Sonoma County filmmakers tell stories of the Tubbs fire

After he nearly lost his Montecito Heights home, after Dr. Stephen Seager realized how badly the wildfires of 2017 had damaged North County, he did what any other amateur filmmaker would do: He started telling stories.

Seager, an emergency room physician and psychiatrist at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center in Martinez, started gathering anecdotes about the fires and original footage of the conflagration.

Nine months later, the 40-minute film, “Urban Inferno: The Night Santa Rosa Burned,” was born.

The film focuses on the first eight hours of the firestorm, the great lengths Santa Rosa residents went to survive, the heroic acts by first responders to minimize casualties, the great ways in which community members came together to help their neighbors, and the extent to which the local community bent but never broke. It debuted at the Roxy in downtown Santa Rosa and was shown hundreds of times.

“Our intention was to tell the story, not to be therapeutic,” he says. “But in doing that, by sharing this authentic footage in an authentic way, I think it helped a lot of people deal with the trauma.”

Seager, who now lives in Cotati, wasn’t the only local movie producer to turn to documentary film as a way of working through grief. Across Sonoma County, a handful of other creative people did the same, responding to the tragedy by telling the stories of those who experienced it firsthand.

In all cases, the process was gut-wrenching: reliving one of the most harrowing nights in Sonoma County’s history. In the end, however, just like it was with Seager’s film, the results helped the community move forward, embracing the future of rising from the ashes by recounting the process through which the ashes occurred in the first place.

Perhaps the most well known of these filmmakers was celebrity chef Tyler Florence, who fell into the role of filmmaker a bit unexpectedly.

His film, “Uncrushable,” was supposed to spotlight a benefit lunch on the Napa/Sonoma border, but quickly ballooned into something deeper and more meaningful when Florence himself realized the movie needed context.

The first day of filming took Florence and his crew to a community gathering in Santa Rosa for a neighborhood that had been mostly destroyed. Over the next three weeks, subsequent filming sessions led them to various community meetings, memorials, vigils and other community events, including shelters at which other local chefs were making and distributing meals for free. The film crew also worked to get original footage from the night of Oct. 8, 2017, when the firestorm descended on the city.

“We joke that we did pre-production, production and post-production at the same time,” he wrote in a recent email. “We were a little worried at first about filming people in their most vulnerable moments, but I think we all quickly came to realize that giving people a platform to tell their individual stories was really cathartic for them.”

Another filmmaker, Mira Stenger, has an entirely different story.

Stenger, 16, is a junior at Quest Forward Academy in Bennett Valley. She focused her film on rebuilding, and built the narrative around the experiences of some of her contemporaries.

One of the girls spotlighted in the film operated a lemonade stand that raised $1,000 for fire relief. Another girl worked with her family’s apparel company to raise $10,000 selling T-shirts with inspiring slogans.

She submitted the three-minute film into a contest held through the Alexander Valley Film Society. In October, at the final night of the organization’s annual film festival, Stenger took first place.

The prize for her honor was $200. But for Stenger, simply being recognized was quite a big deal.

“I was so inspired by the things young people were doing, I felt lucky to be able to tell their stories,” she said. Stenger added that she used the prize money to buy camera memory cards and flash drives, and to help fund the film/digital art club she founded at her school.

Yet another example of standout post-fire filmmaking was a movie shot by Benicia resident and frequent Press Democrat contributor John Beck.

This six-minute film, titled “Forgotten Fire Victims,” tells the story of a handful of Latino farmworkers who were affected by the fires, and details some of the ways in which their lives changed after they lost what little they had. One of the families lost their rental home in Santa Rosa and had to live out of their car with their three children before they moved in with a family member.

Beck shot the piece in one day.

Since the movie debuted Thanksgiving weekend of 2017, it has run before feature films in local theaters thousands of times, catching some locals off-guard by how jarring it really is.

“What meant a lot to me is that the film helped shine a light on a group of people who maybe weren’t getting a lot of focus and attention,” he said. “I wanted a film to stop people in their tracks and put them in someone else’s shoes. I think that process also helped everyone heal.”

Matt Villano is a writer and editor in Healdsburg. He will donate the fee for this story to the SRJC Fire Relief Fund.