Victims of the Pacific Palisades fire tragedy

Documentary filmmaker Tracy Droz Tragos has a lot of experience with wildfires in California.

After all, not long after the November 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, she was on site with a camera as the Paradise community tried to rebuild, filming footage for Ron Howard’s 2020 National Geographic film Rebuild paradise. She sat with people who had seen everything they owned go up in smoke; She described their heartache as they were unsure where they would live or if they would ever see a dime of FEMA money.

On Wednesday she became one of their subjects.

“We found out this afternoon from a neighbor who walked many miles back to see what happened: our house is gone,” she says. “Everything in it is gone.”

The night before, Droz Tragos, her husband, teenage daughter and their two dogs stood outside their Pacific Palisades home and watched the flames coming toward them. Droz Tragos knew from filming “Paradise” that people who hesitated got stuck on the road and died.

So they didn’t bring anything with them – not even socks for their husband – and just got in their car and drove off.

“Honestly, I thought it was a test run, I don’t know why,” Droz Tragos said Wednesday evening from an Airbnb near her in-laws’ Santa Barbara home that the couple was able to book after spending the night at one on Tuesday had spent at a friend’s apartment. “You really don’t think this is going to happen to you.”

There was uncertainty, even a little hope, all Wednesday morning. Maybe the flames had avoided her house. Maybe only part of it was burned. For a while, Droz Tragos thought about revisiting what had happened himself using a media reference. She even took her sister-in-law’s teacher’s lanyard to complete the operation. But then the neighbor came over to investigate and confirmed that her house was nothing more than rubble, like so many others on the block. The house of Droz Tragos’ 79-year-old mother, about ten minutes away, also burned down completely.

“An entire community was wiped off the face of the earth,” she says. “And it’s not just your house – it’s your neighbor’s house. It is the park where you used to walk and enjoy the shade of the trees. It’s the place to get coffee. Where your child goes to school. All of it.”

The filmmaker’s experience continues rebuild paradise, where she was a producer gave her an unexpected kind of expertise: She knew to bring N95 masks and several rolls of toilet paper.

“The neighbors asked, ‘Why are you bringing toilet paper?'” she recalls with a little laugh. “And I said, ‘Trust me, you may find yourself in a situation without a toilet and really wish you had toilet paper.'”

Droz Tragos is best known for her Grand Jury-winning Sundance documentary Rich Hill in 2014. Co-directed with her cousin Andrew Droz Palermo, the film is about three working-class high school students in a small Missouri town and was a critical sensation when it was released a decade ago.

The filmmaker had been working on a variety of new projects and had just moved the hard drives containing all her footage to her mother’s house along with her equipment.

“Up until a few months ago, I had everything in an (outdoor) safe,” she says. “But I thought, ‘Let me save the $80 a month from that storage unit in Culver City and just leave it with my mom.'”

As fires continue to rage through and near Los Angeles, Droz Tragos’ story highlights the part of the Palisades wildfire tragedy that goes beyond celebrity Instagram Stories: the part that impacts what some locals fondly call Call the “caravan park” area of ​​the community. This is still solidly middle class, but hardly James Woods’ cliff-side mansion. The intense and specifically human aspect of a tragedy that goes beyond political accusations and even environmental warnings.

The pain that climate disasters can bring, the coarse particles of a life that they destroy.

The part where a person sees their life stolen from heaven by an invisible biblical power.

And not just for one person, but for an entire, inhabited, ordinary place.

“I know people think Pacific Palisades is fancy, but there’s a whole part of it that really isn’t,” says Droz Tragos, as dogs bark in the background and her daughter complains about the lack of clothing, which she is not currently wearing. “It’s intergenerational. The high school is a really cool place where my kid can go to school and meet people from all over the world.”

She adds: “But it’s gone. The library is gone, the grocery store is gone. All points of contact with the community are gone. The site of the bizarre Fourth of July parade has disappeared.”

A hint of irony creeps into her voice. “In the barbershop, which no longer exists, there is a sign: If you’re rich, you live in Beverly Hills, if you’re famous, you live in Malibu, and if you’re lucky, you live in Pacific Palisades.”

The story about the comeback after the fire sounds good, she says. But Droz Tragos knows it from his own experience Rebuild paradise that it’s not that easy. “Do you really want to go back and be reminded of all that trauma?” she says.

The hours on Wednesday evening were full of what-ifs. A particular hard drive that she wished she had saved. Their daughter’s twin frogs, who had lived long lives but who they had no time to bring back. “I can continue down the path of regret. But then I think, ‘If we had gone back, we might not have made it at all,'” she says.

The insurance pays for 14 days in the Airbnb. Droz Tragos doesn’t know where he’ll go after that. She’s currently thinking about what she can take from all of this.

“I hope we can be kinder to each other and tell more human stories and not just salacious stories,” she says. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to tell these stories because all my work is gone. But I hope others can.”