BC Wildfire Documentaries: Films About Canada’s Burning Forests

Smoke season is a real season now. Most of us in BC have lived some version of it: orange light at midday, an air quality warning on your phone, a long weekend spent indoors with the windows shut. Canada is warming at roughly twice the global rate, and our forests are paying for it. In 2023, Canadian forest fires burned more than 17 million hectares, the worst season this country has on record.

The news shows us the flames. It rarely explains why they keep coming, or what is left once the cameras go home. That is what documentaries are for. The documentaries about the BC wildfire below, all streaming on The Green Channel, look at the fires from the frontlines, the policy rooms, and our own heads. Read together, they add up to something no single fire report can.

The frontlines: Tsilhqot’in sovereignty and community resilience

Modern mega-fires move at a speed that is hard to picture until you see it. Lytton broke Canada’s all-time heat record three days running in June 2021, topping out at 49.6 degrees on the 29th. The next evening the village burned. World Weather Attribution later studied that heat dome and found it would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.

Fire crews met that summer anyway. Initial attack teams, structure protection units, volunteers hauling hoses for neighbours they had never met. The heroism was real. Nobody talks much about the exhaustion.

The people who meet these fires deserve better than a ten-second news clip. And to be honest, Wildfire Warriors gives them one. During the 2017 fires the Tsilhqot’in Nation was fighting on two fronts. The flames, and a government pushing them to leave their territory, at one point threatening to remove their children. They stayed and they fought the fire on their own terms while drawing on generations of cultural burning and knowledge of their own ground. This is called Indigenous fire management, and unfortunately Colonial policy spent a century pushing that knowledge aside.

Another documentary, Firestorm: Out of the Ashes looks further back, to the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire in 2003. British Columbians watched in horror that August as the blaze took 239 homes on the southern edge of Kelowna and pushed more than 27,000 people out of their beds. The film is a retrospective, but not a grim one. It is about what a community does the morning after, and in the years after that.

The root cause: forest management in BC and the logging debate

Climate change is the spark. However, decades of forest management supplied the fuel.

Take the beetles, for example. BC winters are no longer cold enough to knock back the spruce beetle and the pine beetle, and both have chewed through huge stretches of the province’s forests. Dead stands turn red, then brown, then sit there as perfect kindling. Add a century of stamping out every small natural fire, the sort that used to clear the understory, and you get forests loaded from the ground up. One lightning strike, one careless spark, and a hillside becomes an inferno unfortunately.

Then there is logging: Canada harvested about 670,000 hectares of forest in 2023, most of it by clearcut, with BC among the largest shares. The province’s working definition counts old growth as roughly 23 per cent of forested land, which sounds reassuring until you read the 2020 analysis by Karen Price, Rachel Holt and Dave Daust. They found only about three per cent of BC can grow large trees at all. When the Fairy Creek blockades tried to hold one of the last unlogged valleys, the RCMP had made 1,188 arrests by December 2021. Forest management in BC sits at the centre of a fight over jobs, homes and ecosystems. 

No film captures that fight like The Green Chain. It puts every side on screen, from the mill floor to the blockade, and lets each of them make the case. Watch it and the yard signs in any BC forestry town start to make sense for you.

The internal toll: Living with climate anxiety

There is a cost here that never shows up in a hectare count. The chest tightens when the sky goes that colour again. Parents read the AQI before deciding whether the kids can go outside. Some of us are grieving hillsides we have hiked our whole lives. If a smoky summer has left you rattled, that is not a defect. That is attention.

Feeling The Apocalypse is a climate anxiety documentary that begins somewhere honest. It follows a psychotherapist working through his own climate dread, a man whose job is holding other people’s fear while carrying plenty of his own. If you have felt that worry and had nowhere to put it, this film is better company than most documentaries out there.

The worry you feel is not irrational. The planet is warming faster than the forecasts allowed for. In 2018 the IPCC projected we would cross 1.5 degrees somewhere between 2030 and 2052. 2024 became the first calendar year to pass that mark, six years ahead of the earliest date in that window. One year above the line is not the same as breaching the Paris target, which is measured over decades. It is still nowhere near where anyone planned to be.

Dread, though, is a poor strategy. System Update is the counterweight. It looks at how earlier movements won things nobody expected them to win, and treats that as a working blueprint for everyone. Both films tell the same thing: the way out runs through collective action, and there is a track record for it.

Beyond the headlines

Destruction is only half the story of BC’s wildfires. The other half is what people do next. Neighbours rebuilding after Okanagan Mountain. A Nation defending its territory and proving a better way to live with fire. Loggers, protesters, scientists and therapists all wrestling with the same changed country. Environmental resilience runs through every one of these films: people, on camera, doing the work. That beats another night of fire footage.

The fires will come again. Whether we understand them any better by then is up to us.

To understand the crisis beyond the headlines, start your 7-day free trial on The Green Channel and stream these vital documentaries on climate, forests, and resilience.