On a recent Saturday night, about 70 people packed into the Spiral House Art Collective on Burlington’s Church Street to watch a series of short films. The eclectic lineup included “Sicky Sick,” a video analysis of the comic book ODY-C — a gender-bent retelling of The Odyssey set in outer space; “Flood Control,” a satirical dive into one character’s desperate (and doomed) attempts to stop the Winooski River from flooding; and “First Light,” six minutes of circles pulsating hypnotically.
This is Mothership Monthly Film Fest, an amateur filmmaking competition for which no movie is too zany or abstract. Burlington resident Dillon Tanner, 32, has been hosting the fest at Spiral House on the first Saturday of every month since June 2023. The only rules: Films must be under seven minutes and created in less than a month. Tanner hopes the accessible format will spark local interest in filmmaking.
“You have enough time to actually make something but not enough time to overthink it.” Dillon Tanner
“A lot of the short filmmaking that happens now is debuted online, and all your interactions happen over Instagram or YouTube,” Tanner said. “With this, you get to sit down and watch it with a real group of people — which is way more fun.”
The festival’s name comes from the former moniker of the second-floor venue, Mothership VT, which operated as a community center and party venue. The Spiral House Art Collective now hosts a wide range of events in the space, from an “anarchist skill share” to yoga.
Each Mothership film fest kicks off with a live act, from standup comedy to pole dancing paired with live harp music. Then the movies are screened, each of them exploring a monthly one-word theme, such as “afterlife,” “sour” and “blue.” (January’s theme was “flashback.”) Audience members vote for their favorite, and filmmakers participate in a Q&A session while the votes are counted.
Nearly all the featured filmmakers work with no budget and shoot on iPhones, Tanner said, giving the films a YouTube-style aesthetic that prioritizes creative storytelling over polished technique. The DIY spirit is also one reason Tanner decided to host the fest monthly.
“It’s a nice in-between where you have enough time to actually make something but not enough time to overthink it,” Tanner said. “Everyone that’s made something has had to come through that same energy, like, Fuck, I gotta put this together in, like, a really short amount of time.”
Ryan Siegmann, a 32-year-old preschool teacher in Burlington, has submitted a film at every Mothership event since the fest’s inception. He described his January submission, “Sicky Sick,” as “just me being delirious and reading a comic book.” He won the first-ever fest with his short film “Sea Skeleton,” which explores the deeper meaning behind a game of mermaids Siegmann plays with the 3-year-old he babysits. Siegmann said he was drawn to the accessibility of the fest.
“I saw the flyer, and I was like, Wow, I’ve never done this before,” he said. “It looks really amateur, the stakes are low, and it’s a really welcoming environment.”
Other winning films have included “Fluting by Bike,” which captures filmmaker Deborah Kraft playing recorder at various stops along her 2,000-mile bike tour in Chile; “Driftwood,” Marina Khananayev’s short documentary about a man who creates art from driftwood he collects on the shores of Seneca Lake in New York; and “Little Miss Most Dexterous Toes,” a two-minute video starring “Toemelia,” in which someone bakes cookies using just their feet. The film is surprisingly mesmerizing.
Tanner, who works by day as a freelance photographer and videographer, has submitted a number of his own short films to the fest. He’s also the creator of the feature-length documentary Roland & Mary: A Winter of Towing in the Northeast Kingdom, about St. Johnsbury towing company Roland’s Wrecker Service. It appeared in Vermont Public’s local film series “Made Here.”
But Mothership Monthly Film Fest is most popular with more rookie cinematographers, such as January’s winning filmmaker, Robert Langellier. The 33-year-old University of Vermont graduate student said he and his friend Matthias Sirch shot “Flood Control” on an iPhone and assembled the footage using a free version of the editing software DaVinci Resolve.
In the satirical short, Langellier throws tiny rocks into the Winooski River in an attempt to build a dam. When that doesn’t pan out, he digs with a tiny shovel in hopes of constructing a canal. The futile attempts to change the river’s course are set to melodramatic music.
Though excited to win the fest — and the prize of a pool-noodle “sculpture” — Langellier said the highlight of the night was hearing his film elicit laughter from the crowd.
“I love that this is so grassroots and so accessible to ordinary people like me,” Langellier said. “I’ve never seen a film festival like this before.”
Mothership Monthly Film Fest, Saturday, February 1, and the first Saturday of every month, 8 p.m., at Spiral House Art Collective in Burlington. $10.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Shot on iPhone | DIY filmmakers compete in Burlington’s Mothership Monthly Film Festival”
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2025.
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