Image by Malachi Brooks.
In her documentary Bring Your Own Brigade two-time Academy Award nominee Lucy Walker is a bit like Alexis de Tocqueville, her fellow European who came to the USA and observed its exotic inhabitants early in the 19th century. If the French philosopher observed how Americans’ mentality affected democracy in the 1830s, almost 200 years later the London-born Walker is studying how the character of Californians is being brought to bear on the increasingly common and fierce phenomenon of wildfires.