The Fire In Our Hearts | Feature Documentary I 86min I Canada | 2026
"As wildfire threatens a remote region of British Columbia, the Cheslatta Carrier Nation and Southside residents stay to defend their land - transforming the crisis into a blueprint for resilience and sovereignty."
When wildfires close in on the remote Southside of northern British Columbia in 2018, the Cheslatta Carrier Nation and local residents face an impossible choice: evacuate, or stay and defend the land that defines them.For those who remain, the danger is not only the fire. The province deploys RCMP officers to control access across the ferry — the Southside’s only true lifeline — preventing food and essential supplies from reaching residents who have stayed behind and applying pressure for them to leave.
Cut off from outside support, the community refuses to abandon its own. Members of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation and other local residents find ways to move food and supplies across the water, supporting those defending homes, property and land as the fires advance.
But the flames reveal more than devastation. In their aftermath, the remains of a long-erased Cheslatta village emerge from the landscape, bringing a buried chapter of history back to the surface.
What follows is not simply a story of survival. The failures exposed in 2018 ultimately pushed the community to create its own emergency response system - one that would later prove its effectiveness against repeated wildfires and become a blueprint for many other remote communities across Canada.
The Fire in Our Hearts is an intimate, cinematic portrait of resilience, sovereignty and belonging - and of a community that refused to be powerless, transforming crisis into a model for how remote communities can become part of the solution in an era of increasingly scarce wildfire resources.
OFFICIAL SELECTIONS & RECOGNITION
Whistler International Film Festival — First Look Program
Niagara International Film Festival — Official Selection
Almamoura Film Festival, UEA — Official Selection
Kelowna Film Festival — Best Director Nomination
Catalina Film Festival — Official Selection
Montreal International Film Festival — Official Selection
Dumbo Film Festival, New York — Semi-Finalist
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
For director Josias Tschanz, The Fire in Our Hearts is deeply personal.
Tschanz immigrated to the Southside as a teenager, arriving without English and searching for a sense of belonging.He found it in a remote community shaped by cooperation—home to the Cheslatta Carrier Nation, other Indigenous communities, immigrants, Mennonites, farmers and loggers, all deeply connected to the land and to one another.
Years later, while living in Vancouver, he watched that community come under threat from wildfire.Unable to stay away, he returned across the lake and entered the active fire zone with his camera, documenting what was happening from inside the community.
The resulting footage offers rare and intimate access to people facing not only wildfire, but isolation, uncertainty and emergency systems struggling to respond to disasters of this scale.
“This film is my attempt to honor the people who raised me, to bear witness to their resilience, and to insist that any meaningful response to the climate crisis must include the voices of those who know the land best.”