After the Ashes: Rebuilding from the LA Wildfires

2025: The Year from Space

In 2025, satellites recorded wildfires sweeping through the hills of Hollywood, shifting battle lines in Ukraine, and nearly 600 million people assembling for a sacred pilgrimage along the River Ganges. From orbit, imagery exposed the vast displacement of civilians in Gaza, while reconnaissance satellites traced covert weapons transfers from North Korea to Russia. Scientists also relied on satellite data to count migrating wildebeest and walrus, monitoring the planet’s health. Combined with news archives, eyewitness accounts, user-generated content, and expert analysis, these views from above reveal the hidden story of 2025.

Fire Season

As wildfires ravage California, bystanders record nature's wrath.

American Catastrophe: LA Burning -- Special Edition of 20/20

Special reporting from the deadly fires in California.

Table ronde autour de Lars von Trier

Fireline

Enter the spectacle and drama of a Megafire, alongside firefighting teams struggling to save anything they can while protecting each other; revealing the friendship, heartbreak, and exhilaration of going to war against an elemental force.

The Next Right Thing

Four peoples’ lives are brought together by the opioid crisis in a small Georgia city. A seasoned firefighter saves the life of a young woman looking for purpose, while grieving parents fight to provide the support their son struggled to find.

Queen Elizabeth II: A Royal Life - A Special Edition of 20/20

The life and legacy of Queen Elizabeth II after Britain's longest-reigning monarch dies at age 96.

They Break the Tree of Peace

They Break the Tree of Peace explores the reality of life under military occupation in Masafer Yatta, documenting the violence, intimidation, and demolitions carried out and coordinated by illegal settlers and Israeli occupation forces against Palestinian communities.

The Devil Worshippers

"The Devil Worshippers" investigates Satanism and focuses on allegations that there are satanic cults committing crimes and murders in the United States. “Police have been skeptical when investigating these acts, just as we are in reporting them. But there is no question that something is going on out there, and that’s sufficient reason for ‘20/20’ to look into it.”

The Boys in Red Hats

On January 18, 2019, 17-year old Nick Sandmann, a student at the affluent Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, was internationally villainized on social media and in the 24-hour news cycle as he and his classmates appeared to confront Native American elder Nathan Phillips on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. during a March for Life rally. Video clips of the interaction went viral overnight and Sandmann and his classmates faced worldwide outrage as the entire Covington Catholic community became the center of uncomfortable conversations about racism, privilege and politics.

Paradise

In 2021, an extreme heatwave gave rise to huge wildfires in the vast subarctic forests of Sakha, a northeastern republic in Siberia. The village of Shologon lies in this taiga landscape, shrouded in orange smoke and black ash. The forest is burning and the flames are approaching fast.

Burning

Follows the deadly Australian bushfires of 2019-2020, known as ‘Black Summer’. Burning is an exploration of what happened as told from the perspective of victims of the fires, activists and scientists.

Prisoners of Fire

June 26,1990, the Dude Fire rages across Zane Gray country in the towering ponderosa forests below the Mogollon Rim in Central Arizona, killing five prison crew members and a female supervisor on her first fire. Follow along with the survivors and firefighters as they share their experience as inmate firefighters and their harrowing story of courage, loss and redemption.

Ashes

Tramuntana

In a remote area of northern Spain, the wind has a name: Tramuntana. Tramuntana takes what it wants—clothes, trees, boats, and the people of the landscape who live with the endless threat of being carried away by its force. This film is a lyrical portrait of this furious wind, woven from the stories passed down by local villagers.

The Fire in Our Hearts

On British Columbia’s remote Southside, wildfire is not an abstract threat—it is a lived reality. As flames close in on a frontier community, the Cheslatta Carrier Nation and their neighbours face an impossible choice: evacuate, or stay to protect the land that defines them. With limited access and little outside support, the community responds collectively, drawing on Indigenous leadership, cooperation, and generations of knowledge to confront the fire in near isolation. In the aftermath, the burn reveals a long-erased Cheslatta village site, resurfacing a suppressed history just as their response gains wider attention as a model for resilience. But when the flames recede, new constraints emerge—raising questions about the limits of community-led action, and the fragile balance between survival, autonomy, and authority.

Chairman for Life

China’s President Xi Jinping is a force to be reckoned with. As leader of the Communist colossus, he commands the world’s attention, but who is China’s strongman and what is his agenda?

Rebuilding Paradise

​On November 8, 2018, a spark flew in the Sierra Nevada foothills, igniting the most destructive wildfire in California history and decimating the town of Paradise. Unfolding during the year after the fire, this is the story of the Paradise community as they begin to rebuild their lives.

Behind the Smoke

This documentary is meant to bring to light the issues that firefighters and their families faces later in life when the firefighter association and government resources are no longer available to them. Cancer can take more firefighters than anything else on the job. Behind the Smoke is a representative voice of every firefighter, "I was called to save lives, who is called to save mine?"