Wildfire documentary 'Together We Are Heavy' set for free Stillwater community screening
The film, formerly titled 'What's Left Is Love,' grew from an event documentary into a portrait of resilience Stillwater showed during the March 2025 wildfires
After pulling back from a planned summer screening to tell a bigger story, Josh McCullock is ready to share "Together We Are Heavy" — his feature documentary about the wildfires that swept into Stillwater during The Mid South 2025 — with the community at the center of it.
The film will have its community premiere Sunday, March 1, at 3 p.m. at the Stillwater Community Center, with a reception and question-and-answer session to follow at Stonecloud Brewing. Admission is free and open to the public. The documentary will screen again during The Mid South weekend at the Community Center on Friday, March 13, and Saturday, March 14, both at 2 p.m.
McCullock, the film's director and Creative Director at The Mid South, called the project "a story about Stillwater" — one that grew far beyond what he initially set out to make.
"This is not a Mid South story. This is a story about Stillwater," McCullock said.
The film also carries a new title. Earlier plans for the project — then called "What's Left Is Love" — included a community screening last May, but McCullock canceled it after an early trailer drew mixed reactions. While many viewers found the footage compelling, others said it felt too soon. McCullock said he heard that response and took it seriously.
"We're dealing with real people's stories here. This needs to be handled slowly and methodically and fairly," he said. "Timing matters. Definitely matters."
The delay gave McCullock and his collaborators months to collect additional footage, conduct more interviews, and reshape the film's scope. The screenplay was written by Max Munchinski and Kyle Hood, with Munchinski also serving as editor. Munchinski, a veteran adventure documentary filmmaker whose work spans climbing and outdoor recreation films, came to The Mid South and Stillwater as an outsider — which McCullock said proved valuable.
The result is a three-act documentary that opens with a historical look at the 14-year relationship between The Mid South and Stillwater, moves into the chaotic hours of the fire, and closes with what McCullock describes as the story's true subject: the community's response.
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Wind-stoked wildfires erupted Friday, March 14, 2025, burning into Stillwater at the peak of The Mid South endurance festival and continuing overnight into Saturday. With 600 runners on course in the fire's path, hundreds of acres and homes burned. Miraculously, no lives were lost.
The outside perspective pushed the filmmakers to zoom out and interrogate how the community held together — and why.
"I just walked away thinking, this is the kind of town I want to live in," McCullock said. "This is one of those unseen layers of a community. It's not obvious until you have a situation like this, and then you have the time and space to really peel apart the story."
What emerged, McCullock said, is less a disaster film than a portrait of a community's connective tissue — the web of relationships between local agencies, residents, Mid South volunteers, and visiting athletes that activated instinctively when the fires hit.
"The connective tissue, the web of the community — that's like the victor, the main character of the film," he said. "That collaboration and neighborly spirit."
The documentary weaves together footage from multiple sources, including first responder video, audio from emergency calls, and self-shot cell phone footage from participants and Stillwater locals caught in the chaos. McCullock described it as having "a found footage element" — raw, minute-by-minute documentation that puts viewers inside the unfolding crisis alongside those who lived it.
The film features interviews with homeowners whose properties burned, Stillwater Fire Chief Terry Essary, Mid South Race Director Bobby Wintle and co-founder Crystal Wintle, and others who played roles in the response. McCullock acknowledged that with hundreds of homes destroyed and thousands of people affected, no 80-minute film can capture every story.
"We're able to feature three homeowners. There were hundreds of people's homes burned," he said. "I'll never feel like it's adequate in that sense."
The film's new title comes from a phrase Wintle has used at Mid South gatherings for years — one rooted in the opening track of the Polyphonic Spree's 2007 album "The Fragile Army." The song itself is a 30-second ambient intro, completely wordless, but the phrase stuck in Wintle's vocabulary and became a recurring rally cry at Mid South events over the years.
"Together we are heavy"
He invoked it again in his final address to participants the night the ride was canceled. McCullock said the phrase pointed directly to the film's central theme: two communities — local residents and visiting athletes — pressed together in crisis, taking care of each other.
Film stills from "Together We Are Heavy" feature (clockwise from top left) Bobby Wintle, Crystal Wintle, Ruth Cavins and Trey Nixon — four of the Stillwater and Mid South community members whose accounts shape director Josh McCullock's documentary about the March 2025 wildfires. – Provided
McCullock said he decided against cutting a new trailer for the film before the premiere. He wants the community to experience it together, without preconception.
"I have a fear of over-sensationalizing this thing," he said. "I want it to be a personal viewing."
After the community and Mid South screenings, McCullock plans to submit the film to festivals, with the goal of introducing Stillwater to audiences around the world — particularly in the context of how rural communities with outdoor recreation economies face and survive climate-driven disasters.
"If this thing could be seen around the world — in a context where the right people are seeing it — I hope what the film does is throw flowers to everyone that responded," McCullock said. "I hope people are able to watch this and walk away with a fuller feeling of the town they live in. We have something really, really special here."
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