Join Transitions Film Festival and Environment Victoria for the World Premiere screening
of short film Beyond the Burning.

Beyond the Burning is a production of Environment Victoria and was funded by Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation.

This screening will be preceded by a panel discussion.

SYNOPSIS

Now the smoke has cleared, how can we move forward from last summer’s devastating bushfires? Through intimate personal stories, Beyond the Burning explores the terrible toll of this tragedy, the underlying causes of climate change and destructive logging, and two inspiring local solutions – handing back forest management to Traditional Owners and rebuilding with renewables.

New Year’s Eve, 2019. The sky turns bright red in Mallacoota, East Gippsland, as a monstrous fire tears towards the town. Through mobile phone footage and interviews, bushfire survivors explain what it felt like to be there and the impact on local wildlife.

Afterwards, we see the scorched remains of a forest through the eyes of a renowned nature photographer. An ecologist revisits her favourite temperate rainforest – normally too wet to burn – and explains what’s being lost as a hotter climate dries out the bush.

In other parts of the ravaged landscape, wildlife carers offer shelter to injured animals, and a beekeeper explains how destructive logging practices have contributed to the frequency and intensity of the recent fires.

From this tragedy emerge local solutions. Traditional Owners survey the regenerating bush for totem species, conduct cultural burns and begin the long process of taking back management of the land. And renewable energy companies install battery and solar systems to make remote communities more resilient to future climate disasters, accelerating the shift from coal and gas to clean energy.

Told in the authentic voices of East Gippsland residents, Beyond the Burning takes us through the tragedy of the 2019/20 fires and out the other side, towards a vision of a better future.

CREDITS