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Hearth

When a wildfire destroys their home, a long-married couple must fight to get their life back.

synopsis

Diana and her husband Falk have lived off-grid in the Santa Cruz Mountains for decades, content in a quiet life shaped by routine and compromise. When a wildfire destroys their home, they take shelter with their daughter Lou in San Francisco. Displaced and unmoored, they begin the slow, disorienting process of trying to get their life back. When their insurance payout comes in far below the home’s value, Diana takes the lead on the appeal. What begins as necessity becomes something deeper: a search for purpose, justice, and long-neglected parts of herself. As she finds community and confidence, Falk falters. Without the house he built or the role he played, he begins to unravel – growing combative, then withdrawn. The couple’s differences sharpen: Diana’s growing clarity against Falk’s resistance to change. As the appeal stretches on, Diana faces the quiet costs of their long marriage, especially the ways she made herself smaller – for Falk, and for peace. When the appeal finally succeeds, they return to Boulder Creek. But something essential has shifted. One morning, Falk wakes to find Diana on the porch, suitcase packed, unwilling to rebuild the life that once defined them both.

Director’statement

I grew up in Northern California, where fire season has become an annual inevitability. This isn’t unique to California – around the world, people are being displaced as their homes are destroyed and lives uprooted. With Hearth, I’m interested in how physical space carries memory and identity, and what happens when those spaces vanish. Tonally and visually, I’m inspired by filmmakers like Andrew Haigh, Eliza Hittman and Debra Granik – directors who approach character and environment with understated realism. I want to cast a combination of professional actors, non-actors and real wildfire evacuees to root the story in lived experience. As the story unfolds, the perspective subtly shifts from a couple navigating loss to Diana, whose quiet resilience drives the emotional core. She must choose between preserving a life built around her husband or stepping into something unknown. In that way, the wildfire is a Trojan horse for a more personal transformation: a woman quietly, painfully, arriving at a new sense of self.

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