Forty-eight films from 25 countries on six continents will be screened during this year’s Vermont International Film Festival. The 10-day event at Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center in Burlington starts on Friday, October 18. While executive director Steve MacQueen is excited about three music documentaries and the late addition of the new Errol Morris documentary, Separated, he is equally thrilled to present the work of eight Vermont filmmakers.
“We’ve got ‘Vermont’ in our title,” MacQueen said. “Any screen time we can give to Vermont films and help out Vermont filmmakers, we want to do it.”
Communal farms, a bar in Bethel, and Bread and Puppet Theater founder Peter Schumann are the subjects of three Vermont documentaries, while locally made narrative films include four shorts exploring family dynamics and a freewheeling comedy set in Burlington about a trio of soon-to-graduate college students.
Charles Light’s Far Out: Life on and After the Commune blends archival footage with recent recollections to trace 50 years in the lives of radical journalists who left New York City in 1968 to live off the land in Montague, Mass., and at Packer Corners in Guilford. Director-editor Light lived at the Montague commune, as did his coproducer, Dan Keller.
The 85-minute film premiered in early September to a crowd of 500 at Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro, where it was scheduled to run for a week. It ran for five, Latchis Arts executive director Jon Potter said. Ticket sales surpassed all movies in the past five years except for Barbie. Light and Verandah Porche, who still lives at Packer Corners and cowrote music for the film, will participate in a post-screening discussion on Saturday, October 19.
Filmmakers Angelo Madsen (formerly Madsen Minax) and Susan Bettmann will take questions after their short films run as a double feature on Wednesday, October 23. Madsen’s “One Night at Babes” is set in Bethel, where two trans men bought a dive bar in 2017 and reopened it as a slightly cleaner dive bar named Babes. Aging, conservative locals began drinking beer there with queer leftists. Madsen, a University of Vermont associate professor in media and 2022 Guggenheim fellow, stitched together character portraits, intimate conversations and dance sequences to document interactions that are delicate, dynamic and dramatic.
Bettmann took her cameras to Glover, where, with artist Susan Calza, she filmed Bread and Puppet’s Schumann as he produced one of his famous bedsheet paintings. “He was painting on two bedsheets, so he called it a diptych,” said Bettmann, who toured with Bread and Puppet for four years in the 1970s and has performed with the troupe intermittently since.
Schumann, 90, has been painting his entire life, Bettmann said, “so I thought it was a good idea to catch him in the act.” The resulting film, “Painting the Dandelion Resurrection,” premieres at the festival.
Montpelier filmmaker Lukas Huffman programmed the four narrative works in “Family Matters: A Tour of Vermont Short Films,” which will have two showings on Thursday, October 24. Set and filmed in Vermont, they range from dramatic comedy to horror. Also screening twice, on Saturday, October 26, is Pomp & Circumstance, an episodic comedy by Adrian Anderson and Patrick Gray. It follows three college seniors and an adjunct architecture lecturer who runs for Burlington mayor.
Beyond the Vermont-made films, Separated, the latest documentary from Academy Award winner Morris (The Fog of War), will screen on Sunday, October 20. Based on Jacob Soboroff‘s book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, it examines Donald Trump’s border policy that separated immigrant children from their parents. MSNBC Films purchased the documentary. The network took heat last week when it reportedly decided to wait to air it until after the election.
Three music documentaries, Eno, Pavements and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, offer diverse takes on the genre, said MacQueen, who called the latter “one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Tickets have sold out for the opening-night film, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, the Grand Prix winner at the Cannes Film Festival. As of press time, seats were still available for Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983) and Working Girls (1986). The writer, director, editor — and winner of the 2024 Vermont International Film Festival Award for Outstanding Contribution to American Cinema — will participate in discussions after both films.
Other talks serve to link international films to Vermont, MacQueen said. Directors of the Middlebury College Museum of Art and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College will speak following Dahomey, Mati Diop’s documentary about the sometimes difficult attempts to repatriate looted artistic treasures. UVM math professor Chris Danforth will discuss his efforts to measure happiness following the Bhutanese film Agent of Happiness, and representatives of the Nature Conservancy will participate in a panel discussion following Nocturnes, an Indian documentary that follows researchers as they track and count moths in the Eastern Himalayas.
As MacQueen said, “What we’re trying to do is take stuff from around the world and then ground it locally.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Local Films Screen at Vermont International Film Festival”
This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2024.
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