You don’t see many firefighters in films. It is, of course, much easier to film someone in blue running after a mugger. So if you like watching fire fought, you’re out of luck. However, Gabriel Kirkpatrick Mann’s documentary, Hotshot, holsters lightweight cameras and takes us into the heart of all kinds of crazy. The filmmaker is never far from fire for much of its 102-minute runtime.
The footage of the titular workers trying to ease the potential damage of fires is really out of this world. Volcanic skies and ruin everywhere are on display. In one scene, a field of evenly spaced air conditioning units lies in ash. They are all that’s left of a suburban street. “Everything that can burn will burn” is the alarming prediction delivered during an opening voiceover. At first, it sounds like melodrama, but when you hear it again as part of the epilogue, you understand it is a mantra. Fuel burns. It’s just a question of when.

“…hotshots remove rungs in the ladder that might fuel catastrophe.”
A forestry technician, known colloquially as a hotshot, attends to the fuel ladder. The fuel ladder is the progression for a spark to burn grass, grass to burn small brush, and so on until you get to a burning redwood. Or a suburb. The hotshots remove rungs in the ladder that might fuel catastrophe. They are element-baiting matadors. Notionally, they are supposed to be land management wonks, but the reality is they have been co-opted away from their primary role to fight fires that wouldn’t exist if they were just allowed to do their main job. Why? I don’t want to be cynical, but as Hotshot points out, they are paid about a third as much as firefighters.
“If you were to piss test a hot shot, you’d find 70% energy drinks and 30% tobacco,” Mann explains. He should know. His girlfriend is the only girl in the Texas Canyon Hotshots that this film follows. A latter-day Calamity Jane, she is introduced with a corny but spectacular freeze-frame needle-drop of rescuing her crew with some high-speed driving between walls of flame. Of course, she and the other forestry technicians are subject to awful hours. “It’s like summer camp. Just shittier.” Fourteen days on, two off. During that time, they will sleep in the open and work all hours at an insane pace. They have to move fast, yomping huge distances with heavy gear so they can attack the forest, usually against the clock.