Devastating Impact on Undocumented Farmworkers From Northern California Fires Explored in Short Documentary, All That Remains.

How do you move forward when your community is ravaged by a natural disaster? Eva Rendle's award winning film All That Remains (Bronze Medal Award, Documentary, Student Academy Awards) is an expose of that very question.

In this short documentary we meet the community that makes wine country  as we know it, run. We meet farmworkers and citizens of Northern California, many of them undocumented, who speak to the plight they've experienced when the work and the homes they know go up in smoke. Where do you live when all the apartments have been destroyed and how do you access public aid when your work is seasonal and you're undocumented?

A year after wildfires ravaged Northern California’s Wine Country, its vulnerable population of farmworkers, many of them undocumented, find themselves in a heightened state of insecurity and inequality. All That Remains follows the second responders and vineyard workers who are still dealing with the aftermath of the fires, long after the media has turned away.

Their stories shed light on the immigration, labor, and housing issues that have been building in Napa and Sonoma for years, only to be brought to the surface by one of the deadliest natural disasters in California history

Director’s Statement:

I started covering this story when the North Bay Fires first hit, about six weeks into my first semester at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, but it really evolved over the next year and a half. The fires started during harvest season. Since a majority of farmworkers in Wine Country don’t have legal immigration status, right off the bat there was a lot of local and national media coverage on how the undocumented community was impacted by the disaster.

But I was struck by the deeper, systemic inequities in Wine Country that the fires brought to the surface. Undocumented immigrants are the backbone of Napa and Sonoma’s agricultural and tourism industries, but they’re forced to live in the shadows because of their immigration status. The fires exposed and exacerbated the immigration, labor, and housing issues that they live with every day.

When I set out to make this film, that was what I aimed to explore. While this is a local story, I think the lessons learned in Napa and Sonoma can be applied to communities nationwide. In the end, I hope it can start a conversation about who is most vulnerable after a natural disaster and what kinds of things people with legal immigration status take for granted in their day to day lives.

Director Bio:

Eva Rendle is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist whose work covers agriculture, immigration, and environmental issues in the West.

She received her Master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in 2019, where she was named the Brian Pollack Documentary Film Fellow. She holds a B.A. in Geography and Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado.

In 2015 Rendle was named a National Geographic Explorer, and spent three months photographing family-owned olive farms around the Mediterranean. Since then she has worked on print and video stories in Spain, Greece, Italy, Chile, Hungary, Peru, Israel, and Palestine.

She lives and works in Denver, Colorado.