Sundance 2025: Filmmakers Who Lost Homes In L.A. Wildfires Share Their Stories As They Land In Park City

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One of the best parts of covering the Sundance Film Festival is getting to know the filmmakers and casts, and hearing their stories of struggle to get films made, accepted and the chance to play on a big stage that has launched some of Hollywood’s great careers.

I would be hard pressed to find a group of filmmakers to root harder for than the ones who directed Didn’t Die, a modestly budgeted zombie film that will premiere Tuesday in the festival’s Midnight Madness lineup. Meera Menon directed a film in which a young podcast host clings to her ever-shrinking audience in a zombie apocalypse, with overriding themes that sprang from Covid and the double strikes, about how human nature and a sense of humor is sometimes all we as we try to overcome loss and carry on.

That context takes on extra meaning with the makers of Didn’t Die. The brain trust of the film all saw their homes burn to the ground in the Altadena fire that destroyed their entire neighborhood. Menon, her co-writer and husband Paul Gleason (also the film’s cinematographer), and producer Erica Fishman and her husband, the film’s editor Geoffrey Boothby, will premiere a movie where they shot in their homes footage of happier times for the characters. Those images are all the filmmakers have left after being forced to evacuate, leaving behind most everything they had.

Sundance always brings gems that have launched careers for actors, writers and directors, but we are a long way from the heady days in which journalists like myself pulled all-nighters dogging precedent-setting acquisition deals in marathon auctions. Each year the dealmaking seems to take longer in this age of streaming and theatrical instability. With few exceptions, no one is in a hurry and buyers think long and hard about investing acquisition costs, the projected P&A and sweat equity needed to turn these films into financial winners.

Between Covid and the strikes, Hollywood’s progress seems to be one step forward, two steps back, and the L.A. wildfires fit that scenario. How will that impact the marketplace? Some of the crowd flying from Los Angeles into Park City ahead of Thursday’s opening day either lost their homes or just returned to them after evacuating, and those not directly impacted worry about what the air quality will be like for their families, or what havoc more Santa Ana winds might bring. Indie execs will have to compartmentalize to get much done, and the deals might take longer than usual. But worthy films almost always sell, and sellers and buyers are hopeful quality will win out this time as it has in the past. Many of the main buyers of indie films are flying to Park City from New York, so they have been less directly impacted and will be more fully focused on filling holes in their slates.

The 2025 Sundance lineup is all over the map this time. Start with Kiss of the Spider Woman, a full-blown musical rendering of the stage play and movie that is distinguished by what I would say is Jennifer Lopez’s best performance since Out of Sight. Diego Luna and a breakout turn by Tonatiuh also shine. It seems unusual to find a plug-and-play film like this at Sundance, and I’m sure it will sell quickly and for a lot of money.

The rest of the slate is thick with solid documentaries and great backstories: Prime Minister, the documentary on how Jacinda Ahern banned guns in New Zealand after a mass shooting, will seem like sci-fi as gun-advocate Republicans and Donald Trump kick off 2025 with majorities in both the House and the Senate; Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore brings back an actress who with her CODA cohorts were the hit of Sundance 2021 and won the Best Picture Oscar. Matlin returns in a film about all the obstacles she overcame. There are narrative films like Last Days, the drama about a missionary determined to infiltrate an uncontacted tribe on North Sentinel Island, a danger for him and the uninoculated isolated tribe. It marks the return of Justin Lin, the director of several Fast and Furious films who made his debut with 2002’s Better Luck Tomorrow. He watched his career flash before his eyes in a post-premiere press conference, as detractors lambasted his depiction of Asian youths as criminals, until the great critic Roger Ebert stood up and shut down the naysayers with the logic that no one would be saying this if the film was about white criminals, and Lin had the right to tell whatever story he wanted to tell. This is just a few of the stories that will be told in Park City (eyeball Deadline’s Hot Titles list for specific films buyers and sellers are excited by).

Now, back to the makers of Didn’t Die, who were generous enough to share their stories with Deadline, as they postpone for a week the stress of rebuilding to premiere a film they spent years making.

I suggest that in reading Menon’s director statement, the word irony comes quickly to mind.

Kiran Deol appears in Didn’t Die by Meera Menon, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Paul Gleason

“The parallels are intense, thematically with the film,” she said. “We had to do a final check of the print of the film to go to Sundance, after we’d found out our homes had burned down and it felt like we were crafting this prophecy for ourselves. It was eerie to watch the film after this had happened. The main characters are fleeing catastrophe after catastrophe, and with this tiny baby played by my daughter who’s now 3 years old. And we were fleeing our home with her two weeks ago. Those sequences felt eerily close. I hadn’t really even realized this till today, but I think the meaning behind making the movie for me was, I’ve done a lot of television work over the past six, seven years since the last time I had a movie at Sundance in 2016.

“I did that both because it’s a lot of fun, but also to find stability in my life and actually be able to earn a living and buy a home and have a child and do the things I wanted to have that anchor point in the world that felt safe and secure,” said Menon, whose TV work includes directing segments of The Walking Dead and its spinoffs. “Making this movie was very much an act of creative freedom that I felt like I had earned, after finding that sense of security for myself by working and buying a home and doing all those things. And it does feel ironic to be premiering the movie after an event in which all of that work I had done to create that stability for myself literally went up in flames. It’s a strange universal schematic that we’re working through right now. But the reality is it didn’t just happen to us, it happened to thousands and thousands of people in Los Angeles. So to take it personally at all somehow feels silly.”

Menon hiked in Eaton Canyon that day with husband Paul and their daughter Lakshmi, and they could feel the winds growing gustier. But it was such a beautiful sunny day, and nothing burning. So they were not that alarmed, until later that night.

“We saw the fire from our home before there was any evacuation warning,” she said. “Our power had been out, and our neighbor knocked on our door and showed us that the fire had started there. And because the winds had been historically the strongest winds that we’d experienced, certainly in this part of town since we’d lived there, we knew that was a recipe for disaster.

“So we immediately just grabbed … very little because the power was out and it was dark. We put Lakshmi in the car and drove out of our driveway without even knowing where we were going to go. But immediately, as we always do, our first stop was Erica and Geoff’s house across town. They live across Altadena from us. And we thought, that’s far enough away. There’s no way this fire is going to reach across all of Altadena. We got to their house and just figured we weren’t going to be able to go back to our house that night. So then made the drive to my sister’s house that night, thinking that Erica and Geoff were going to be fine, that they were too far from it.”

Turns out they underestimated the destructive potential of those winds, and soon Fishman and husband Geoffrey loaded their own daughter in the car and got out of there.

Erica Fishman and her husband Courtesy

“We still had power,” Fishman said. “At that time, we had just converted my daughter’s room, trading her bed for a big kid bed. All the Christmas presents were out in her room. She loves Lakshmi and was just showing her around and we all opened a bottle wine. It just felt like everything was fine. We were like, you guys can stay over, but they felt it might be a couple of days. At that time, my husband, who was the editor on the movie, he’s very good at this type of thing and he started packing bags while they were there. We put my daughter to bed and sat down, and then we really looked at where the fire was and we thought, oh, well, we’ll just get out. It was an excess of caution; we’re the kind of people that believe that going somewhere at 10 o’clock is always easier than going there at 4 in the morning. So we took a couple of things and left. I brought a jewelry box, which felt very silly to pack at that time, but my grandmother’s wedding ring, and a broach from a dead relative and some family jewelry from Geoff’s side were in there. And that was really all we took, along with a couple pairs of pants.”

Both couples woke to discover the fire incinerated their homes, and those of their neighbors.

“This is so woven into us making this movie, and just how close this is to us premiering this movie,” Menon said. “We’d been finishing the movie in these final weeks, and so we were just reviewing a section of the final print of the movie and needed to decide on a color setting for it. It’s in black and white and we were deciding how dark it was going to be. And so that was the day after we had evacuated our homes. That next morning we were sitting in this review session just talking about the film and wondering if our homes had burned. We had seen it on the evacuation map and the maps that were being updated in real time, how much it had grown and how wide of a swath of our community had been evacuated. No one was really sure if we’d be able to get over there. But after that review session, Paul and I ended up driving over to Altadena and were able to get in. This was before the National Guard was there and before things had been locked down. And we were able to confirm both our homes and Erica and Geoff’s homes were gone.

“What we saw was just home after home after home,” she said. “The minute we saw our home was gone, we were like, we have to see what their side of town looks like. And we could see the fire definitely got bigger, and faster, and it spread further south, the further west it went. And there we were that night, thinking it’s never going to reach West Altadena.

Erica and Geoff expected to be able to see the remains of their home Tuesday after we spoke and before they head to Park City. But both couples are facing a future focused on the long process of rebuilding. And they have to try to help their young children absorb an unimaginable trauma.

“If it wasn’t for the photo that these guys took and sent us that day, it would’ve been almost a week before we were able to even confirm that it was totally lost,” Fishman said.

Courtesy

If there has been a bright spot, they said it would be the outpouring from the community, both within the industry and outside. They’ve been fortified with clothes and hand-me-downs that will keep them going in the short term, as they hole up with relatives until returning from Park City and figuring out their next moves, which will involve insurance companies and so many other variables. But they said they feel blessed, and not only because they had the good sense to get in the car and away from danger.

“The support of friends in this time and our community, and the many communities that we’re a part of has been absolutely overwhelming. The star of our movie started a clothing drive and had a friend of hers shuttling things over for us to go through within 24 or 48 hours,” Fishman said. “I think in a lot of cases, your movie star, the lead of your film, isn’t necessarily the person who’d be doing that. Friends of friends of friends of friends, and strangers have been reaching out, offering their homes, rental references, discount codes to brands, deliveries of items, offers to send food. It has been overwhelming and remarkable. It’s pretty inspiring in terms of what the community is capable of. I think I saw a meme that was like, if anyone thought that Hollywood’s Los Angeles rescue efforts would be lagging, they have no idea how many production coordinators live in this town.”

Menon is also leaning on the positives.

“We feel like we have it so much better than so many,” she said. “And then you think about devastation that happens around the world and how many more resources we have in this country than other people in other parts of this world. And so your sense of disaster becomes relative because it feels like you joined this club of people that have experienced fleeing their homes and seeing their neighborhoods devastated by something in the context of the global experience of what this is. Climate change is everywhere. There’s war and devastation everywhere. I think we feel pretty lucky. So I think, I mean, Erica and I said this to each other the other day, if this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to us, it’s not that bad. We’ve survived it. Our families are okay, and we have incredible communities supporting us.”

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