VFMF Film Program
June 3-5, 2022
A film program providing some portraits of America. Film Schedules subject to change.
June 3, Friday: Stowe Cinema
The Sound of Silence, 7:00 PM
Stowe Story Labs Mentor Film Program
(Narrative Feature starring Peter Saarsgard, Rashida Jones, Tony Revolori)
Directed by Michael Tyburski. Written by Ben Nabors and Michael Tyburski. Produced by Jonathan Duffy and Michael Prall
A successful "house tuner" in New York City, who calibrates the sound in people's homes in order to adjust their moods, meets a client with a problem he can't solve.
Q&A with Jonathan Duffy and Ben Nabors following the screening. Reception following the Q&A.
June 4, Saturday: Stowe Cinema
The Neutral Ground, 12:00 PM
Sidewalk Film Festival ‘Southern Voices’ Program
(Documentary)
Directed by CJ Hunt
The Neutral Ground documents New Orleans’ fight over monuments and America’s troubled romance with the Lost Cause. In 2015, director CJ Hunt was filming the New Orleans City Council’s vote to remove four confederate monuments. But when that removal is halted by death threats, CJ sets out to understand why a losing army from 1865 still holds so much power in America.
Stowe Story Labs Alumni Short Films Block, 12:30 PM
A curated block of short films chosen by the Stowe Story Labs Short Film Program Team.
Variables: Written and Directed by Sabina Vajraca
In the middle of the Bosnian War, a teenage math-wiz is given a way out of the bloodshed when his math club gets an invitation to compete at the 1995 International Math Olympiad in Canada. Inspired by true events.
Ride or Die: Written, Directed, and Produced by Josalynn Smith
Paula and Jamie are on their way to Thebes—Thebes, Kentucky that is….
The Dark of Night: Written by Denise Meyers
A traveler finds shelter from a downpour at a diner in the middle of nowhere. Inside, she finds a waitress with a black eye, a grease bag in a cheap suit, and a shady cop on the take.
Shipwreck: Written and Directed by Lisa Cole
Portrait of a young girl navigating grief, loss and sense of identity.
January 14th: Written, directed, and executive produced by La'Chris Jordan
A young couple’s anniversary takes a bittersweet turn when a police officer pulls the husband over on a questionable traffic stop. Inspired by true events.
Passive Aggressive Dads: Written and Directed by Jim Picariello
Two middle-aged dads just want to spend a quiet day with their daughters at the park. But when an obnoxious group of teens drive by, too fast and too loud, it spurs these aging, disgruntled dads into a self-righteous act of passive-aggression.
SNCC, 1:00 PM
Sidewalk Film Festival ‘Southern Voices’ Program
(Documentary)
Directed by Danny Lyon
A non-fiction account of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and its successful efforts to break the back of Jim Crow. Photographer Danny Lyon made SNCC after years of work, filming his friend John Lewis as early as 2008, then Julian Bond, both of whom sadly died after their final interviews in this film. Using hundreds of unknown 35mm stills Lyon shot in the deep south at the height of the Movement, and recordings made inside the churches in the early 1960’s, he recreates one of the most successful student organizations in history, the SNCC, the point of the spear in bringing Jim Crow to its knees.
HollyShorts Short Film Block, 3:00PM
A curated block of short films chosen by the HollyShorts Film Festival
I am a Pebble: Directed by Mélanie Berteraut Platon, Yasmine Bresson, Léo Coulombier, Nicolas Grondin, Maxime Le Chapelain, Louise Massé
Bubble, a young otter, lives with three mossy stones and thinks of them as her family.
Team Meryland: Directed, edited, and shot by Gabriel Gaurano
Born and raised in the Watts projects of Los Angeles, twelve-year-old female boxer Meryland Gonzalez fights in-and-out of the ring for the dream to be crowned the 2019 Junior Olympics champion.
Mountain Cat: Written and Directed by Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir
A troubled teenage girl is coerced into seeing a local shaman in search of spiritual healing.
Cracked: Written and Directed by Lin Que Ayoung
After a series of disturbing events, a young girl is compelled to face her traumatic past.
Little Bear: Directed by Nicolas Birkenstock
A young girl sleepwalks and runs away at night. Now she wants to see where she goes.
Freddie Mercury: The Final Act, 3:30 PM
(Documentary)
Stowe Story Labs Mentor Film Program
Directed by James Rogan (2022 BAFTA Nominee)
The extraordinary story of Freddie Mercury’s battle with Aids and the groundbreaking tribute concert Queen staged in his memory after he died.
Sword of Trust, 4:00 PM
Sidewalk Film Festival ‘Southern Voices’ Program
(Narrative Feature)
Directed by Lynn Shelton
A woman inherits a sword from her grandfather that she believes proves the South won the Civil War. In attempting to sell the alleged artifact, she meets white supremacists eager to revise history.
Wrestle, 7:00 PM
Sidewalk Film Festival ‘Southern Voices’ Program
(Documentary)
Directed by Suzannah Herbert and Co-Directed by Lauren Belfer
Hoop Dreams goes to the mat in this intimate, coming-of-age documentary about four members of a high-school wrestling team at Huntsville’s J.O. Johnson High School, a longstanding entry on Alabama’s list of failing schools. Coached by teacher Chris Scribner, teammates Jailen, Jamario, Teague, and Jaquan each face challenges far beyond a shot at the State Championship: splintered family lives, drug use, teenage pregnancy, mental health struggles, and run-ins with the law threaten to derail their success on the mat and lock any doors that could otherwise open. Tough-love coach Scribner isn’t off the hook, either; he must come to terms with his own past conflicts while unwittingly wading into the complexities of race, class and privilege in the South.
Director Suzannah Herbert and Co-Director Lauren Belfer captured over 650 hours of footage during the course of the team’s final season to create this closely observed, deeply affecting depiction of growing up disadvantaged in America today.
Bootlegger, 7:30 PM
Stowe Story Labs Alumni Film
(Narrative Feature)
Directed by Caroline Monnet, Written by Daniel Watchorn (Stowe Story Labs alumni)
Mani, a master’s student, returns to the reserve in northern Quebec where she grew up. Her painful past resurfaces. Resolved to reinte-grate into the community, she gets involved in the debate around a referendum on allowing the free sale of alcohol on the reserve. Laura, a bootlegger, pockets the profits she makes there under the protection of the band council and her partner Raymond. The latter is still angry with Mani, whom he holds responsible for the death of his daughter in a fire. Opposing forces quickly divide the community into two sides who face each other to determine the best path to independence.
Q&A with the Screenwriter to follow the screening.
The Peanut Butter Falcon, 8:00 PM
Sidewalk Film Festival ‘Southern Voices’ Program
(Narrative Feature)
Directed by Michael Schwartz and Tyler Nilson
A young man with Down syndrome teams up with a scruffy outlaw to travel across the Southeast, encountering colorful characters along the way.
NYX Horror Collective Shorts and The Babadook, 9:30 PM
This screening will have three components:
A short, panel discussion about the evolving horror genre and the intent behind these horror short films with members of the Nyx Horror Collective
Stowe Story Labs has partnered with the Nyx Horror Collective to present these short films and to inaugurate a fellowship to this year’s Stowe Narrative Lab. The Collective was founded by a group of diverse woman-identifying horror creators to develop, celebrate and elevate original, women-led horror content. Their members are transforming the genre through stories that explore race, gender, sexuality, mental and chronic illness, body image and more.
13 Minutes of Horror Program
The 13 Minutes of Horror is a film festival for women horror filmmakers, inclusive of BIWOC, LGBTQ+ women, disabled women, and non-binary creators.
The Babadook
(Narrative Feature starring Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall, Hayley McElhinney, Barbara West, and Ben Winspear)
Directed by Jennifer Kent
Based on Kent's 2005 short film Monster, which follows a single mother who must confront her son's fear of a monster in their home. Six years after the violent death of her husband, Amelia (Essie Davis) is at a loss. She struggles to discipline her ‘out of control’ 6 year-old, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), a son she finds impossible to love. Samuel’s dreams are plagued by a monster he believes is coming to kill them both.
Sunday, June 5: Stowe Cinema
Hale County This Morning, This Evening, 11:00 AM
Sidewalk Film Festival ‘Southern Voices’ Program
(Documentary)
Directed, Filmed, Edited, and Written by RaMell Ross
An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, Hale County this Morning, This Evening follows Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two young African American men from rural Hale County, Alabama, over the course of five years. Collins attends college in search of opportunity, while Bryant becomes a father to an energetic son in an open-ended, poetic film that privileges the patiently observed instertices of their lives. The audience is invited to experience the mundane and monumental, birth and death, the quotidian and the sublime. These moments combine to communicate the region’s deep culture and provide glimpses of the complex ways the African American community’s collective image is integrated into America’s visual imagination.
Gay Chorus Deep South, 1:00 PM
Sidewalk Film Festival ‘Southern Voices’ Program
(Documentary)
Directed by David Charles Rodrigues
In response to a wave of discriminatory anti-LGBTQ laws and the divisive 2016 election, the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus embarks on a tour of the American Deep South. Led by Gay Chorus Conductor Dr. Tim Seelig and joined by The Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir; the tour brings a message of music, love and acceptance to communities and individuals confronting intolerance. Over 300 singers travelled from Mississippi to Tennessee through the Carolinas and over the bridge in Selma. They performed in churches, community centers and concert halls in hopes of uniting us in a time of difference. The journey also challenges Tim and other Chorus members who fled the South to confront their own fears, pain and prejudices on a journey toward reconciliation. The conversations and connections that emerge offer a glimpse of a less divided America, where the things that divide us—faith, politics, sexual identity—are set aside by the soaring power of music, humanity and a little drag.
Accepted, 1:30 PM
Sidewalk Film Festival ‘Southern Voices’ Program
(Documentary)
Directed by Dan Chen
Four ambitious students fight for their future at TM Landry, a controversial school that sends its graduates to elite universities.
Just Mercy, 2:00 PM
Sidewalk Film Festival ‘Southern Voices’ Program
(Biographical Legal Drama)
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton
A powerful and thought-provoking true story, Just Mercy follows young lawyer Bryan Stevenson (Jordan) and his history-making battle for justice. After graduating from Harvard, Bryan had his pick of lucrative jobs. Instead, he heads to Alabama to defend those wrongly condemned or who were not afforded proper representation, with the support of local advocate Eva Ansley (Larson). One of his first, and most incendiary, cases is that of Walter McMillian (Foxx), who, in 1987, was sentenced to die for the notorious murder of an 18-year-old girl, despite a preponderance of evidence proving his innocence and the fact that the only testimony against him came from a criminal with a motive to lie. In the years that follow, Bryan becomes embroiled in a labyrinth of legal and political maneuverings and overt and unabashed racism as he fights for Walter, and others like him, with the odds—and the system—stacked against them.
A League of Their Own, 3:00 PM
Stowe Story Labs Alumni Program
Directed by Penny Marshall
Tom Hanks, Geena Davis and Madonna star in this major-league comedy from the team that brought you Big. Hanks stars as Jimmy Dugan, a washed-up ballplayer whose big league days are over. Hired to coach in the All-American Girls Baseball League of 1943, while the male pros are at war, Dugan finds himself drawn back into the game by the heart and heroics of his all-girl team. Jon Lovitz adds a scene-stealing cameo as the sarcastic scout who recruits Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis), the baseball dolly with a Babe Ruth swing. Teammates Madonna, Lori Petty and Rosie O'Donnell round out the roster, taking the team to the World Series. Based on the true story of the pioneering women who blazed the trail, on the fields and off, for generations of athletes.
Artist Q&A following screening with Lea Robinson (Stowe Alum and soon to star in Amazon Studios/Sony Pictures Television TV remake of A League of Their Own)
The Order of Myths, 4:00 PM
Sidewalk Film Festival ‘Southern Voices’ Program
(Documentary)
Directed by Margaret Brown
The first Mardi Gras in America was celebrated in Mobile, Alabama in 1703. In 2007, it was still racially segregated.
Filmmaker Margaret Brown (Be Here to Love Me: A Film about Townes Van Zandt), herself a daughter of Mobile, escorts us into the parallel hearts of the city's two carnivals to explore the complex contours of this hallowed tradition and the elusive forces that keep it organized along enduring color lines.
With unprecedented access, Brown traces the exotic world of secret mystic societies and centuries-old traditions and pageantry; diamond-encrusted crowns, voluminous, hand-sewn gowns and trains, surreal masks and enormous paper mache floats. Against this opulent backdrop, she uncovers a tangled web of historical violence, power dynamics and intertwined and interdependent race relations.
Two Queen Sugar Episodes, 5:00 PM
Stowe Story Labs Mentor Film Program
Moving So Easily Through That Common Depth (2021) and Or Maybe Just Stay There (2021)
Directed by Stowe Story Labs Mentors Shari Carpenter and Bertha Bay-Sa Pan
We will close this year’s festival with an exploration of 21st Century Television, and a live Q&A with two top emerging filmmakers and Stowe Story Labs mentors Shari Carpenter and Bertha Bay-Sa Pan. Reception following the Q&A.
Thank you to the NEA, our partners, and sponsors for making this festival possible and free.