues two dogs, Sparky and Smokey, that had been abandoned in a house aflame.

“I did film some interviews,” Mann says. “But we decided to honor the hotshots. They do not talk to the media. They do not like the media, which they feel gives the public stories about fires that are distorted and absurd. Their attitude, which I admire, is to do their jobs without talking about it. To show and not tell.”

Most hotshots consider mainstream and freelance media folks as “fire pornographers.” So do Donlon and Mann, who says, “I have been at fires where some other cameramen are cheering the fire on, shouting, ‘Burn, baby, burn,’ so they can get more footage to sell.”

Hotshots are not considered firefighters. They are what is called “forestry technicians,” employed by the Forest Service and other federal, state and county agencies, and as such are paid roughly a third what firefighters earn. This seems incomprehensibly unjust.

Mann and Donlon agree. Making “Hotshot” has turned them into advocates. “We financed this film ourselves, trying to get people to understand. We were given a rare opportunity to be on the front lines with brave men and women fighting an essential fight. I am humbled by their dedication,” Mann said.

“Congress is soon set to make some fiscal decisions and if they do not raise the pay for the hotshots I am afraid that 60 percent of them will be forced to quit. And then what?”

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“Hotshots” is available on streaming platforms Oct. 1 and at www.hotshotmovie.com