In her feature documentary Only on Earth (screening in DocsBarcelona Official Competition and sold by Autlook), Danish director Robin Petré isn’t observing the wildfires in southern Galicia from a safe distance, zooming in with telephoto lenses. Instead, she is at the heart of the inferno.
“We are actually inside those fires,” the director extinguishes any idea that she and her team were staying back as the heat rose. Instead, they were “up close” with the foresters and the firefighters.
Wasn’t this a bit reckless? “Reckless I wouldn’t say. It’s dangerous obviously…what we had to do was find allies and friends among the firefighters, the very best of them. They would lend us their outfits. We were in full firefighting suits with glasses protecting your eyes, helmets, boots that can’t melt and fabric that can’t burn.”
They also wrapped the fabric round their microphone so it wouldn’t catch fire and then they would enter the woods with the firefighters. “For me, it was necessary to transfer the intensity, the realness of those fires up close…it was crucial to the whole feeling of the film.”
Not that Petré had thought she was going to be making a movie about raging forest fires when she embarked on the project in 2022.
“When I first set out to make this film, I wanted to make a film around the cowboy culture and the wild horses… I wanted these recurring annual fires to be a backdrop,” she remembers. “But what happened was that during the shooting, we were there during the worst drought and heatwave in recorded history.”
The fires were on a truly biblical scale. She talks of driving for hours and never escaping them. “On a clear day, you couldn’t even see the colour blue. Everything was like sepia…there was this weird orange hue on the houses, the sky.”
It became impossible to follow through with the original idea. The focus changed. “It became a film both about the horses and about the fires.”
The wild horses have their own part to play in the story about the fires. Traditionally, they helped keep the flames away because they trod down the flammable undergrowth. Their numbers though have reduced significantly, thereby making such catastrophic fires more likely.
Footage of the horses is as spectacular as that of the flames. Hundreds are shown galloping together.
“I’m someone who grew up with horses. I am from rural Denmark, from a village with 200 people right at the edge of a national park. I have been riding since I was four years old and I have a very close relationship with horses because they were such a big part of my youth and my childhood. I have so many sensory memories related to them and that helps me to translate that to cinema – into these images that you see in the film.”
Petré knew precisely how she wanted to frame the horses. She could predict how they would behave at any given moment and thereby could place the camera at the best point to capture their reactions.
The local community catch the horses once a year as part of an old rodeo-like tradition called a “churro.” The horses’ manes are cut. In the past, the horsehair would have been used for filling pillows and mattresses. That no longer happens but the tradition of the shearing lives on.
Petré first learned about the wild horses of Galicia from a magazine article. “I have been working for several years now on human/animal relations, our collective impact on the natural world and issues relating to that,” the filmmaker explains why she was at first so intrigued by the article. “I thought it was very, very interesting and that there might be a film there and so I went on an initial one-week research trip.”
In Spain, she met an expert on the horses. She was so fascinated by what she learned that she soon returned for a longer trip. By now, she was building a network in the local community – and learning how to communicate in Spanish and Galician.
Among the human protagonists are a pair of young boys, shown roaming around with their catapults but also lovingly grooming some of the horses. “Kids are kids,” the director reflects on the experience of working with them. “Some of the shooting with the children were the most chaotic….in a fun way. My whole crew were trying to get the kids to stay here [in one place] practising with their slingshots long enough for us actually to make an image before they run off to their next game.”
The fire fighters also feature prominently, racing down the roads at very high speed as the fires rage around them.
Petré hopes the documentary will both provide viewers with an “immersive” experience and “nudge them” to think about what they are seeing. She wants them to realise that “every time we make a mark on the natural world, we are also interfering with a certain balance. This is like a transcending theme in the film – that everything influences everything else.”
For obvious reasons, after the terrible fires in Los Angeles in December, the film seems strangely topical.
“What is important to know is that Only on Earth is a universal story. It is a film about something relevant on a global scale…there are so many parallels between the Californian fire situation and the Galician fire situation,” she muses. “Humans have been altering the natural forests – we are introducing really fast-growing new tree species, eucalyptus in particular, because they are so good for profit, wood production, paper production and so on – but they are also very flammable. Wiping out a forest of native tree species highly resistant to fires and instead putting up a forest of eucalyptus trees, and then at the same time having destabilisation of the atmosphere, rising temperatures, these crazy droughts…” the director pauses as if she can’t quite take in the sheer folly that has led to blazes. “It’s us again, humankind, creating our own enemy, fuelling a fire beyond our own control!”
“As you can imagine, it has been a very difficult project with permissions, personal safety, the intensity…” she adds.
Copenhagen outfit Hansen & Pedersen came on board early on. Polar Star is the Spanish co-producer. Signe Skov Thomsen and Malene Flindt Pedersen were producing (alongside Marieke van den Bersselaa and Carles Brugueras). HBO is also one of the partners on the project.
