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 b
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