• 8866 Wed, 20 Aug 2025 18:15:00 @ Hoyts Melbourne Central Cinema 8/10
• 8873 Sat, 23 Aug 2025 15:45:00 @ Hoyts Melbourne Central Cinema 8/10

Director: Max Walker-Silverman
Producer: Jesse Hope,Dan Janvey,Paul Mezey
Screenwriter: Max Walker-Silverman
Cinematographer: Alfonso Herrera Salcedo
Composer: Jake Xerxes Fussell
Editor: Ramzi Bashour
Production Designer: Juliana Barreto Barreto
Costume Designer: Lizzie Donelan
Key Cast: Kali Reis,Amy Madigan,Josh O’Connor,Lily LaTorre,Meghann Fahy

In this heart-wrenching rural drama, Josh O’Connor plays a rancher rising from the ashes of a wildfire that destroys his home.

An inferno sweeps through Colorado and ravages the ranch that the family of Dusty (Josh O’Connor, La Chimera, MIFF 2023) have owned for four generations. Seeking lodging, he ends up in a FEMA campsite – a stone’s throw from where his nine-year-old daughter, Callie-Rose (young Australian actor Lily LaTorre, Runt, MIFF 2024), now lives with his ex-wife, Ruby (Meghann Fahy). As he settles in, he finds himself connecting not only with his daughter, who frequently visits the site, but also with the other displaced residents, including a widow, a lesbian couple, a kindly plumber and a woodsman. Forced out of his solitary comfort zone, Dusty learns that he needs to reconstruct more than just his fire-wrecked property.

Max Walker-Silverman’s follow-up to A Love Song (MIFF 2022) is another beautifully frank portrait of rural America, this time inspired by his grandmother’s experience of a calamitous blaze. Reuniting with cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo, Walker-Silverman captures Colorado’s sublime landscape and skies, providing an awe-inspiring backdrop to O’Connor’s quietly formidable performance as a man at once hardened and hopeful. A hymn to resilience and solidarity, Rebuilding is also a tender tale of self-renewal, in which even a rugged cowboy can be moulded into a better version of himself.

“A work of subtle but deep emotion … Nature is a force to be reckoned with but in Walker-Silverman’s films the energy of empathetic human nature is shown to be just as powerful.” – Screen Daily