Review of “Black Summer” (2020)

Moving picture, 45 minutes

Seen in 2020.

Australian bush fires in the summer of 2019–2020.

A cheap production, compiling amateur footage of personal property and supplementing it with a few aerial shots, talking-head descriptions by eye witnesses, and dated intertitles. In the version shown by SVT, there is no introduction and only a tiny bit of context is added in an epilogue. Some of the amateur footage has good colour, but that’s it. An unworthy monument to the great disaster.

moving picture non-fiction