Paradise after the 2018 Camp Fire in a scene from “Stray Embers,” screening at SF DocFest on Sunday, May 31.
SF DocFest.
As the Camp Fire roared through Paradise, forcing evacuations in chaotic, bumper-to-bumper traffic, carpenter Brad Weldon stayed behind and picked up his hose.
His bedridden 89-year-old mother, Norma, was not going anywhere, so Weldon and his housemate, Mic McCrary, fought the flames with what they had — including the water from an aboveground swimming pool — to save their home and their lives.
San Francisco Documentary Film Festival presents “Stray Embers”: 4 p.m. Sunday, May 31. $19. Vogue Theatre, 3290 Sacramento St., S.F. • Available to stream online Thursday, May 28, through June 7. $10. sfdocfest2026.eventive.org
Then, in the aftermath of the Nov. 8, 2018, conflagration that decimated the Butte County town and killed 85 people, the fifth-generation Paradise resident invited displaced neighbors — and many, many dogs — to share his home.
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That makeshift community that Weldon built is at the heart of “Stray Embers,” a project seven years in the making by Erin Brethauer and Tim Hussin, which offers a cinema-vérité portrait of a community’s tenacity and survival. It screens Sunday, May 31, at the Vogue Theater, and streams online, as part of San Francisco Documentary Festival, which runs through June 7.
Filmmakers Tim Hussin, left, and Erin Brethauer.
SF DocFest
The documentary is an outgrowth of what Brethauer describes as part of the “initial news blitz” in the wake of the disaster.
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In the mid-2010s, she and Hussin had a video column, “The Regulars,” in the Chronicle, and made their first feature, “Last Man Standing” (2016), about long-term AIDS survivors, under Chronicle auspices. That same year, they struck out on their own to work on other projects as freelancers for hire, which led to them accepting an assignment from the Guardian to make a short film focused on Paradise residents grappling with the Camp Fire’s aftermath.
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Weldon was among the subjects of the resulting “Paradise Lost: The Town Incinerated by California’s Deadliest Wildfire” from 2019. Filmed with his mother and McCrary, he made an impression in the documentary and on Brethauer and Hussin. The Asheville, N.C., filmmakers made 45 trips to Paradise over the ensuing years to more fully explore Weldon and his adopted community’s story.
“It was this surreal moment of being in Brad’s backyard with all that he had saved,” Brethauer said of their initial visit. “It’s this intact garden, when everything around his house had burned.”
The filmmakers first capture that spirit in Weldon’s garden, where he transforms a destroyed satellite dish into a birdbath
“He and Mic were just so welcoming in the face of something that felt so incredibly scary and apocalyptic,” Brethauer continued.
Brad Weldon in a scene from “Stray Embers,” screening at SF DocFest on Sunday, May 31.
SF DocFest
“We also really craved seeing the long-term effects of a disaster like this. After all those news stories go away, what are the people still experiencing?” Hussin added. “What is that long arc of healing that communities go through in the face of such a transformative experience?”
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The pair was particularly struck by Weldon and his circle’s warm and welcoming nature — “They felt like family very quickly,” Hussin observed — as well as how they responded to the disaster that upended their lives.
“They just kept going forward, and they didn’t dwell,” Brethauer said. “The most amazing part of human beings is their resiliency, and I think we’re both curious about where that comes from and what enhances it.”
“Stray Embers” adds to a robust roster of films that focus on the Camp Fire, among them Bay Area filmmakers Zackary Canepari and Drea Copper’s documentary “Fire in Paradise” (2019); Ron Howard’s “Rebuilding Paradise” (2020); Lucy Walker’s “Bring Your Own Brigade” (2021), in which Weldon also appears; and last year’s fictionalized “Lost Bus.” There is even a 2020 “This Old House” four-episode series focused on Paradise residents rebuilding and a 2021 BBC One documentary, “Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World,” in which the activist interviews fire survivors.
The Camp Fire remains both the deadliest wildfire in California history and the most destructive, with nearly 19,000 structures burned. An arcing PG&E power line started the fire, but drought conditions related to climate change fanned the flames. Paradise and its neighbor Concow were destroyed, while several other neighboring towns were also damaged.
All of that, along with the human drama, created fertile ground for filmmakers.
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“Also, the name, Paradise, I feel like that drew people in,” Brethauer noted.
Norma Weldon in a scene from “Stray Embers,” screening at SF DocFest Sunday, May 31.
SF DocFest
Weldon and some of the other “Stray Embers” subjects will be in attendance with Hussin and Brethauer when the film screens at the Vogue. Some attended the February world premiere at the Big Sky Film Documentary Festival in Missoula, Mont. Even before that, Hussin and Brethauer traveled to Paradise for a private screening last fall in Weldon’s living room.
The film moved Weldon to tears.
“It seemed like he was pretty blown away. I mean, he got to see his mother again, who had
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passed away,” Brethauer recalled. “I think the film gave them a moment to be like, ‘Wow, we went through all this.’”
Pam Grady is a freelance writer.