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Aug 18, 2026
Independent Lens: Documentary filmmakers Erin Brethauer + Tim Hussin
Independent Lens: Documentary filmmakers Erin Brethauer + Tim Hussin
00:00
26:18
Transcript
0:00
[gentle music] Erin Brethauer and Tim Husson are a filmmaking/photography couple who met in Asheville, worked together in California making intimate documentaries, and have returned to Asheville to raise a child and put their professional focus into their production company, This Land Films.
0:21
You're watching or listening to a piece of their latest project, Stray Embers, documenting people in a small Northern California town recovering after devastating wildfires. Loneliness
0:34
and isolation becomes very addicting. [fire crackling] Once you get to the point where you really don't miss company, it doesn't become a factor, and then at that point you're free.
0:52
You're free to do any fucking thing you want. Stray Embers gets its local premiere September 22nd at the Fine Arts Theatre in Asheville.
1:01
Erin and Tim are now in the middle of their latest project, focusing on their own and other people's recoveries from Hurricane Helene.
1:08
I'm Matt Peiken of See Here, the show and tell of arts and culture in Western North Carolina.
1:13
In this episode of the See Here Podcast, Tim and Erin talk about their leap of faith away from working at mainstream news outlets, collaborating in the field for their own work, and what matters most to them as documentary filmmakers.
1:27
Tim and Erin, thank you so much for being here. In your photography and videography, did you always come at it from that vantage point of human storytelling?
1:37
I know people come into this, first they might be, uh, a photographer who was l- interested in landscapes and doing streetscapes, as an example, and then found their way to more human interest stuff.
1:47
How did you find your way to that? Yeah. I think I was initially more interested in the natural world and the environment.
1:55
I did initially study environmental science at the University of Florida, and I realized pretty quickly that it was too much science in that for me. [laughs] I had always loved taking pictures.
2:05
My grandfather was really into it as a amateur, and my sister was really into it, and she gave me my first SLR camera.
2:14
So I was using that, and I think that there was a point in college where it really connected that I could combine my love for the environment and also my artistic side, and I found journalism through that.
2:27
I was like, "Okay, I can do stories that mean something, and I can also take photos."
2:33
So I started pursuing that in college, and then through that experience, I started becoming more interested in the stories of people around me. Cool.
2:42
Erin, tell me about your background and where you're coming from in this. I
2:46
initially learned about photojournalism from a high school career day, and I think there was, like, a local newspaper photographer who came in and shared some of her work, and I just remember being really blown away that this was a job, that you could document, use art, and also
3:06
be in your community.
3:07
I really was a pretty shy person growing up, and so I think I really loved about photojournalism that you could learn about the world and learn about people's lives and gain entry into their worlds through photography.
3:20
What's interesting to me is you describe yourself as a shy person.
3:23
You wouldn't think a shy person would want to put themselves, or readily put themselves in with communities, especially communities you may not be familiar with.
3:32
How did you break that barrier for yourself to overcome or work with your shyness to then thrive in these settings that are foreign to you?
3:42
I think curiosity often overrides the shyness, and I think that's what pulled me into it. The more I started learning about photography, the more I became kind of obsessed with it, and that's what just pulled me in.
3:55
So... How did you find your way to each other, not just personally, but professionally?
4:01
You're both photographers, and I would think that forming a film company or any creative venture, you usually look for collaborators who have complementary sets of skills but aren't your own.
4:13
I handle this, you handle that, and we will thrive. [laughs] But you both are photographers and videographers. How did you come to your marriage, your professional marriage, your creative marriage aesthetically? Yeah.
4:27
I think that photography can be a pretty solo experience, and we both became interested in filmmaking while we were at newspapers, and myself a little bit before, too. And so we came together as friends initially.
4:43
Where did you meet? We met here in Asheville. We met through our friend Mike Bellamy, who's a really good photographer locally.
4:50
I was here visiting some family, and I w- knew Mike, and Mike was coming out to a cabin that my family had rented, and he invited Erin along, and that's [laughs] when we first met.
5:00
Did you two immediately just start talking about your craft and art form? Is that what your bond was? I think so. I think we c- f- for sure connected through that.
5:11
We didn't know each other, and then I really admired Erin's work, and we stayed in touch after that. And then whenever I would come visit, we would meet up and look at work and hang out.
5:22
So getting back to my question about how you began to even think of working together, how did you frame those conversations, and how did you think you each would enhance or bring an individuality to something that you're both sharing time behind the lens and you both have that vision?
5:41
How did you think you would work together? How would you frame that? We were friends for several years.
5:47
We met each other before Tim took this cross-country bicycle trip with his brother and made a film about that called America Recycled, which is incredible and worth checking out.
5:56
He ended up in the Bay Area, and then I accepted a job at the San Francisco Chronicle and ended up leaving Asheville to move there for that job. So it was, like, a really fresh, new chapter for me. And-
6:09
We just reconnected and started hanging out, and then Tim actually got hired at the newspaper too.
6:15
So our boss, who is this very powerhouse but groovy woman named Judy Walgren, saw that we had some good chemistry and put us together on a really big project.
6:28
That's also around that same time we also started to have romantic chemistry, and I think [laughs] that all of those feelings just culminated at this one
6:38
moment in time, and we just started channeling a lot of our passion both for the work we were doing and for spending time with each other [laughs] into the- Yeah. Describe this big project that you worked on.
6:49
That sounds like it was a very catalyzing experience for both of you personally and professionally in terms of how you would work together. Tell me about this project. Yeah.
6:58
It was, it was called The Last Men Standing, and it was, it was a big feature for the newspaper, and it was the newspaper's first feature film, and they wanted us to make it.
7:07
And so we spent months interviewing long-term HIV and AIDS survivors in San Francisco who were a little older and felt that they had been kinda left behind, forgotten. Their stories had been forgotten.
7:20
They were dealing with a lot of issues. They l- lost whole communities in the '80s and w- were dealing with a lot of mental health issues, a lot of financial issues, just staying in the Bay Area.
7:32
And so we featured several men who had these experiences. When was this? This was in 2016 we start, we started- Yeah... doing it. Initially, we started working on the project, and it wasn't meant to be a feature film.
7:44
[laughs] But they were just gonna be vignettes on these different men, but I think once we started doing these interviews and capturing things, we realized that we could make a feature length film.
7:54
How did you then graduate or evolve it from thinking from these vignettes to thinking this would be a feature film? Because obviously you need a lot of interstitial material. Mm-hmm.
8:03
There's a lot of other, there's narrative arcs- Mm... that probably have to take place in a feature versus these vignettes. How did all that come together, and how did you talk to your editors about growing this?
8:15
'Cause I imagine they would swallow hard even though they championed the project to begin with. A feature film, A, how can we spend the time on this? B, what's it gonna cost? W- that's outside of what we do.
8:27
How do we market it? What do we do? Well- Talk about all of that. In classical newspaper style, we filmed everything. We edited the film, and we produced it also. [laughs] So it was an organic thing.
8:40
We got an office space in the basement of the Chronicle, and so we just spent a lot of time making paper cuts and trying to figure out how we could make something that all fit together, all these different pieces.
8:52
And then our editor Judy would watch cuts, and then we'd go back. So it was a pretty organic process. And they just gave us the time- Yeah... really, which is precious at a newspaper. Yeah. And that's all we needed.
9:03
To weave all the stories together was quite a task. That took quite a bit of time, but the way they selected all the different folks in the film, they all were complementary and added something new.
9:14
So there were some things that were repetitive that we needed to manage, but in general, we were able to tie it all together.
9:20
Also, with the backdrop of the beautiful place that we were living was amazing, and the history. Like, there was some archival footage we were able to use in that.
9:28
Yeah, we were able to access archival footage from the LGBTQ+ archive in San Francisco too. Which is vast. Yeah. It's huge. It's huge. Yeah. So how did that experience pave the way for your future projects together? Mm.
9:44
How, how did that kinda create a path for what you wanted to do together? It was an amazing experience.
9:49
We were also producing a short film series at the same exact time called The Regulars, where we were doing a short film character profile every week. Mm-hmm. We would trade off.
9:58
So it was, like, very intense time, a lot of work. What a gorgeous time though, right? When a newspaper would give you the time, that seems like such an antiquated thing now with most papers.
10:09
Tim and I were talking before we started rolling about how The New York Times seems to be in its own league of allowing- Mm... this kinda journalism to happen. I remember when I was at the St.
10:18
Paul Pioneer Press, and even before that in Northern California, I was at a smaller daily, and you could just carve your time. If you believed in it and made your time, you could do that. Mm.
10:28
And it seems like you can't do that anymore. So anyway, tell me, how did that experience on that first film pave the way for you to craft what you're doing now?
10:37
Yeah, through that experience, I think we both felt pretty burnt out by it. We were doing way too much by ourselves, and we really craved the spaciousness to work on something long-term.
10:48
So when we left the newspaper, we made that a priority.
10:52
We were taking freelance work, but also we wanted to work on long-term projects where we didn't have a deadline, where we could do what we want, where we could have the freedom to really explore.
11:03
What kind of subject matter did you think about, or was that not even in your head? It was more just about liberating yourselves from the strictures that were imposed upon you.
11:13
Was it the time and just that freedom, or were there stories you wanted to take on that you thought you maybe wouldn't be able to do within a traditional media outlet?
11:22
I think we were definitely interested in just being able to work on some of these stories more deeply, and time is, like, the magical ingredient for that.
11:30
That being said, we have been working on Stray Embers for about s- almost eight years. [laughs] So we really took our time with this last project, which has been a wonderful process, really intense at times.
11:42
I had always worked in as, like, a staff person on a newspaper, and so I was really curious what it was like to freelance. And Tim had that experience before, but I was really interested in what that would feel like.
11:55
And so I think just after this really intense period at The Chronicle, Tim ended up leaving first, and then I left to work on a project that was presented to me, and I just used that as a chance to dive in, and that's when we started forming our own production company.
12:11
And that's This Land Films. Does the name of This Land Films mean anything to you two? What, does it tell the public about what you're about or what, m- in a broad umbrella about what your films, you want them to be? Mm.
12:26
I see it as, like, a all-encompassing kind of net of just stories from this place and this land, like, how we're connected to it and how we are separated from it and what it all is about.
12:41
And I think in our work, we try to speak to universal stories through the specific, and we get really close to people, and I think that it's like
12:51
this part, this piece, let's look at this piece more deeply and then see what we all can learn from it. You mentioned Stray Embers. That's your- Yes... current project or your most recent project.
13:00
You said it's eight years doing that. You did other work in the interim- Yeah... too. So talk about Stray Embers. It's about the aftermath of a fire, right?
13:08
So explain the genesis of this project, where the fire was, and how you two decided, or why you two decided to step into this from a documentary standpoint.
13:19
Yeah, so i- in 2018, we were sent to Paradise, California, to make a short film for The Guardian newspaper about the aftermath of the Camp Fire, which was the biggest, deadliest wildfire in California history at the time.
13:33
And so when we were there, we met a few folks who had saved their house by fighting the fire for 24 hours with garden hoses and five-gallon buckets, and we just wanted to see what would happen next.
13:48
Would you both be with cameras? Were you both at the same time holding cameras and moving around, or how did you work in that environment? Maybe I could just touch on the genesis of it.
13:58
At the time, in 2018, this fire was unlike a lot that we'd ever seen before, and so it felt like this harbinger of things to come, and it also... I think
14:12
we all are dealing with, like, feelings around climate change and climate disasters, and it felt, okay, what is that? What does it look like to come back from this?
14:21
And meeting Brad, who saved his house, who was very open doors and just basically said, "When this town reopens, all of my friends and family are welcome to come and live with me," that's basically what I think compelled us to want to return and see what that looks like over time.
14:38
And I don't think we anticipated that we'd be going back for five years to keep filming.
14:43
[laughs] I think we were just curious, and we had the time 'cause we'd left the newspaper, and so we were like, "Let's just keep going back."
14:49
And so it was a very intuitive filming process where a lot of times we were both filming, and sometimes one of us would film and the other would gather audio, or sometimes we would just switch off filming.
15:00
So it was, like, a very fluid, intuitive process. Is this happen on the fly, or are you very planful about- [laughs]... "Hey, you hold the camera. I've got the mics this time"?
15:10
[laughs] How do you make those decisions either before you get into the field or in the field? Mm. We had been working together for a long time up to that point, so it was just second nature.
15:20
We would just look at each other and know what the other was thinking. [laughs] So- [laughs]... there wasn't a lot of planning. [laughs] That's really amazing that you have that kind of back and forth that way.
15:29
Even, like, bands, you're the guitarist. [laughs] You're the bass player. You're the drummer. Yeah. Okay, we have our roles. I would think it's really unusual.
15:35
In fact, I have not talked with a pair of videographers slash, uh, photographers who work together that way. I'm sure there are others. I just was very curious about your process.
15:46
How has that evolved for you over the years? And even within this project, you said you didn't plan to go back over five years. Sometimes you would have the camera. Sometimes you would, or vice versa.
15:56
How has your working relationship evolved in the time of doing, working on Stray Embers? W- it's evolved.
16:06
In maybe the earlier periods, we were both like, "We need to film everything together and be filming at the same time."
16:13
And then I think we learned to pass the baton, and then we learned that you're gonna play this instrument, and I'll play this instrument. You solo for a little bit, and I'll kinda play backup.
16:22
So I think it's just been, like, we find, like, the rubs or the places where we get a little exhausted, and then we try to find relief from that. And sometimes one of us would go.
16:34
There were times where Erin went on her own, and she just had the freedom to do things, and some of the most amazing shots in the film are from those, those trips.
16:43
Are your interviewing styles and the way you interact with your subjects, are they different from each other? I think I learned so much from Tim, and especially in Last Man Standing.
16:56
I think Tim has a really good way of making people feel comfortable, and Tim would also make sure that we had enough time and space to let people feel comfortable sharing their stories.
17:08
And so I just learned that it can be more conversational. It doesn't have to be this, like, I ask the question, now you give the answer, and I think that's reflected in Stray Embers.
17:17
You'll hear us interacting with people, and I think that just feels more real. You just get a sense for the people who are there being folded into this community, and that's an important part of the story, too. Mm-hmm.
17:30
Yeah. Now, y- most of your work, it seems like, unless I've missed something here, has taken place in California. You are here. Mm-hmm.
17:38
How long have you been full-time in Asheville, and how has being here affected or somehow influenced the work you're doing? Yeah, we've been here for six years now. We came in 2020, right? Mm-hmm.
17:51
Uh- Yeah, we were planning to come back in 2019, but then the pandemic. [laughs] So we got here in 2020, and- Mm... our work changed a lot. We weren't
18:00
freelancing as much here 'cause it's not a big market like it is in the Bay Area, but we have worked on a lot of really cool little projects here and larger ones. What do you think? Yeah.
18:13
I lived here the first time for almost eight years before moving to California, and then, yeah, we came back in 2019. So
18:21
basically, we devoted a lot of our personal and professional lives to following this project in Paradise, which is all about- Kind of the messy middle of climate disaster and, like, how people rebound from that over time.
18:36
That's what we figured out on the back end. In the time we were there, we were just like, "This is interesting, this is interesting. Let's keep going."
18:42
But now I think with the benefit of hindsight, that's what the story's become. So being back here in Asheville, we wanted to come back because it's a place we can put down roots.
18:51
We both had really incredible community here from the first time that we had lived here, and I think that felt really good returning to. And then I think going through Helene, we had a three-month-old baby. [laughs] Wow.
19:08
We- Hurricane baby. [laughs] Yeah, a little flood baby.
19:11
And it was a really interesting period with a lot of tension for obvious reasons, but also because when really big things happen in our lives or just in society, I think we both reacted by going out and filming and going out and photographing, whether for an outlet or editorial outlet or just for ourselves.
19:33
And in this case, having such a young infant, we weren't able to really go out there. We did find ways to do it, and we did film things to document, but it's also become more like personal documentation.
19:47
We filmed a lot of our household, some of our neighbors after that, and it's really interesting to see the echoes of what we learned in Paradise and what we witnessed in Paradise through this one household in what we witnessed here in Asheville after Helene.
20:04
Are you planning to produce a Stray Embers-like film around Helene and the aftermath of it? Yeah, that's what we're working on now.
20:14
We're gonna move into some editing next month with our editor, Daniel Freeman, and we're gonna see what comes of it. It'll be different from Stray Embers.
20:22
Yes, we filmed out in the community the aftermath of Helene, but we also filmed ourselves because it felt appropriate.
20:30
So it's something that I'm not used to doing as a journalist, like turning the camera [laughs] towards me, but we'll see what comes of that. [laughs] Yeah. How are you funding or financing your work?
20:40
We- Or do you fund and finance it? [laughs] Maybe that's the apropos question. That's a really good question. In the US, it's so competitive grants.
20:48
There's not a lot of support for this kind of truly independent filmmaking.
20:53
Working on Stray Embers, we've self-funded the production by just driving from the Bay Area to Paradise, which is three hours away, and then we would camp or sleep on the floor at Brad's house.
21:04
And now with this new film about the flood, we're also at this crossroads where we're like, "Okay, we could just make it, or do we try to spend all this time trying to find funding?"
21:17
Which maybe in the long run would be more beneficial for us. It's really hard as a filmmaker navigating these points.
21:24
It's like we could either just keep making work and keep making work, or we could try to find people willing to help invest in us. And so if you are a sponsor, we're looking for a patron. You know- Something like that...
21:39
I- Stray Embers premiered at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in February. Oh. And it's been in the film festival circuit this year. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Have you been traveling around with it or...?
21:49
Yeah, we've taken it to San Francisco for the SF DocFest and River Run. We're actually taking it to Nashville at the end of September and then another film festival in New Hampshire. So it's going to different places.
22:02
The one thing I will highlight is we are bringing the film to the Fine Arts Theater in Asheville on September 22nd.
22:09
It feels very important for us to share this film around the second anniversary of Hurricane Helene, and that's why we decided to rent the theater on that Tuesday before the anniversary to share it with our community here.
22:22
So now that you're here, you're working on the post-Helene film, uh, do you also think of this as a multi-year project? In some ways, though, I can see the parallels.
22:33
They're pretty obvious from terms of the aftermath of disaster and how people are thriving or not, how they're surviving in year four or five is different than in year two, and you learn that yourselves in working on Stray Embers.
22:46
These stories could go on infinitely. And I'm wondering, aside from disasters and that propelling you to projects, are there subject matters you want to take on?
22:58
You mentioned earlier your ties to environmental science and This Land Films. Are there other things, other themes you want to look at in your filmmaking that you m- maybe haven't started with yet?
23:11
That's a really good question. I think at this point it's really been people's connection to the land, and specifically, uh, how we deal with natural disaster. That happened with the wildfire film, Stray Embers.
23:24
It's happening with the Helene flood film, and in the future, I don't know. I think it's also, like, taking a step back from that, and the emotional theme is about grief and, like, how do we handle huge changes.
23:39
And I think that we also, concurrent to doing our film projects, we both enjoy making still photographs, and I know you've been working on a kind of long-term project about that.
23:51
Yeah, that, like, a film project for us at this point takes at least five years. So- [laughs]... you know, we're two years into the Helene project, so we have a few more left on that.
24:01
[laughs] But that being said, we've also worked on these little profiles, like touching back on the work that we did at The Chronicle with the regular series. We've worked on a few artist profiles.
24:11
We made one about our friend Cray Melich for Penland, and I love that format, like that short film kind of profile where we just get to share about a person and interpret some of the things that they're saying artistically is really fun.
24:26
So I hope we get to work on more things like that. I'm doing a lot of that with See Here, where I'm doing, uh, these three to four-minute little video vignette documentary things.
24:35
Anything we haven't talked about that you think is important for people to understand about your work or where you're headed?
24:40
I think we both use filmmaking or our artistic practice in general as a way to process what's going on in front of us, in our lives and our worlds, and so i- it's really been a tool for that, I think.
24:54
And when you ask about what other things we might be interested in, I guess that's really just related to what experiences we'll have in the future, what we'll go through, what traumas we'll have to deal with and process.
25:06
And yeah, it's just like a reflection of the journeys we go through in life.
25:11
It's- And I think one other thing I'd love to highlight too is we live in Asheville, which is a smaller place, and there's a lot of really incredible filmmakers and photographers here, and especially with documentary film, I think we're really interested in, like, helping support and bring more documentary film
25:31
opportunities to the community. We're gonna be showing our film in September. Our friends, who are the filmmakers Patrick Bresnan and Yvette Lucas, they're gonna be showing their film the week before.
25:42
And we hope to do a monthly documentary series where we can bring films that are on the festival circuit right now to our community and just try to provide more opportunities to experience alternative perspectives and ways of telling stories.
25:57
I appreciate meeting you both and learning about your work, Erin, Tim. Thank you so much for joining me here today.
26:02
If you haven't already, please subscribe for free to our newsletter so you can see and hear what's happening in Western North Carolina arts and culture. Just go to seehearwnc.com.
26:14
I'm Matt Peiken, and I'll see you here at See Here.
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