(L–R) Kali Reis, Josh O’Connor, and Max Walker-Silverman attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Rebuilding” at Eccles Theatre on January 26, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by George Pimentel/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Lucy Spicer
Sundance Film Festival audiences know writer-director Max Walker-Silverman from his feature debut, A Love Song, which premiered as part of the online Festival in 2022. But here inside Eccles Theatre on January 26, 2025, is the first time they get to be in the same room with him as he introduces a new film. And they’re all the better for it.
“Hello, my friends,” begins Walker-Silverman serenely as he introduces Rebuilding, which is screening in the Premieres section of this year’s Festival. What follows is a list of people the filmmaker wishes to thank. But far from feeling perfunctory, each acknowledgement sounds like a personalized line of a poem. Then, he sets the scene for the film — the San Luis Valley.
“This is the oldest part of Colorado. It’s where sandhill cranes gather in spring and fall and where I made this movie because I believe a better world is out there for us,” he says. “Film is an act of imagination. It is the bright light in a dark room. So I made this film because only through imagining a better world can we hope for one. And only through hoping for a better world can we fight for one. I made this film because if loss must be an ongoing ingredient of our lives, as it must, then care and healing and rebirth must be, too.”
The first moments of Rebuilding allude to a destructive event that is all too familiar to members of the audience who live or have loved ones in California at this time. But the film is not about a wildfire — it’s about what can be found, cultivated, and embraced in its wake. A quiet, thoughtful Josh O’Connor (God’s Own Country, 2017 Sundance Film Festival) plays Dusty, a rancher who has lost his family property in the fire. He relocates to a temporary trailer park on a FEMA site with others who have endured similar losses, but he’s not one to make friends with his new neighbors just yet — Dusty wants to reclaim his life exactly as it was. His ex-wife, Ruby (Meghann Fahy), sees this change in his life as an opportunity for him to spend more time with their young daughter, Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre). As Dusty begins to consider the full weight of what he’s lost, he finds comfort and a renewed sense of purpose in the community around him.
Walker-Silverman began working on the script when he moved back to his home state of Colorado. “This film was trying to picture what a nice life could look like, and it wasn’t one in which losses were avoided or erased, as they cannot be. But instead, it was one that decides if loss and destruction will be part of our lives, as they are and have been and will only increasingly be, then, let’s hope that the strange and amazing things that follow in their wake, as they do every time — people taking care of each other in ways that they only do after loss — let’s hope that that can only become more a part of our lives as well,” says the writer-director during the film’s post-premiere Q&A.
Rebuilding is undoubtedly a reflection of its storyteller — quiet, measured, hopeful. His cast agrees. “My experience with this shoot was exactly what you saw on the big screen. It was very community-oriented,” recounts Kali Reis, who plays Mali, one of Dusty’s new neighbors. “I will say there was not a bad sunset that was there.”
Fahy felt the serenity, too. “It was just very cozy. It was very peaceful on set every day, and that was such a great environment to be in,” she says. “I feel like when you’re in a space that feels that calm and supportive, that’s when the good stuff happens.”
Leading the post-screening Q&A, Sundance Film Festival director Eugene Hernandez remarks that this film and its message to embrace community are proving especially meaningful to audiences affected by the California wildfires. Walker-Silverman reveals that his grandmother’s house had been lost in a fire a few years ago.
“I’ve watched the way my mother has brought that land back to life and tended to it. And it’s not the same as it was, and it never will be, but she loves it very dearly still and cares for it and works on it. And it will burn again, as well,” he says. “The pain of the past and the uncertainty of the future does not diminish — and in fact only fertilizes — the present that is existing there. There are moments in which that sort of ecology is not enough of a comfort, and then there are moments when it is. This movie touches on the moments when it is, and if that worked for people, it would mean everything to me.”
