“Way the Wind Blows:” Marshall fire documentary hits film festival
After the fire, there were the lists: What does it take to refill a home? Which cleaning supplies were tucked in the cupboard? What counts as a pantry staple? Which list should the scissors go on? The safety pins?
After Heather Szucs lost her home in the Marshall fire, the lists began to weigh on her. It was hard to calibrate the way that time collapsed and then unfolded, accordioning back and forth in an unnatural rhythm — a lifetime of accumulation, gone in minutes, had to be built back in mere months.
“Your life stops,” Szucs said. “Everything that you were doing with your life stops. Now you have to do this,” she said, referring to the process of recovery from the December 2021 fire. “And it is absolutely nonstop.”
That process is documented in a new short film, “Way the Wind Blows,” playing at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival in Golden this weekend.
About a month after the flames ripped through Marshall Mesa, local filmmaker Megan Sweeney started putting out feelers, trying to decide whether to pick up the camera. It had to be organic, she said. Nothing forced. She’d send out an email to a few friends, and if nothing came back, she’d drop it.
Szucs, a self-described “yes person,” caught wind of Sweeney’s project. She was interested.
The 17-minute film is narrowly focused on Szucs and her girls, and omits the huge community response that swirled around them while they rebuilt their life.
People brought over food on Tuesday nights for dinner, therapists volunteered time at the local schools, donation centers supplied kids with clothing and backpacks, Altra and Crocs donated shoes, Szucs said.
A woman Szucs knew from college gave her daughters, Zoe and Savanah, new ski setups, “so we would be able to do something regular that winter,” she said. Lindsey McMorran, an interior designer in Erie, furnished the girls’ bedrooms for free.
McMorran ended up furnishing 218 kids’ bedrooms during the year following the Marshall fire through an impromptu program she called “Build a Bedroom.”
Like many community efforts, it started with a Facebook post.
Someone McMorran knew asked for donations over the social media site to buy beds for her kids. McMorran, who previously ran a nonprofit, blasted the original post out to her network.
That sparked the idea for a Google form where families could apply to have their kids’ bedrooms furnished — she got 42 applications in the first 24 hours.
“My house looked like an Amazon distribution center,” she said. “Everybody just kind of had a role. People would come over and count inventory, build furniture. I look back on it now like, ‘How did we do that?’ We were working six days a week, 15-hour days.”
“All I had to do was get the mattresses,” Szucs said.
The GoFundMe fires
As climate disasters like wildfires strike hotter, faster and more frequently, government agencies are struggling to keep up with demands — a reality that could soon be exacerbated by the recent firing of forest service workers who keep wildfires in check.
The fires in Los Angeles have been dubbed “the GoFundMe fires” by a number of media outlets, referring to the popular internet fundraising platform people turn to for everything from help paying medical bills to starting a small business. (In a dark twist, GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan was evacuated from his home in Altadena during the Eaton fire last month).
This taps on a central debate in both politics and economics: how much we should rely on government programs to address societal issues.
In a paper published in November 2023, researchers from the University of Colorado and the University of Wisconsin analyzed 475 GoFundMe campaigns set up by individuals as a direct result of the Marshall fire.
Their study focused on homeowners whose houses were completely destroyed by the fire. The researchers excluded group campaigns, as well as renters and people fundraising for smoke damage, which would have brought the dataset up to nearly 1,000 households.
Within just a few weeks, Marshall fire campaigns had raised $23 million, compared with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s roughly $2 million in grants to individuals.
But the researchers found a disparity in how the $23 million was dispersed based on a homeowners’ overall wealth. Higher income households received more donations, while lower income households received less.
In numbers, that meant households where adults earned more than $120,000 annually could expect about 25% more in donations than households whose adults earned less than $78,000 — about an additional $8,000.
Those campaign numbers are correlated with a whole host of other recovery outcomes — households with GoFundMe campaigns were 27% more likely to start rebuilding within a year, researchers found, and those with larger proceeds were rebuilding faster.
Putting faces to numbers
A strong network is part of what drove McMorran into philanthropy in the first place. When her daughter was diagnosed with cancer, close friends and family immediately started fundraising for them.
“It’s like when you buy a car, then all of a sudden you see that car everywhere. That’s what my Facebook feed was like — all of a sudden it was full of cancer patients who didn’t have the same support as me,” she said.
So she started Here with Hope, a nonprofit that eventually dissolved when her own needs took center stage, but that was reborn from the ashes of the Marshall fire. She routed the Build a Bedroom program through the nonprofit. Same name, new mission.
One of the things McMorran noticed between running the nonprofits is people like to see the direct impact of their donations.
“When you donate to these big, huge charities, you don’t actually see where that money goes,” she said. “And a lot of the times the people affected don’t see that money right away, so there’s frustration. People like to see their money is immediately going to use.”
With the Build a Bedroom program, “you buy a lamp, you’re going to see that lamp in the ‘reveal’ video a few days later,” she said.
A similar logic underpins Sweeney’s motivation to keep making documentaries. She wants to show the ways that individuals are directly impacted, or making an impact. Her next documentary is about a local farmer.
Though the statistics are important to understanding the scale of a disaster, Sweeney doesn’t want the individuals’ stories to get lost in the reporting.
“I usually don’t make videos about something so traumatic, it’s really hard,” Sweeney said. “In the moments right after (the fire), I felt so intrusive. Like, should I be here? But in retrospect, it’s important. We have to keep documenting, keep communicating that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”
“Way the Wind Blows” will be screened this weekend at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival, during Saturday’s “Roots and Reels” short films screening at the Colorado School of Mines’ Green Center, 924 16th St. in Golden. The festival features more than 60 films from around the world.