News

A news item about a tragedy in Detroit got them started, and by the time they were finished—three years and 1,000 hours of footage later—co-directors Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez found that their firefighting documentary had become something bigger than they’d imagined. Burn follows a group of firefighters as they try to contain blazes in a city with an endless roster of buildings left vacant amidst an economic collapse (a topic dealt with in Detropia and several other documentaries). Detroit’s population, as the film notes, is less than half of what it was 60 years ago, and many of those abandoned houses and former businesses have become firetraps. The film is built on vivid scenes that depict the danger facing fire crews from one shift to the next, but Burn also has broader implications, raising a host of issues about the changing texture of 21st century American cities...