Taos News
Hermits Peak–Calf Canyon documentary to screen at TCA
Between April and June 2022, the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire became the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, burning more than 340,000 acres in Mora, San Miguel and Taos counties and destroying hundreds of homes. The fire started when Santa Fe National Forest personnel lost control of two separate prescribed burns that merged into a megafire during extremely dry and windy conditions.
A new film, “burn, scar,” which premiered at the Mountainfilm Festival in Telluride, Colorado, in May, delves into longstanding tensions between generational Northern New Mexicans and the U.S. Forest Service through the lens of the Hermits Peak–Calf Canyon wildfire and its aftermath.
Filmmaker Hillary Bachelder said she was in the “exact right place and time” in the spring of 2022 to put her on the path of making “burn, scar.” She moved to Taos in 2021 from Chicago, where she worked for Kartemquin Films, the production company behind “Hoop Dreams” and other social issue-driven documentaries. She had just started taking a class with the Santa Fe Watershed Association, seeking to understand the landscape and the impacts of climate change on her new home, when the wildfire started. A couple of weeks before the fire, her class had taken a field trip on which a fire ecologist with the Forest Service spoke about prescribed fire as a tool for forest restoration and wildfire mitigation.
“Within just a few days, the first broadcast burn escaped, and I had just been with this guy from the Forest Service hearing all about how important prescribed fire was, and then this disaster started,” Bachelder said. “I pretty immediately thought that it was an interesting and important story.” Dennis Carril, the fire ecologist, worked for the U.S. Forest Service during the devastating fire and became one of the film’s main characters.
The film follows seven protagonists, as Bachelder calls them: acequia parciantes, generational landowners, land grant activists, Carril, a forest ranger and an Albuquerque attorney from Mora who returned to help advocate for her community.
“What happened with Hermit’s Peak–Calf Canyon was really tragic and obviously incredibly impactful and awful, and it was also a mistake,” Bachelder said. “It came from a bunch of well-intentioned people, and so I really did want to approach it in a way that could hold all of our protagonists with some empathy and understanding.”
Empathy and understanding don’t mean agreement, Bachelder said.
“I'm okay if you disagree with them at different points when they're on screen, because I felt that way," she said. "There's times that I really agree with everyone. There's times that I disagree with all of them,” but her hope is to find “empathy and understanding for where they're [each] coming from.”
Credited as the film’s director, editor and cinematographer, Bachelder was able to capture her characters’ vulnerabilities as they navigated the fire and its aftermath. As the seasons change, there’s new growth in the burn scar; landowners and acequia parciantes in the film brace for another year without irrigation due to post-fire flooding; and Forest Service employees grapple with responsibility and work to regain hard-won trust.
Bachelder hopes the film underscores the passion Northern New Mexicans share for land, even when they may disagree about how to care for it. “Even though there's so much entrenched frustration on all sides, everyone is so passionate and everyone really cares about the land,” she said. “They might be coming from different sides around it, but I can really respect that passion, and I really appreciate their commitment to fight for the land.”
The film is not just about the fire, but about how it ignited a reckoning of the region’s centuries-old tensions. The fire is the lens through which Bachelder tells the story of Northern New Mexico — land struggles, government mistrust, extreme weather, climate change and resilience.
The 90-minute documentary, which won the Best New Mexico Feature award at the Santa Fe International Film Festival several weeks ago, is slated for four showings at the Taos Center for the Arts next week. Each screening — Nov. 1, 4, 6 and 7 — will be followed by a conversation with Bachelder and local wildfire experts to “try and root these ideas and these issues in what's happening specifically in Taos County,” Bachelder said.
“I hope that people will come out to the TCA, but then also stick around to do some of this process of translating what you've just seen into everyday Taos life," Bachelder said, adding that conversations will focus on topics like resiliency in rural communities and collaborative land management approaches. Panelists were still to be determined as of press time.
“The wildfire recovery process is this very long road. We used to say ‘after the fire, after the fire's done, after the fire's done.’ There has not been an ‘after the fire’ yet,” Antonia Roybal-Mack, the attorney from Mora who provided aid and legal support to fire victims, said in the film. “This process takes years and years.”
Bachelder followed Roybal-Mack as she helped people navigate yearslong Federal Emergency Management Agency claims and as she set up aid centers during burn scar flooding years after the mountains stopped burning.
“The most critical at the moment is that people in the burn scar still haven't been made whole,” Bachelder said. “So many people have not been paid out from FEMA or have not been paid what they should be.”
After an extremely dry year, heavy rains this fall caused even more flooding in communities affected by the fire, underscoring that the recovery process is ongoing.
“I think we're at an early stage of what the film can offer in terms of healing for people, and I hope that it can be a tool for that,” Bachelder said. “I hope it can be a tool for dialog, so I get really excited when I see little signs of, like, after a screening, these two people are talking to each other who might not have engaged otherwise.”
Bachelder hopes the film can be healing for people who lost something in the fire, and also that it can spark conversation about what she calls a “messy” story. She also hopes it serves as a reminder that for flooding and fire victims, there has been no after the fire yet.
By Emily Sender