Over ten years have passed since Bay Area icons Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens made their first queer environmental documentary feature, Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2014), and with the climate crisis worsening with each passing season, the artist/activist duo are sounding the alarm with the third chapter. World premiering at Frameline49, Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency follows 2019’s Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure. The sense of alarm can be gleaned from the films’ subtitles, but even as the emergency sirens go off, the initial ecosexual endeavor — a love story not just between two queers but between those queers and the planet around them — has not gotten lost.

Beginning with an evacuation from Boulder Creek during the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fires in Northern California, Sprinkle and Stephens craft a cinematic reckoning with the power of fire… with its capacity to heal and its potential to destroy. Enlisting a collective of artists, Indigenous elders, witches, formerly incarcerated firefighters, and educators, the film examines the ways in which queers (and other humans too, of course) can support the health of the Earth. Partially narrated by Boulder Creek’s mythical white peacock Albert and culminating in a ceremonial Wedding to Fire in the Redwoods, Playing with Fire is a powerful portrait of queer resilience in the face of a world in flames.