It is a very different look, listen and feel of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires that Austrian filmmaker Lukas Marxt (Among the Palms the Bomb, Or: Looking for Reflections in the Toxic Field of Plenty) brings us in his new experimental documentary. Unlike the busy, nonstop news coverage we saw when the tragic events unfolded, the film takes viewers through different extended scenes of observation, usually shot from steady positions. And although it unspools without talking heads, narration or other commentary beyond an opening text quote from a philosopher, the doc’s title, >1.5°C: Pyropolitics and the New World, hints that the director will not mind if audiences feel like our collective feet are being held to the fire as we experience the visual and audio journey on which the film takes us.
More so than anything, it feels like an encouragement to help us with what philosopher Michael Marder says in his quote at the start of the film about pyropolitics, or the politics of fire – the geopolitical and political causes feeding the flames that we watch and the damage they cause. If pyropolitics is “increasingly dictating the rules of the game today, then it is crucial to learn its language,” Marder’s quote reads.
>1.5°C: Pyropolitics and the New World will give viewers a chance to do so when it premieres on Oct. 27 at the German documentary festival DOK Leipzig, followed by Austria’s Viennale, before screening at IDFA in Amsterdam.
Marxt directed and edited the film, and he handled the camera work together with Carson Davis Brown. In a Zoom conversation with THR, he shared what inspired >1.5°C: Pyropolitics and the New World and its look and feel, and why pyropolitics can’t just be ignored.
Marxt was in California when the fires started, as he has been working for more than seven years around the Salton Sea, close to the Mexican border, where he also shot his film Among the Palms the Bomb, Or: Looking for Reflections in the Toxic Field of Plenty. “It was a big ecological disaster when it collapsed in the ’70s because of agricultural runoff,” the filmmaker tells THR. “That created an algae bloom, and all fish and birds died. And then everybody moved away. Before that, the area was called the Californian Rivera, where everybody wanted to be and bought properties.”
When Marxt heard about the wildfires, he recalls thinking, “Oh my God, what is that? And my first impulse was, I don’t want to film anything like this. I really have no interest in going out and maybe being in someone’s way who is trying to help. I was living in El Sereno, which is close to South Pasadena, so it was not evacuated, but it was always on the brink. But the more we talked with friends and people affected, the more we heard that they had to evacuate. And so, I said: I don’t have to make a film about it, but we should try to document these historic events.”
So he and his team went out and started “documenting as much as we could during the period of the burning, but our main concern was always to not be in people’s way.”
Marxt filmed fires, firefighters, inside a shelter (with a sign highlighting that there was no access for media) and more. “Everything covered by the news, we were not interested in,” he tells THR. “This is obviously an observational documentary, just depicting this event.”
The film starts with the sound of fire, then takes audiences closer to and eventually inside the fire. “And then you have this afterburn,” Marxt says. “It’s a very simple red thread which helped us through the editing.” Watch a trailer for >1,5°C Pyropolitics and the New World right here.
How about that title? “The title is much bigger than the film. I hope it is a title which makes you curious, but also a title which invites you to think more,” Marxt explains. “Even though there are no answers in the film itself.”
The temperature change referenced in the title is part of the Paris Agreement on climate change adopted in 2015. That international treaty saw countries agree to pursue efforts to limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The filmmaker’s experience so far is that not everybody is aware of the treaty. “There’s a big difference between the U.S. and European audiences,” he shares. “In the U.S., a lot of people have no clue what we’re talking about when we talk about 1.5 degrees. The U.S. also signed it, but it is not promoted there as much as in Europe.”
But wildfires have not only hit L.A. “The film focuses on this single event, but this is happening everywhere, including in France and on the Iberian Peninsula,” Marxt points out. “And the fires are coming closer and closer to the cities. L.A. has been affected by a lot of fires, but all the warning signs of past fires were simply ignored.”
That is where pyropolitics come in. “I hope the film [encourages viewers] to dig deeper, because we are shaping the Earth,” he says. “And we are shaping everything for maximum profit, including in farming, which changes the natural way and path of a fire. The film can be the start of a thought or a conversation.”
Marxt says that just like his other work, >1.5°C: Pyropolitics and the New World pushed him into a dystopian space. “I’m always going to the rim of where people got pushed back to, or look at how far you could go and where the borders of industry and activity are,” he explains. “And lots of times, you end up in wastelands or in an apocalyptic kind of surrounding.”
The filmmaker’s focus on environmental and climate challenges created by humans does not mean that he isn’t hopeful that worrying trends can be addressed, but he sees a lot of work and focus ahead. “I’m not the worst doomer around, but it does not look very good at the moment,” he tells THR. “The future does not look very bright.”
Marxt is already working on another film idea, which he plans to co-direct with his >1.5°C: Pyropolitics and the New World cinematographer colleague Carson Davis Brown, and it doesn’t sound much less apocalyptic. “There is an open gun range in the hills of the High Desert where people just come in, especially on weekends, where 100, 200 trucks arrive, and just start shooting with no regulation,” the filmmaker says. “They bring all kinds of targets – mattresses, tires, cars and whatever – and they are shooting at them. And then there are people who live there and live from picking up the brass bullet casings. It’s very, very disturbing.”
For Marxt and his collaborator, the filming process is about immersing themselves in this world to understand it and share the experience with an audience. “Over the past two years, Carson and I have been spending time with this community to understand the people who live there and the alternative economy that has emerged around this place,” he says. “We have spent over 50 days with them, also sleeping there and making sure we have their trust and willingness to work on this documentary.” It sounds like the new film, just like >1.5°C: Pyropolitics and the New World, will be made to start conversations.