Rebuilding

 

Writer/director Max Walker-Silverman

director with Kali Reis and Josh O'Connor

actress Kali Reis

REBUILDING           B+                                                                                                        USA  (96 mi)  2025  d: Max Walker-Silverman

Film is an act of imagination.  It is the bright light in a dark room.  So I made this film because only through imagining a better world can we hope for one.  And only through hoping for a better world can we fight for one.  I made this film because if loss must be an ongoing ingredient of our lives, as it must, then care and healing and rebirth must be, too.                    —Writer/director Max Walker-Silverman, “Rebuilding” Reminds Us to Seek the Balm of Community 

From the maker of 2022 Top Ten List #8 A Love Song, this opens up a window into a rarely seen world in this critically praised, quiet, and empathetic little indie gem starring versatile British actor Josh O’Connor (5 major roles in the last 18 months) as Dusty, a humble Colorado cattle rancher navigating life in a temporary FEMA trailer park (timely in an unfortunate way, coinciding with the real wildfires that devastated parts of Southern California) after his home and extensive ranch territory that have been in his family for generations are completely destroyed by a horrific wildfire that consumes thousands of acres.  Premiering at Sundance in the same year as Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams (2025), which this resembles (neither was awarded any prizes), yet that film garnered all the attention, fueled, perhaps by the money from Netflix, causing this film to get lost, flying completely under the radar with no promotional fanfare, though it actually offers greater depth and more profound emotional resiliency.  Delicate and tender, this is the kind of film that only independent American cinema can offer, far more naturalistic than his earlier effort, reminiscent of Chloé Zhao’s 2021 #5 Film of the Year Nomadland (2020) in terms of its depiction of America and its vast panoramic landscapes, accentuating the plight of marginalized people in the wake of tragedy, where sadness and personal struggles are largely overshadowed by the immense presence of the natural world.  O’Connor is excellent in a subdued and understated performance as Dusty, a reserved, overly polite, and grief-stricken man of few words, whose self-reliance and independence seem to have isolated him from others, especially his loved ones, as he’s a man with too much pride to ever ask anyone for help, yet his actions speak loudly, essentially revealing that when you’ve lost everything, what you’ve got left are friends, family, and a surrounding community, who are not to be underestimated, as they mean everything.  Patient and slow-paced, mostly told though Dusty’s perspective, a cowboy who wonders who and what he is if he’s not a rancher, this is a gently humanist story, set in southern Colorado, where it’s times like these that make you revaluate what’s really important in your life, as it may not be the same things that mattered before the fire.  The sheer devastation of losing everything changes things, as you no longer have the comfortable rhythm of your daily support system in place, starting the day milking the cows, bailing hay, feeding the livestock, herding cattle, and mending fences, as the sparse life in a FEMA trailer is totally different, where everything is reduced to the bare essentials.  He thinks he might seek work during the calving season at his cousin’s farm in Montana, 500 miles away, until he realizes how much his daughter is attached to him.  Working with former NYU film school classmates, production designer Juliana Barreto Barreto and co-editor Ramzi Bashour, though his closest collaborator is cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo, exquisitely shot in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, the largest alpine valley in the world, where going months without rain make it a tinderbox ready to explode, but we never see the fire, only the aftermath, though we do see an opening abstract montage of floating embers carried by the winds.  Beautifully establishing a not so ordinary sense of place, with a sparse script written by the Telluride native director featuring dialogue that sounds organic, as there are no villains, and there’s not an ounce of melodrama, accentuating the kinds of figures rarely seen in films, as the relationship between humans and nature, between all natural things, must fluctuate, ebb and flow, leaving us open to change, as loss is universal, where sometimes it takes a calamity to realize what we have.  

Deeply rooted in the human experience, based on his own personal ordeal of watching his grandmother’s house burn down in a wildfire in 2020, this American cowboy movie is a character and performance-driven film featuring a Greek chorus collection of offbeat characters driven from their homes, “not real neighbors,” as described by Dusty, where these inhabitants from closely assembled trailers could be anybody, where the initial focus is not on them but on Dusty reconnecting with his family, including his firm but fair ex-wife Ruby (Meghann Fahy from Christopher Landon’s Drop, 2025), her strong-willed mother Bess (Amy Madigan), and his estranged 9-year old daughter, Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre, an Australian with a perfect American accent), who is mature beyond her years, offering an eye-opening performance, stealing literally every scene she’s in while also winning our hearts in one of the great child performances.  Despite being divorced, they maintain close relations, even though Ruby has moved on to a new husband, Robbie (Sam Engbring), with an openly sensible plan to mutually share raising their daughter.  In a lot of small mountain communities, families are scattered and far away, making it inhospitable for the elderly, and those who move there are often leaving home intentionally, so kids are cared for by a lot of unofficial aunts and uncles.  Natural disasters from floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, fires, tornadoes, and earthquakes are going to be part of our lives forever, where after such staggering loss, things don’t come back as they were, from the places that define us, but are instead reinvented, with this film focusing on the subsequent healing, reminiscent of the much larger scale Amish barn-raising sequence in Peter Weir’s WITNESS (1985), WITNESS Barn Raising Scene MOVIE 1985 YouTube (6:22), which is nothing less than exhilarating.  With no work to keep him busy, this catastrophe opens a window of opportunity for Dusty to reconnect and spend more time with Callie-Rose, bringing her out to the new homesite, where he hasn’t even unpacked the cardboard boxes in his trailer, yet she immediately finds companionship with one of the other kids, as they literally live off a deserted highway in the middle of wide open spaces where no other structure can be seen for miles.  While it’s a primitive environment, with no running water, the closeness of the trailers all huddled together resembles the era of Westerns when wagon trains did the same thing in order to offer protection from Indian attacks.  But here what stands out is that they have no one to rely upon except themselves, responsible for cooking and feeding each other, sharing meals and companionship, helping out with needed home repairs, exploring ideas of home and family, and our memories of both, developing all the attributes of a close-knit community, routinely looking out for one another in a reflection of human decency, discovering deep emotion through simple moments of connection between characters, where authenticity is the film’s greatest strength, a reflection of the prevalent use of non-professionals (everyone but one in the FEMA group).  The initially shy and reticent Dusty seems to hide his eyes under his cowboy hat, bashfully avoiding contact with others, yet still he projects strength, despite everything falling apart underneath him, making a strong impression on his daughter, who has never gotten to spend a lot of time with her Dad and looks up to him perhaps more than she should, REBUILDING I Reborn I Bleecker Street YouTube (2:08), yet she is immediately accepted by the group, no questions asked, making her feel right at home. 

This film is not a disaster movie, but a tender look at humanity’s ability to rebuild through togetherness, a film that is grounded in themes of loss, open skies, and the kinds of people Hollywood often overlooks.  In the minds of this ragtag group of displaced neighbors is just what comes next, as the housing is only temporary, so they’ll have to figure out how to move on to the next step in their lives, which is a concern for everyone, as their lives have been uprooted and placed in limbo, surrounded by the emptiness of a wide-open landscape.  In what resembles the middle of nowhere, completely vulnerable to the elements, they figure out their day-to-day routines, but it’s hard to see beyond that.  Banks refuse to offer loans, as there is nothing left to borrow against, with everything of value destroyed in the fire, where it will be another eight to ten years before his pastureland will again produce enough grass for livestock farming, making it all but impossible to begin again anytime soon.  Needing a phone or computer to process their applications for federal assistance, or for Callie-Rose to do her homework, a library is the only place for these rural residents to access Wi-Fi, with sporadic cars or trucks seen parked nearby, but they close early from funding cuts, so at night Dusty takes Callie-Rose there so she can read books on her tablet while lying in the back of his truck in the parking lot, Rebuilding Exclusive Movie Clip - You Live Here (2025) YouTube (1:01).  Her choice of reading material leans towards the fantastical, allowing her imagination to soar from Scott Emerson’s The Magic Boots, which is beautifully integrated into the social realist aesthetic.  One of the standout scenes is watching the two girls stick the interior walls of the trailer with countless glow-in-the-dark stars, then extinguish the light and sit with an equally astonished Dusty under an endless starry sky, a small gesture that carries enormous emotional weight.  The exquisite acoustic guitar score by Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington, coming from the John Fahey folk roots tradition, figures prominently, like Jake Xerxes Fussell & James Elkington - Mountain Time ... YouTube (2:21), with the John Prine song Kurt Vile - "How Lucky" with John Prine (Official Audio) YouTube (3:23) eloquently infused into the narrative, becoming a sort of theme song for Dusty.  In the end, what matters most are the welcoming personal connections, which only reveal themselves over time, with earth mother Mali (Kali Reis, a mixed Indigenous and Cape Verdean actress, also a former American and World Champion boxer), who lost her husband to the fire, becoming the heart and soul of this new community, taking everyone under her wing, where they’re free to be whoever they choose, including an elderly lesbian couple, a biracial couple, an affable plumber, a barely seen hermit-like man who rarely leaves his trailer, where older men especially drift from self-reliance into solitude, while others are much more socially connected in their day-to-day lives, with Dusty and Callie-Rose not only accepted, but embraced.  The structure of the film slowly builds from an isolated emptiness, seemingly having nothing, to an awareness of why they want to stay, as they feel an inter-generational connection to the land and don’t want to have to start a new life elsewhere, while also exposing recognizable friendships, where they’re all in the same boat, as they come to realize these fragile connections matter.  With no easy answers, this is the kind of film that sneaks up on you, handled with great restraint rather than exploitation, leaving a profound emotional imprint, with a surprising and unexpectedly touching finale that only accentuates the tenuous and fleeting nature of our lives, as healing happens not in isolation, but through shared human connections, where a reimagined future must come from within, becoming a stark meditation on hope and resilience.      

Trouble the Water

TROUBLE THE WATER          A-          

USA  (90 mi)  2008  d:  Carl Deal and Tina Lessin

It felt like we lost our citizenship.  —Kimberly Roberts

A wonderfully unpretentious film that by tracing the path of one family gets to the heart of the matter of the government’s notorious absence in New Orleans after Katrina leaving residents, but mostly poor and black residents where the greatest damage occurred, to fend for themselves.  Without explaining how she happened upon a video camera, apparently a $20 camcorder that feels left over from the CLOVERFIELD (2008) movie set, Kimberly Roberts from her home on France Street in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans starts filming her house and everything around the neighborhood in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina, as she wanted a recording of what it looked like both before and after.  Greeting everyone she meets on the street, asking what their plans are, also filming while riding her bike, where you can hear the click click click as the pedal hits the kickstand, we get a good sense of how she sees her neighborhood and the people familiar to her living in it, some of whom, including several in her own family, will not survive the storm.  She has a natural ease with people and the good sense to narrate while the camera is running explaining what we are looking at as she stocks up on food, ice and emergency provisions.  Unable to afford “the luxury” to get safely out of town (apparently their car had recently been stolen), she and her husband Scott decide to ride out the storm from her home, producing about twenty minutes of some of the most intense footage of the storm in action, where after the levees break a mere three blocks away, she comments “It’s like an ocean out there” as the water rises and her street is flooded as high as a stop sign.  Her family is forced into the attic and eventually move to a house across the street that is one story higher, where she and about a dozen others including children, elderly and an infirmed have to be carried over a river chest high by her husband who uses a punching bag as a flotation device.  With no help in sight and a 911 operator that tells them the city is not prepared to offer them any rescue assistance at this time, they have to wander through this nightmarish deluge on their own.

 

As we piece together footage after her battery runs dead where the film is framed with time headings—Two days after the levees fail, or one week after the levees fail, we learn that despite an abandoned Navy barracks several blocks away that had already been closed due to cuts in federal funding, where only a skeleton crew remained protecting the base, this family was turned away from more than 200 empty beds at the point of M-16’s locked and loaded pointed directly at them, ordering them to disperse.  Instead they spent several nights in an abandoned school before they found a boat to take them to a Red Cross shelter, which is where they met the documentary filmmakers who were originally attempting to do a story on the travails of the National Guard, over-extended both in Iraq and now back here at home, but the Guard refused to cooperate.  Among the most devastating footage captured was the deadly aftermath where in a rented van filled to capacity with 25 of her neighbors they drive past the New Orleans Superdome, where a long tracking shot resembles the look of the Civil War wounded in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), capturing defenseless, helpless people who have no way out, many lying on the ground sick or near death from lack of water while several buses remain idle parked right across the street.  While this entire catastrophe is amateurishly documented, Roberts has an amazing ability to offer her own soulful perspective whose raw insight and authenticity adds to the harrowing realism of the moment.     

Actual news footage shown on TV is interspersed with what Roberts sees on the ground, oftentimes at complete odds with one another, especially when President Bush or FEMA director Mike Brown affirm their alleged successes, or when we get a good look at the tourist video that the city still proudly uses.  The Roberts family exits the city for their first time for a home 200 miles away owned by an uncle which has no running water, where in a typical day in the life scenario, the water department comes out to turn the water on at one point, only to return minutes later to turn it back off again.  That uncle lost his mother when she was abandoned in a hospital during Katrina, as the entire staff evacuated and left the patients behind to fend for themselves.  From this location they can visit FEMA centers where they line up next to “Gate B – Cattle entrance” and reapply for emergency funds that never came, after which they hope to move to a safer location, believing everything has been lost at home.  When they make a return visit several weeks later to obtain what they can, the streets are a sea of mud and obliteration patrolled by neglected, near starving stray dogs.  Kimberly feels blessed that a photo of her mother remains intact, explaining her mother died of AIDS when she was 13 and this is her only surviving keepsake.  Amazingly their two dogs left behind survived, though they have been living on highly contaminated water, while the corpse of one man seen in the before-Katrina footage still lays dead in his living room.  The National Guard is summoned to obtain the body.  Again a long tracking shot of several city blocks both a few weeks after the flood and shown again a year later shows one or two houses either rebuilt or still standing on her block while everything else remains a wasteland of utter demolition.  Nothing has changed as there is simply no sign of life left there at all. 

Instead they set out for Memphis, Tennessee where another relative lives, bringing extended family and the dogs, where in a nice, clean neighborhood it’s clear the additional burden is asking a lot of anyone.  At first, the peace and quiet and relative safety is like an oasis after the storm, but after a period of time, having nowhere else to go, they eventually return to New Orleans where Scott gets a job working with a building contractor reconstructing houses.  Kimberly has a budding rap career under the name Black Kold Madina which is on full display after she discovers her own rap demo previously believed lost when she provides an audacious, foot stomping performance of her song (I Don't Need You To Tell Me That I'm) “ Amazing,” Black Kold Madina - "Amazing" YouTube (3:54), while standing outside an overstuffed closet in a crowded bedroom with her husband proudly watching which is in perfect synch, a song that offers plenty of insight into her personal history, including that knife scar across her husband’s jaw, their life before Katrina as drug hustlers, and her literal resurrection into a woman with a clean slate and a new attitude about her future.  It’s not so much a song as an anthem of joy and triumph in the face of diversity.  There’s a defiant “Won’t Get Fooled Again” mentality that Kimberly develops after she’s had a chance to see schools outside New Orleans actually prepare kids for college and the future, while with the highest incarceration rate in the nation New Orleans is instead “preparing us for prison."  Kimberly Roberts has come full circle with her before and after footage.  Little did she know that what she couldn’t film, the growing maturity inside of herself, is what ended up changing the most.  This disaster movie which is filled with first hand observations from an every day black perspective turns into a film of personal triumph, and in a moment of rare humility, Kimberly is brought to tears when one neighbor actually thanks her for the efforts she made on behalf of all her neighbors.