Interview: ‘Stray Embers’ Directors Erin Brethauer and Tim Hussin Look at California’s Deadliest Wildfire Through the Eyes of a Selfless Hero
The 2018 Camp Fire that ravaged through Northern California left hundreds displaced and distraught. Stray Embers tracks how California’s deadliest wildfire devastated the town of Paradise, where Brad Weldon lived as a fifth-generation resident. The fire took 85 lives and destroyed over 18,00 structures, displacing over 50,000 people. Weldon’s unique road to recovery caught the attention of documentarians Erin Brethauer and Tim Hussin.
In the wake of the fire, Weldon opened up his land to over 20 people who lost their homes in the fire. Housing family and friends, neighbors and strangers alike, Weldon’s selflessness represented a singular courage in the face of grave danger and complete tragedy.
Over five years, Brethauer and Hussin tracked Weldon’s story and makeshift community as it grew into something beautiful despite its horrific origins. Brethauer and Hussin sat down with me around the film’s screening as part of San Francisco’s DocFest 2026 and talked about the project’s origins and how they fit five years of life into a feature.
August Hammel: When did you know that this specific story of the fires was something that you needed to chase and when did you know that it would be a feature?
Tim Hussin: It happened pretty early. We were sent there on an assignment for The Guardian to just do a quick aftermath short film and when we were there, we met the main protagonist of the film. As soon as we met them, we were like, “This is amazing.” They saved their house, they told us they were going to open it up to everyone who had lost everything. So, we already knew something amazing would unfold here. At that point, we were like, “This is a film.”
Erin Brethauer: We were sent to Paradise and Brad – because he couldn’t evacuate in time and because he had a bedridden parent who was like 89 years old – managed to save his house with his friend. When we first arrived, we were standing in his gardens, which he saved. It was this strange moment where we were standing in this intact garden with roses and out along the perimeter of his yard was a totally burned town. But it wasn’t just that kind of contrast, It was Brad being so open doors and so open to his community.
TH: We connected with him very quickly. It happened on its own in a way.
AH: His selflessness is something that’s so unique. In natural disasters, people are quick to, of course, save what they can for themselves, but to see him in the aftermath of a tragedy be so willing to invite people in who have lost what he had and more – what was that like meeting him? When did you first know of his story and how did that contrast to when you met him?
EB: The first time we met Brad was just four or five days after the fire. We met him as he was still securing his household and finding some balance after this, but it was during that visit that he told us he was going to be inviting all of his friends and family to live with him. At that moment we were like, “What does that look like?” The more we spent time with them, the more we just got drawn into this very unique world, we got drawn into the feeling of being included in this community. Brad opens his doors to everyone. In the film, you see that it’s not just his friends and family, but it’s also folks who had been living on the street momentarily and it wasn’t just like, “Oh yeah, you can stay over there,” he would feed people, he brought them in. So having that feeling, it felt so good and it made us want to continue to see how it played out over the long term.
TH: After a disaster like this, when everything is upended and you don’t have the systems you rely on, typically you have the opportunity to live in a different way. They really took that opportunity to do so in a way that was to support their community, rather than to turn inward and just take care of themselves, which they could have, a lot of people do that. We lived through Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina, in 2024, and it was amazing how similarly we saw the community respond. It was people helping each other out. It wasn’t as much of a turning inward. It’s the systems that people rely on when those are gone and they have the opportunity to make a new way, we’ve seen that they will do things like this, open up and help each other out and share resources. That was inspiring and that was a big reason we wanted to make this film.
AH: Part of what’s kind of so inspiring about it is that you’re not only tracking what could be a very quick journalistic story, which is the tragedy itself and the immediate response, but you track the years-long aftermath. When did you guys know, as filmmakers, when your story was done and that you had the kind of story that you wanted to tell?
EB: It took a number of years and I think we just enjoyed filming there so much and the people. I still love going there and documenting, but I think after a few years, Tim and I put together a rough cut and we wanted it to show the passage of time over the seasons and some of the things that had happened in the household, but it wasn’t the film that we wanted to make. We reached out to someone we had been in an SFFilm residency with, Daniel Freeman, and we asked him if he would be interested in working with us on the edit. He did and became the third leg, the third partner for us. He spent six months just looking at the footage, everything that we had shot over five years and it took him about six months, but he came back to us with the bones of the film that has eventually become Stray Embers.
TH: I think we wanted to see people’s arcs naturally happen, so we weren’t rushing anything and we weren’t forcing that. We were there until we had the sense that those arcs had resolved in some way, that was sort of our timeline. We started to feel that in the three or four year mark. We were still going back, but that’s when we started to sense it and it wasn’t like a definite, “okay, we’re done filming now.” It was this amorphous thing. I remember a few shoots when I was like, “I feel like we’re finishing the film now.”
EB: Two really important components of making this film were time and intuition. A lot of the filmmaking process for us has been feeling the intuition of following certain people, following certain things over time.
TH: In the years that followed – two, three years into it – more fires came back to the area, bigger fires, so that was like a natural point, like a tent-stake in the film that we were like, “This is something they’re living with for the long term. It’s not just a one-time thing.” That was a big moment, of building that arc in our minds before finishing the actual production.
EB: You think that when a town burns down that they’ll get a pass, for a little while, but the Dixie Fire came back in 2020, I think.
TH: The North Complex fire, the Dixie Fire, those were the two big ones.
EB: That was really surprising to us and I don’t think something that we’ve seen captured on film is the recurring effects of wildfire on the community as well.
AH: I grew up in San Diego, and I’ve brushed up against a lot of fires and natural disasters in my time, so the doc is emotional for me on a personal level, but also it’s emotional because you know how to peak at exactly the time the audience needs it and to give them relief when you need it as well. How did you find that in the edit? There’s a fine line to walk between overwrought and pulling at heartstrings and just letting the story speak for itself and I think you achieved the latter.
TH: Thank you. That’s a very sweet comment. I always say there’s not much logic behind it. It’s more of a feeling that we crafted in the edit. Wth Daniel and just a lot of reviews of the film, watching it over and over and over, tweaking certain things, just all these tiny decisions that you make when editing that like makes that thing you talked about real. It’s just painstaking time and effort of continuously following the feeling or intuition. I’m not one to map it out so much. I just like to go in and try and feel it out as we move through it.
EB: Daniel helped us focus the film on Brad’s household and using that as the base to build the film. In prior edits and rough cuts, we had also spent more time with Lenny [Brad’s friend] down in the canyon, but I think having that focus of like, “No, we’re staying in Brad’s house and Lenny’s going to be kind of this counterpoint to like living in society,” that really helped give us a focus. We would pass the film back and forth in the edit. Daniel would take it, we would take it back and work on it. He would take it back. For us, having time away from the edit was a huge benefit to seeing things more clearly.
TH: Daniel did make a really cool outline of the film, color-coded, almost like a musical score. It’s really interesting to see if you’re curious.
AH: You’ve been showing it at a lot of festivals and a lot of eco-conscious or eco-centered festivals. Whether the audience is a festival attendee who’s there for environmental righteousness or because of passion for it or if it’s just someone who’s showing up out of pure curiosity, what do you hope people take away from it in the end?
EB: I hope people take away a feeling and an experience that will stay with them – a feeling that has to do with resiliency. Going into the future, people are going to experience more climate-related disasters or even just disasters, period. If we live long enough, we’re going to experience difficult things. I just hope they’ll think about this household and have a new perspective on what it means to be a caretaker.
TH: I’d like people to take away just being open to caring more for your family, friends, and community. I think we live in an age where it’s easier to isolate more and these people are not doing that in Stray Embers and that’s just a refreshing thing to experience in a film and in real life. I hope people leave and want to connect more deeply with their home and their community.
EB: I hope people open their doors to others.
Stray Embers is currently in its film festival run and seeking distribution.
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Interview: ‘Stray Embers’ Directors Erin Brethauer and Tim Hussin Look at California’s Deadliest Wildfire Through the Eyes of a Selfless Hero 
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