Last Days at Paradise High
2020 · 23m · USA
Directed by Derek Knowles, Emily Thomas
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After the most destructive wildfire in California history destroys Paradise, two seniors navigate a final semester defined by grief.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two high school seniors navigating the semester after the most destructive California wildfire in history, made partly by a wildfire survivor — twenty-three minutes of real climate-grief reporting. The proximity matters. Strong.
America's youngest climate refugees deserve precisely this kind of patient observational attention, and a co-director who is himself a wildfire survivor changes the witness relation in important ways. Twenty-three minutes well-spent.
23:17, 18.9K views, 320 likes — a wildfire-survivor-directed doc about Paradise High seniors after the Camp Fire is positioned by the directors as 'America's youngest climate refugees,' which is the right frame for what the place is now. The proximity (one director's own loss) is the load-bearing element.