The Fire In Our Hearts

Josias Tschanz is a Swiss-Canadian director and producer based in Vancouver. A graduate of the University of British Columbia with a degree in Film & Theatre, he has built an international career spanning feature films, television series, and documentaries shot across Japan, Argentina, India, Europe, and North America.

His work has been broadcast on CBC, IFC, WDR, Netflix, and SKY, and screened at festivals internationally. His debut feature Neutral Territory received critical attention and was presented in New York as part of the New York Film Festival. His international breakthrough came with a television series produced for WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk).

Josias has directed documentaries including Beyond Adventure, focused on elite mountain guides in the Rockies, and the international series Flags to Riches, produced with Sonar Entertainment, exploring football culture across clubs such as Inter Milan, Juventus, Manchester United, and Seattle Sounders.

The Fire In Our Hearts is a first-person documentary rooted in my lived connection to the Southside — a remote, 10,000-square-kilometre region of British Columbia where fewer than 2,000 people live, work, and protect the land they call home.

I arrived here as a teenager, newly immigrated, without English and searching for belonging. The Southside gave me something I had never known before: acceptance, purpose, and community. It is a place shaped by cooperation — home to the Cheslatta Carrier Nation, other Indigenous bands, immigrants, Mennonites, farmers, and loggers — all deeply connected to the land and to one another.

That bond was tested when wildfires tore through the region. In a single season, residents faced 27 major fires, often with limited outside support. From Vancouver, I watched my community burn from afar. Unable to stay away, I returned across the lake into the active fire zone, camera in hand, to document what was unfolding from the inside.

What I captured is rare, intimate footage of a community in crisis — not only fighting fire, but navigating isolation, uncertainty, and systems unprepared for disasters of this scale. Amid the devastation, the flames also uncovered something long buried: the rediscovery of a lost Cheslatta Carrier Nation village site, erased decades earlier. This moment reframed the disaster, revealing how land, memory, and history persist even under extreme destruction.

This film is not about assigning blame. It is about showing what happens when small, self-sufficient communities are forced to rely on themselves — and how innovation and collective responsibility emerge under pressure. As new legislation threatens to undermine hard-won local knowledge, The Fire In Our Hearts asks what we can learn from communities already living on the front lines of climate disaster. This film is my attempt to honor the people who raised me, to bear witness to their resilience, and to insist that solutions to the climate crisis must include the voices of those who know the land best.