In the West, fire isn’t a question of if but when.
The reasons vary. It might be a crushing combination of dry climate, gale-force winds and a small spark that consumes houses whole, or an unprovoked middle-of-the-night inferno that claims businesses and your favorite third place.
True, you’ll focus on the whys and the hows, but even definitive answers will lack satisfaction. What once was is now no more. The only thing left to do is sweep away the ash and rebuild.
It’s a reality Coloradans know all too well, from the 2020 Cal-Wood Fire to the 2021 Marshall Fire and the 2025 Caribou Village Shopping Center Fire. It’s also the reality at the heart of Rebuilding — the latest family drama from Colorado’s Max Walker-Silverman — a movie born from ash, after the house of the writer-director’s grandmother burned in a fire.
“I had a basic view of the characters and a few little dynamics that were kicking around for a while,” the 32-year-old filmmaker says. Then came the fire, “the catalyzing event for the real propulsion of the story.”
Born, raised and still residing in the mountain town of Telluride, Walker-Silverman studied at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. There he met producers Dan Janvey and Paul Mezey, as well as several crew members who would work on Rebuilding, before returning home to make a few shorts in the 2010s and two features in the 2020s thanks to “beneficent benefactors on the coast, who’ve allowed us to play in our weird southern Colorado sandbox.”
Walker-Silverman finds quite a bit in that sandbox. He and Rebuilding cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo balance the apprehension of living in the West — the distance, the emptiness, the array of potential climate threats just over the horizon — with an appreciation and awe for the landscape surrounding and engulfing the characters. Here’s a man who isn’t bored looking at a sunset.
“The sun rises every morning, it sets every night, and it’s very pretty both times,” he says. “That’s a good chunk of the day. Couldn’t take that away from people.”
Anchored by a reserved and powerful performance from Josh O’Connor as Dusty, the San Luis Valley rancher who lost his house and livelihood when a wildfire tore through the area, Rebuilding is set after the trauma. When we meet Dusty, he lives in a FEMA trailer with the rest of his displaced community. Some survivors move forward with determination. Others don’t move at all. It takes all types, and connections develop where there were none before.
Something new grows out of the ashes. It’s different, yes, but that new imbues Rebuilding with a hope that no matter how bad things get, they can always get better.
“I need to believe that things can be OK,” Walker-Silverman explains. “Otherwise, it’s hard. It’s hard to live, and, more specifically, it’s hard to fight for things to be OK.”
“It may be optimistic, but I don’t think it’s wrong,” he continues. “Because there are amazing things that come out of humans and hard circumstances that [Rebuilding] tries to pay tribute to.”
When Rebuilding premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the Eaton and Palisades Fires were still burning in Los Angeles. Homes lost, lives displaced. The rebuilding process wasn’t yet on the table.
But in the dark safety of Park City’s Eccles Center, the film showed a path survivors could walk. While introducing the film, Walker-Silverman said he hoped his work could be “a bright light in a dark room.”
These days, the room feels darker. The fires are getting more frequent and more destructive. They feel more like inevitability than possibility. You might even wonder if Walker-Silverman tried out a version of Rebuilding that was bitter and angry.
“No, hope was always the key to it,” he says. “That was the whole point to me, just as a personal project. I was fairly conscious at the outset of writing [Rebuilding]: I’m going to create something for myself to give myself hope.”
Walker-Silverman’s “bright light in a dark room” proved difficult to find in 2025. Following the premiere at Sundance, Rebuilding played another two dozen festivals and a few one-off screenings before a theatrical release so limited you’d be forgiven if you missed it altogether. On opening weekend last November, the only theater screening the movie along the Front Range was an AMC in Highlands Ranch.
As of this writing, Rebuilding is no longer playing in theaters and is not available to stream. Your options: a barebones Blu-ray or Video on Demand. Why a movie this good hasn’t attracted greater exposure is baffling.
Granted, the film’s fate isn’t unusual in the now typical glut of movies released theatrically and virtually every year. But considering relevancy of subject matter and the sensitivity with which Walker-Silverman handles it, Rebuilding is a movie Coloradans should hold dear to their heart.
“There’s so much cynical work out there — or a lot of work where the filmmaker feels it’s their responsibility to point out the unjustness of the world,” the writer-director says. “Which makes sense, because that’s real, the hardship of the world is so real.”
“But I sometimes find myself feeling like: ‘Man, is there a condescension to this? Don’t people kind of know how hard and unfair life can be?’” he continues. “Maybe the harder thing to do isn’t to point it out; it’s in fact to point out how it could be otherwise.”
ON SCREEN: Rebuilding is available to buy or rent from Amazon, Apple TV+ and Fandango at Home.
