Friday, April 18th, 2025
Art from the Ashes
College student turns family farm tragedy into award-winning film
By Abigail Miller
Submitted Photo
A screenshot from the YouTube documentary about the fire at the Hellwarth farm.
HOPEWELL TOWNSHIP - A young, local filmmaker earned national recognition this month for a short documentary about his family's journey to rebuild after a fire heavily damaged the milking parlor at their dairy farm near Celina last January.
Carter Hellwarth's brother Caden went out to check on the family's dairy cows at around 8:30 p.m. Jan. 30, 2024, when he discovered a milking parlor full of smoke. Celina firefighters responded to the fire at Hellwarth Farms shortly afterward. They requested mutual aid from Chattanooga, Coldwater, Mendon and Rockford fire departments. Several firefighters, assisted by two tankers, battled the blaze.
Soon, it got to a point where fire crews realized that there wasn't too much of the barn left to save, Carter said.
"The fire grew a lot. From there, once it was discovered that the actual parlor portion where the cows were milked was devastated in the fire, it became a pretty daunting question of what do we do with the cows now? Because this would've happened in late evening. And cows would generally have been milked at about 2 a.m. the next morning, so in a matter of hours. We had to think about, where do we take the cows next?"
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A screenshot from the documentary shows the fire in progress.
It did not take long after the fire was extinguished for the Hellwarth's neighbors to rally around them.
"A large number of people came to the farm to help," Carter said. "Through that, some of these neighbors and helping hands also coordinated and called to other farms situated in various places across the state and found some different locations that could take the animals in."
A sophomore studying film production and communications at Bowling Green State University, Carter was inspired to write, film and direct a documentary about the fire almost immediately, he said.
File Photo/The Daily Standard
Multiple fire departments responded to Hellwarth Farms Inc. at 3081 Carmel Church Road in Hopewell Township on Jan. 31, 2024.
"I think the inkling (to do the documentary) was there kind of from the get-go," he said. "Really, a large amount of the motivating force behind the idea was just the powerful concept of the community that was behind it. The fact that all these people came together to help my family, because this really did - I mean, just hearing about it sounds like such an impossible situation. You have 200 cows that you need to move somewhere almost immediately. And so that was, I think, kind of the driving force behind it."
In addition, in the fall of 2024, Carter learned of the Latest Generation Film Contest, put on by the Lincoln Presidential Foundation for filmmakers aged 14-22.
"It was calling for documentaries from young filmmakers in the Midwest, and I kind of saw the opportunity and talked to myself (and said), 'Well, hey, I have an idea here. I have something that I've been kind of wanting to create.' And so that was definitely a motivating factor that gave me the resolve of saying, 'Hey, I'm going to make this happen.'"
He later learned after the fact that the film competition was for films created on subjects that had happened 20 years ago or prior, he said. But by then, he had already begun working on his film.
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The Hellwarth dairy farm milks about 200 cows and produces soybeans, corn, hay and wheat on 600 acres.
"At that point, it kind of came down to the premise of, this is something I wanted to create. I wanted to both share my family's story and use it as a chance to just share kind of what I've experienced in the agricultural world and share it with a larger audience," Carter said. "And so I guess in that kind of final leg of the actual creation of the documentary, it became more just a personal need."
"The Barn is Burning" is an almost seven-minute long documentary chronicling the many steps of the farm's rebuilding process. The film also highlights how Hellwarth Farms embraced innovation in the face of loss. It begins with the charred remains of the family's milking parlor on Carmel Church Road, and it goes on to showcase the rebuild in its phases: the timber framework of the barn rebuild and the newly installed robotic milkers.
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Carter's film uses an interview with his dad, Garrett Hellwarth, to tell part of the story.
The story is framed around an interview Carter did with his dad, Garrett Hellwarth, who owns and operates the multigeneration family farm that involves around 200 cows and about 600 acres of soybeans, corn, hay and wheat.
"What's interesting about this is it was kind of filmed in multiple little chunks, and part of that is impacted as me being a student that's an hour and a half away from home," Carter said. "I really couldn't film too much directly after the fire. I had to wait a few weeks after the fire. I went home and I did get some footage there of basically the burnt remains of the barn."
Over the summer, he was able to shoot more footage of the rebuild process.
"And then finally when I really knew in the fall, like, 'Hey, this project's coming together, it's actually going to be a documentary,' I filmed my dad's interview, sometime in November. In the beginning of my kind of winter break was where the real meat of the project happened, when I filmed a lot of everything else that I needed ... a lot of the filming of the milking robots themselves. And that's when all the editing happened as well, was right around New Year."
Following the completion of the film in January, Hellwarth decided that, although it didn't exactly fit the criteria of the Latest Generation Film Contest, he would enter it anyway.
"Life kind of went on, and a few months later, about two weeks ago, I got a call (from the Lincoln Presidential Foundation) and they kind of opened up by saying, 'Your film was great. We loved it, but it didn't really meet those history requirements, and so we can't really consider you for those regular awards that we were going to give,'" Carter said. "I was like, 'Yeah, I understand. Well, I'm glad you liked it.' And she eventually said, 'Hey, the team liked it a lot. And so they kind of added in another section of awards for the contest.' And my film was honored with a special recognition for excellence in storytelling. So, that was pretty fun news for me. I definitely was not expecting it at all."
Along with the award and a $250 prize, "The Barn is Burning" will be featured along with the other award-winning films, at a special red carpet premiere in Chicago on June 22.
The short documentary premiered at the 25th annual BGSU Film and Media Festival on April 5 and is now available to watch for free on
YouTube.
Submitted Photo
Carter Hellwarth is studying film production and communications at Bowling Green State University.
