The Chaser Report - The Story of Australia's Bushfire Heroes | Luke Mazzaferro

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

Zander and Dom are joined by A Fire Inside co-director Luke Mazzaferro whose latest film explores the selfless acts of everyday Aussies and how they overcame the 2019-20 bushfire season. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome back to another episode of The Chase Report. My name's Zanda, and today Dom and I are joined by Luke Mazofero, one of the co-directors of the brand new film, A Fire Inside. It explores the 2020-2019 bushfires for the eyes of the people on the ground. And it's a powerful film that talks about the importance of mental health, the impacts of climate change, and how we can be there for communities,

and how communities can be there for each other in the wake of disaster. is we talk to Luke after the break. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply.

Details at FIS.ca. There are downright apocalyptic images coming out of Australia right now. Everything that you can possibly think around you is on fire. An area bigger than England has been reduced to ash. How do you convince thousands of everyday Australians to go and stand in front of something that could potentially take their life? 2019 was Australia's hottest ever year.

We had over 200 consecutive days of bushfire emergency. I'll never get those images out of my head. That was not a normal bushfire. that was something dragged up out of hell and dumped on earth. He kept trying to get the car out and it just wouldn't move. Both just looked at each other and went, this is where it ends for us. The emergency did the stop the day the rains came. A different sort of emergency took over.

Luke, thank you so much for joining us. You're one of the co-directors of the brand new film, A Fire Inside. It's just stunning. What's it been like to finally have the film out there? Yeah, it's been great, actually. It's been great to finally share these stories with the public. And, you know, we ended up shooting a lot of the film during the initial lockdown last year and then finishing the film during this latest lockdown.

So we kind of were sitting on it for about two months just in isolation. without anyone having seen it yet. So it's nice to get it out there and I guess shine a light again on some of these stories and people who, you know, for a bunch, feel like, you know, it's been a little forgotten with everything else that's been going on in the world. There has been an awful lot. But it was an incredibly traumatic summer. There's no other fire event that I can, or no other fire that's been given the black

designation where there's been a whole season, black summer, but it was more than the summer. It went for about five months all up, I think. How do you manage to shape the enormity of that season and all of the different events that happened into one narrative? How did you approach that? Yeah, so in the early discussions with Justin, it was always to, the thing that interested us was this question of,

why do these people do what they do? Because what we saw from this season, as you said, it wasn't just like a, it was like, whole season and as Shane Fitzsimmons says he refuses to call it black summer because it went through winter autumn and summer and um but this we were like who were these people that in this case left their day jobs and their families and their towns and stuff for like months at a time um so it was focusing on the humanity behind the fires so rather than trying to paint the picture of the entire season and tell this chronological story of the fires and

ourselves, we wanted to focus on this question of why do these people do what they do? And what we quickly learned, what was even more interesting was why do they continue to do what they do after it costs them so much. And not, you know, the financial aspect is one thing, but the emotional, psychological toll is quite astounding. Is a really profound film. And it's quite impactful the whole way through it. And you explore all these different.

volunteer firefighters and their relationships with their communities. How did you work out where you're going to go for this film? Again, the sort of the blueprint we worked out early on and actually ended up staying like that for the most part, apart from the inevitable changes because you rewrite these things so many times with documentaries once you're shooting and then in the edit. But was, let's set up the fires themselves, contextualize the enormity and the unprecedented level of what these folks went through.

And then for the most part, Acts 2 and 3 deal with the aftermath and towards the end deal with actually moving forward and what's life going to be like when the next five season comes around or the inevitable next black summer or the next one that is of this scale again because the science is pointing towards it becoming more frequent. And we touch upon that in the film. Yeah, so that, in our initial research, we kind of firmed up on that idea

because everyone we spoke to, that emotional toll was so apparent. We just couldn't shy away from it. So we ended up leaning into it. And again, I mean, you've seen the film. We kind of tried to make clear that, yes, it is an emotional film. It can be intent.

but ultimately it is, we hope, a hopeful film and an inspirational film because the resilience that these people do show is quite amazing and there's this really cool line that John Brogden came out with as we were interviewing him that's in the film, which is that classic, should be right attitude that we've grown up with in Australia he learned from this past season is that Australians aren't as strong as they thought they were but we are more resilient than we thought we were. It is quite an extraordinary thing when you think about it.

Just the Gospers Mountain Fire, the biggest fire of the 2019-2020 summer. I think it was something like eight times the size of Singapore, completely extraordinary, burnt for more than 100 days. And then humans going up against this, trying to stop this incredible wall of flames that's kilometres long, and then doing it day after day after day, for no pay. It's really inspiring, isn't it?

And what sense did you get of what motivates these RFS volunteers who just spend their lives standing by to do this whenever it's needed at the drop of a hat? Yeah, it's one of those curious things where the answer itself can be quite unremarkable. Like you ask a lot of these folks, and we would ask them, one of the first things we'd ask them. And a lot of times the answer might just be like, oh, it's what you do. Just that classic, just like a couple of word

Aussie response, just like, that's what you do or like, oh, well, who else is going to, if I don't do it, who else is going to do it? But the answer became much more complex and varied once we started walking a mile in these people's shoes. You know, some start out, like you take Nathan Barnum, for instance, and he started out because his dad did it. And he, as a teenager, was like, that's pretty cool.

My dad goes and fights fires and jumps in fire trucks and it seems like a fun thing to do. But now with everything that he's gone through in his life, he does it because he knows he literally can save a human life and give someone the opportunity to continue living and breathing and experiencing life who wouldn't have had that chance if he hadn't have done the training that he did for all those years. and at that very specific moment, answered that call, rushed out, went into that burning house, and pulled these people out. So, yeah, it's one of the things that is, was profound once you spent the time with them. Because if you just ask the kind of question straight up, I think humans are more complex. And it's interesting to sort of see it play out and then get under their skin with it. in that scene he's describing how they didn't have any trucks left so he got the call that there's people stuck inside a house so he had to get into his four-wheel drive and they just had to drive to the fire it's quite intense and it's visceral and beautiful is not the right word but it's so visually striking how much of that was you kind of combining footage from what you could get from the bushfires versus recreation in order to aid the visual telling of his story

Yeah, so that particular sequence, the retelling of the rescue of that family, was something that we constructed through, I guess, re-creation. We actually went out to a cane farm and filmed a burn out there, which allowed us to reconstruct those specific moments. Because, of course, there was no, like, you know, they don't wear body cams or anything like that. We actually had nothing to work with, just the master interviews that we had. Yeah, so I guess that's, I know what you say.

It sort of feels inappropriate to say it beautiful, but it was because we had filmed that in a certain way that it feels a little more cinematic than just the iPhone footage or the smartphone footage, like archival stuff that's in a lot of the film. Yeah, so we had to construct that one ourselves. Yeah, it must have been quite challenging working out how to pull the footage together because these are fires that were so huge and so dangerous that most news organisations didn't let their people anywhere near it.

And I guess just the dwarfing scale of these fires compared to humans. But also, as someone who was involved in covering them on radio, I was actually in the room helping people, getting the RFS info and pulling it together and saying, well, there's a fire coming towards here, you've got to get out now. and having to tell people shelter in place, it's too late to leave and all these kinds of things, I guess my imagination was trying to conjure up these images. There is something very primal, isn't there, about fire?

It somehow gets to us as humans at a very, very deep level. It's probably one of our biggest fears going back millennia. Yeah. Yeah, it's, we, as far as the archive goes, that just, you know, it was hundreds of hours of just scouring everything from social media to news websites and calling up different people who had libraries of stuff

and even reaching out in the film world to, you know, cameramen and cinematographers we knew who may have been out there at the time and just trying to pull everything from anywhere. And then where we could, we filmed some sort of thematic, you know, heightened visuals ourselves

such as that rescue scene to really kind of contextualize and like provide that, you know, overt, visceral, almost kind of nightmarish dream sequence of that memory. But yeah, I guess we always try to balance as well if not becoming sensationalist. We sort of, even with our previous film, which is about AI,

we really hold ourselves to a stand of not wanting to overblow things just to get an easy reaction. so yeah it was months and months of editing to try and find that balance of like servicing and honoring the extremity of it but also not kind of going for like cheap um reaction just because it was easy to do because these were real people and real stories and people who had entrusted us with their very sensitive you know memories of what they went through how did the film come about was it during the fires you decided to make it or what what point did you go, all right, I want to distill something from this event?

Yes. So Justin and I were actually promoting our previous film called Machine. And we were traveling around the country at the time doing like the press tour for that. So we were flying to like Queensland, Victoria, Canberra, you know, W.A. And every flight would get on, we'd be looking at the window and like what the hell is going on. It was just like chaos down below. And at times the smell of smoke started coming into the cabin and the pilots having to come over the PA and be like, oh, no, I'm panicked.

That's just from the bushfires. There's nothing wrong with the plane. And then my close family friends actually lost their property that got completely destroyed. And then my in-laws had to evacuate their property. And luckily that was okay. But the real kind of seed of sparking an interest in doing a project

on it came when an RFS member a long time RFS member Andrew Flakler who is an old filmmaking friend of our producer

Michael's invited us to a talk he was doing and he was recounting his experiences on the front line so we went along

and I'd met him once or twice before but it was like 4,000 yards stare like listening to talk for someone

who just came back from D-Day and it was just like holy shit this is a dude, you know, he's just like, he's a filmmaker, he's like me, but he obviously has been doing this for like 20 years as an RFS member and this is what it was like for day in and day out. And we started thinking like that element felt like it may have

been lost a little bit, like those actual sort of raw accounts and experiences of people on the front line and like sort of looking past the chaos of all the politics and all the kind of, you know, the idiotic misinformation that was going out there and whatever and just like, who are these people that walk amongst us? Who are these community volunteers that give back and actually make such a difference to these communities? Because that's where the resilience comes from in these communities is just like these average joes. You just like put their hand up and give back. And it doesn't even have to be RFS members. It's, you know, people at the community pantry or, you know, people who are helping clean land or rebuild fences or whatever.

Yeah, in amidst all the trauma of these events and people losing their homes and in some cases lives, it... Well, sometimes people who survive, the survivor's guilt is really intense. And sometimes can be more intense for folks who have survived than, you know, the neighbor who lost their own house. And it's like the neighbor who lost their house is comforting, the neighbor whose house survive because they just can't process that why and me, why was I spared? Yeah, I was just going to say, there's an amazing sense of community. that emerges from these experiences and it is like survivors of war it's a good analogy and I know people who had neighbours who'd lost their houses but who stayed up the entire night you know protecting their house and they weren't able to make it down there and all that

and there is a beauty isn't there in the bonds that let communities come together to battle these fires it almost goes back to I guess all the disaster movies that we've seen about these awful threats going going back to Bayes well, if there is a monster, it's at your door, you fight it, and then all going well, it goes away, and you count your losses. Yeah, it's interesting you say that we often would be sitting in the edit, Justin and myself and our editor, Scottie Walmsley, and we would bring up that analogy of like, this is, like,

the first part of film is like a disaster monster film. It's like Godzilla's coming and sort of setting up that, you know, you've got the science at the start who's like, It's coming. Everyone beware. This is coming. The Jeff Goldblum. We have that people. It's like we do.

We've got our climate scientists in the film. We've got our climate scientists in the film who's sort of like the conditions are ripe. This is, we're screwed. And then it unfolds. And then the rest is it's kind of like a war film. And you're seeing these survivors of this war. Yeah. So it's, sorry, I forget what the question ones.

But yeah, there were conversations we were having because there was just such. a parallel there of these people who had lived. And one of our people, Paula Zaha, even says it's like the images we were seeing come out of this look like they were from World War II. You know, the burnt out, melted engine blocks of cars in these towns that just were decimated. It's not something that we attribute with modern Australia. I think one of the most striking parts of this film

is not the images of the flames, but the amount of people you're able to interview from completely different walks of life. There's that family that had moved to the Bushtown 20 years ago and had slept in a tent for a year, people who had escaped from domestic violence and started up their own charities to support the community and continues to support it to this day, or people even like providing trauma and psychological relief.

How did you find all these people? And was it important to you that you showed off just the range of people living in rural Australia? Yeah. So the first part, was a mixed bag with how we found them. Some we found from existing media coverage, like, say, Nathan and then Brendan O'Connor. And then from those, they would tell us, like, oh, you should really speak to this person. And then that would lead on to another conversation,

another conversation, another conversation, another conversation. Others we found just from, again, scouring social media and being like, oh, this town seems interesting in finding this person. And then others in that beautiful thing that can happen when making docks is, is just while we were driving around, location scouting and just sort of trying to get a feel of what the vibe was on the ground. And like so Paula Zaha from the community pantry, we just were driving through Bargo and stopped.

And we're just looking around and went to get back in the car. And now the corner of my eye saw like a sign. It's a nondescript building. But I don't know, for some reason I just walked across the road, went in and said, what are you doing here? We're making a dock on the fires. And then she just started talking about her. experience and, like, telling us about, you know, history with the domestic violence.

Then she's like, oh, by the way, I've got lasagna coming out of the oven that they were making for their campers, like, you want to sit down and have lunch? So Michael and I were like, no, no, we're busy, but we've got to run, but we got to details and then did a follow-up call and then kept sort of, you know, she introduced us to other people. And, you know, from there, she had her own footage and stuff. Like Barbara from Narragunda, who's that amazing elderly woman who's becoming. everyone's favorite by the end of the film she um that yeah that totally was by chance we were just filming aminderoo pod delivery because we wanted to see what that looked like and what it was all about

and then out walks barbara totally like we had no idea we would we just had been put in touch of like oh there's a pod delivery happening here and she walks out and just starts um you know starts being barbara and it's just like point the camera on her holy shit um and then And yeah, then we went back and filmed with her again a few months later and sort of tracked her journey. Because the pods are these temporary living solutions for people in Bush. Yeah, yeah. So Mindaru Foundation, they quickly set up this fire fund and out of that came, I guess

their experience with Twiggy Forest's mining background, the versatility of mining accommodation. So they got basically a shipping containers converted them to temporary accommodation that have like fridges and ovens and stoves and gas heating and whatever. And they delivered them out. Anyone who had lost a home who got nominated, I'm not quite sure exactly how the nomination process went, but they would be given these pods for up to two years. And then the idea is that once they've rebuilt,

the pods can be cleaned and, repurposed and basically standing by for the next inevitable disaster, which is like, it's a pretty cool thing because something like this will happen again, whether it's flood or fire, and now there is this slap, there's a whole bunch of these piles that are just like standing there ready to go, whereas there was a little delay with these fires because they had to quickly fabricate them once they got the idea to do them. So it's, it's a worthwhile thing that they're doing. The disasters aren't slowing down in their pace, are they? I remember being on radio a year after the fire season started and talking to a lot of people who still didn't have their homes, still hadn't been able to move back.

And just the whole traumatic decision of do you rebuild or do you give up? Do you abandon this dream of living right near the bush? That's kind of a question for policymakers as well. How did you tell the story of recovery and finding resilience? Because there are so many pockets of anger still there today, people who feel forgotten. And then in amongst that, there's an amazing story of mental health and I guess learning more about how humans process these things. How did you put that part of the film together?

Yeah. Again, varied like each, you know, Barbara, the two people we covered who had lost their homes, Barbara and the Cam family, had very different experiences. And, you know, Barbara has since rebuilt a house, I believe, and is now living in that, whereas the cams have only just got an approval to rebuild and won't, I think, start rebuilding until next year. So you're now talking like two plus years from when they've been living in a Minderoo pod

and a tent off to the side of that. And so it was just hearing them out. I don't know, you know, but hearing them out and letting them vent that anger, letting them express their gratitude for the community. members that had helped them, not shying away from the realities that, yeah, unfortunately, there were some experiences where there were looters who were coming to their destroyed properties and taking stuff. But as they would remind us, for every one of those experiences, there'd be like 12 where, there'd be 12 where community members were coming around and bringing cooked

meals or letting them come and, you know, crash in their living room for a night or helping them clear land and stuff like that. So I think we wanted to just be true to humanity can be messy. And humans, like there's a lot of shades of gray to it all. But ultimately, there is the good news story of we actually, in these times of crisis, the best of us does come out. And thankfully, what we found was the overwhelming majority of stories. were in that positive of that positive nature.

It's not to shy away from the darkness because it's important to acknowledge that and kind of scratch it why we do that. But overwhelmingly, we are good. And I think, you know, we would talk about it because, again, we were making it during COVID and then during the US election last year and Justin isn't America.

And so we're like sitting there all day in this subject matter and then seeing what was happening in the States and we're just like, man, this film actually deserves to be a reminder for people that there is hope and there is positivity in humanity when we all just respond and unfortunately that only seems to happen in force during times of crisis people just you know suddenly that neighbor who you had the shits with you'll just kick the door down and try and save them because it's just like life is on the line so you know we hope the takeaway

is that they can just be a little bit more of a reminder of like, you know, it is important to just acknowledge everyone, you know, even if it's that person who cuts in lane in front of you as you're driving home or whatever, just like they may be a dick or they may just have had a hellish day and they're just like put in not thinking of your needs. So if you just sort of take a breath to be like, hey, just give them a pass. They might be going through something and just, you know, those little moments can actually sort of, you know, amount to,

a lot of positive. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply.

Details at FIS.ca. There's this eye-opening moment in the film where you talk to a backpacker who was stuck in the street during the bushfires and has been helping with the recovery since, then. What was it like to get that perspective? Emily, who was like a manager of Blaise Aid. Blaise Aid is a charity that is based all around regional Australia, I believe, or definitely

New South Wales. And she was based in Cabargo. So they help farmers rebuild fencing. And when you consider these fires where kilometres of a single farmer's farm was destroyed, that's a lot of fencing that needs to be redone. And they also perform welfare checks and So we were just filming with Blaze Aid, and she was our chaperone, but she just kept sharing her story just anecdotally, and we were like, we should be covering Emily. So that's how she became a key voice in the film. But he was this person who had never been to Australia,

had no interest in helping, like, well, being sort of volunteering, hadn't really considered that before. But through the generosity that she experienced, in her time of dire need totally had this life-changing perspective shift of like, I just need to get back. And it was her way of healing and kind of moving through the trauma that she experienced, which was a really unique thing. And that's kind of another takeaway that we've found, like making the film and that we hope

is sort of conveyed in the film. He's like giving back can be a way of healing and a way of sort of. of moving beyond your narrative of either being a victim or being someone who is suffering from trauma because once you're getting back, it's sort of can create these new pathways in the brain and sort of, you know, endorphins and stuff. And you sort of start changing your perspective of you're not the only person who's gone through something. And so like someone like Emily is still down there right now, rebuilding fences and doing stuff like that. And there's, I think now I'm not going to leave

Australia. This is someone who came out for a holiday, just as an English backpacker, just for a laugh, as she says, who's now had her whole, like, life trajectory changed for the better by this incident, by this disaster. You mentioned that at the start of the film, as per disaster movie format, you have warnings from scientists that weren't heated. I remember during the whole summer we heard from the former head of the Royal Fire Service talking about how he tried to warn policymakers and they hadn't reacted. And this story that you're telling is another warning to policymakers and to all of us that this will keep happening and get worse as time goes on.

But the story of Black Summer has been forgotten somewhat, what with COVID, of course, how have you gone with getting this film in front of policymakers and do you hope that it will have, do you hope that it will be able to remind people of what we need to remember? given the future threat of more summers like days or even worse. Yeah. So we know that there's been a lot of talk about like the climate change angle and that sort of thing. But we hope and our film touches on that for sure. But we hope again from a policymaker point of view that when you see the humanity behind it all

and the real everyday impacts of the people who are like actually in the. the trenches in these communities who are affected by it and not just seeing them for a moment in standing in front of their destroyed house but going okay now this is them three months later this is them six months later this is them 12 months later and this is the actual impact that these disasters have on individuals and communities we hope will provide some deeper context and And, you know, I think if you can't feel moved or empathy for these stories, then we've got bigger problems. But, you know, we'll be having a big TV release in December. So I hope that no one, as far as policymakers, will be able to kind of hide from it once it's out there.

Because you probably don't want to make a sequel, do you? No. no and you know that's sort of the sad thing is you know there's only so many voices in the film and we tried to keep it concise so it didn't we tried to keep it concise but so you really had time to spend with these people and not to sort of become a you know a carcophony of stuff that just becomes a bit of a wash but it is emblematic and I think if it does happen again you could probably just watch the same film and be like those these new communities who have gone through it

are going through the exact same thing. So it's, yeah, it's definitely a, we hope a beacon for people to not only actually listen about what's going on in the climate with global warming, but also to build resilience in preparation of these events. So we're not left flat-footed when the next one comes along to be like, okay, what could I do?

do now to give back to my community because the more prepared we are, the more resilience we're going to have. And that's, you know, there was a lot of lives lost, which was tragic. But it is just, it is quite amazing that there weren't more lost. And I think that is testament to some of the preparation that had been put in place, but there needs to be much more, much more. The end of the film does pitch that with the Australian Resilience Corps. For people, we haven't heard of that before. Brand new. Yeah.

Yeah. So, again, that's something that Minderoo have literally just launched officially this week. And they had heard about the film while we were in production and we showed them a cut of it and they were blown away and sort of wanted to see how they could be involved. And they pitched us this thing that they were working on, which is the Australian Resilience Corps, which is,

has the ambition to build the largest network of community volunteers in the country. And so basically it's pitching that no matter who you are, no matter what your skill set is, you can be useful to your community. It's not just the firefighters. It's not even just people who work in community pantries and food banks or whatever. It's like everyone can give back in some way. So they're a portal for you to go give you details.

and then they'll put you in touch with relevant community organizations in your community or else around in Australia if you want to put your hand up to travel around and give back. So it's all about preparing for the inevitable next disaster. So when it does hit, we actually have this huge group of people all around the country that are already mobilised and sort of already been doing, have some experience in community organizations. there was some really cool examples that came out of Black Summer where they call it spontaneous venturing

where the example that got the most coverage in media was in Cabargo where just community members not affiliated with any charities just suddenly mobilized and created like a shelter and a donations hub and it operates really well for a couple of weeks but at the end of the day it's not an official organization, there's no kind of like, you know, infrastructure there. But it was really successful, and it happened in multiple occasions.

So this is, the volunteer corps, I guess, will, has the ambition for not relying on that, not just relying on just people just having to come together in the heat of the moment when they're already at a dealing with heightened emotions and other factors going on. But there's people who are just standing by. And, yeah, so it's building resilience, basically, and that's just what's going to help us get through because it is going to happen again. As a broadcaster, I visited a bunch of places

where bushfires have been through six months later or something like that. And the reason that that happens, what people go there is because there's enormous value to those communities in telling these stories. It's so easy to feel forgotten when the media crews roll out and no one's there anymore

and it feels as though they've been abandoned and it seems as though what you've done with Justin in terms of pulling this together and putting it in front of the Australian community putting it on TV you've ensured that these people's stories won't be forgotten and that we'll actually try and learn from this because

if you've been through an experience like this your dearest wishes that no one else goes through it. Yeah, absolutely. and the people that we spend time with basically said the same thing. It's one of those things, you know, where people like, oh, it never happened to us, never happened to me.

But it did, and we hope that the varied group of people we have featured is an example of it doesn't actually matter who you are. Like the fire doesn't discriminate. If it's going to rip through, it's going to rip through. And even if you're prepared with the best, you know, fire, grated glass, windows and everything, it's, you know, when it's as ferocious as the conditions were in this season, it just is decimated everything in its path.

So, yeah, we hope that people, that, yeah, people are reminded of the good that can come out of communities and individual actions and that it is also a warning that we need to look after each other and especially on the mental health aspect I think a big thing that has come out of this and from firefighters we know who have seen this

as we were testing the film in the stages of editing we had firefighters who said shit okay seeing like Brendan O'Connor or Clembaden or a young firefighter like Nathan put their hand up and say I'm not okay I need help, made them realize that they also had things going on in their life, that they weren't addressing, and it gave them the courage to go out and seek help. So that's really cool to hear, and we've since been hearing that, that knowing that it's

okay to not be okay and having that feeling like you've got that permission to reach out for help, we hope that the film is also a conversation starter and sort of continue. just plays a small part in continuing that conversation. Thank you so much, Luke, for coming on the show. A Fire Inside is an incredible film that people can catch with a Sydney Film Festival on demand, and it is still in cinemas around the country, and I advise that everyone checks it out because it's an incredible watch, and I think it's deeply important at this point in history.

Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. Thank you so much for listening to another afternoon edition of The Chase Report.

It's been incredible to have Luke on. And just a reminder, if you want to check out his film, it's a fire inside, and it's on Cindy Film Festival on demand, and it's also in cinemas around the country. Check that out now. Our gear is provided by road microphones and we're part of the ACAST creator network.