Documentaries begin this weekend with a moving meditation on a Quechee orchard and the nature of time
By Tom Ayres, Senior Staff Writer
Skillfully crafted and artfully told, documentary films are the quintessence of compelling storytelling. That fact will be demonstrated anew at Billings Farm & Museum this weekend when the first of nine films in the 14th annual Woodstock Vermont Film Series is shown on Saturday and Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m.
The series, which will screen in the intimate confines of the Visitor Center Theater at the farm and museum, will transport audiences around Vermont, the country, and the world, sharing stories of the natural world, musical geniuses, artists, journalists, and the search for identity and meaning in the modern world. The series is curated each year by renowned Vermont filmmaker and arts presenter Jay Craven, who spoke last weekend about the thematic thread that ties together the nine films in the 2023-24 film fest, which runs through mid-February.
“This particular series is dealing with a number of individual characters,” Craven offered in a phone conversation on Sunday. “There’s not a complete thematic unity, but when you think of [Quechee orchardist] Terry Dorman, Joan Baez, and Yogi Berra, there’s some element of complex portraits. They’re not just glowing portraits of larger-than-life personalities. The films in the series all deal with people with complications in their lives — the human journey. Great documentaries reveal multi-dimensional, complex characters — and if you’ve got great characters, it’s a big start to making an effective documentary.”
The opening film in the 2023-24 Woodstock Vermont Film Series is a case in point — and it tells a tale from a particularly Vermont perspective. “Whitman Brook,” directed by award-winning Norwich documentarian Ben Silberfarb, is the story of an orchard and its stewards. It’s a story of love, loss, rejuvenation, and the act of caring for a special place on the planet that has endured — and will continue to endure — long into the future.
“This film is about life’s pace. It’s about our place in time and environmental stewardship. And it’s a love story,” filmmaker Silberfarb, whose celebrated body of work has largely focused on humankind’s intersections with the natural world, said during a chat from his Norwich home on Saturday morning. “It had its beginning in the winter of 2021. Terry called me up and invited me to come over with the idea of kind of just documenting some of the goings-on at the orchard and the processes he goes through — the pruning, the grafting. After just half an hour of hanging out with Terry, I knew that there was a much deeper story to be told. Over the next two years a friendship developed as I followed all four seasons of the orchard. Terry has a unique sensibility and a wonderful sense of the land and the landscape and the history of his property.”
Asked if there was something about “Whitman Brook” that was especially evocative of Vermont and a Vermonter’s sense of place, Silberfarb was unequivocal. “The thing I’ve noticed in showing this film around and going to film festivals with it is that in Vermont — and New England in general — there’s a certain aesthetic about how the story unfolds,” the “Whitman Brook” director offered. “The film is about New Englanders. Terry is from Massachusetts and came to Vermont many years ago. The workers at the orchard are all Vermonters or from New Hampshire, so there’s this underlying New England aesthetic. The success of the film to date has been mostly concentrated in New England. There’s just an aesthetic here that people really get.”
The opening film in this year’s Woodstock Vermont Film Series, “Whitman Brook” will be shown this Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 4-5, at 3 p.m. in the Visitor Center Theater at Billings Farm & Museum. Filmmaker Silberfarb and Quechee orchardist Dorman will take part in a “behind-the-scenes” question-and-answer session, moderated by series curator Craven, following the Saturday screening.
Here’s a glance at the other eight films slated for screening in the film series over the next three months.
“Dusty & Stones,” Nov. 18-19, tells the story of two country music singers from the tiny African kingdom of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) who are unexpectedly invited to record in Nashville and take part in a battle of the bands in Texas.
“Breaking the News,” Dec. 2-3, spotlights a group of women and LGBTQ+ journalists who banded together in 2020 to launch a news service that asks questions about who is overlooked in conventional journalism and how their stories can be told.
“Close to Vermeer,” Dec. 16-17, goes behind the scenes of the largest exhibition of Vermeer paintings ever, mounted earlier this year at the famed Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
“Pianoforte,” Dec. 30-31, a nominee for the Grand Jury Prize at the venerable Sundance Film Festival, is a “fly-on-the-philharmonic wall” documentary about one of the most prestigious competitions in classical music, the International Chopin Piano Competition.
“Joan Baez: I Am A Noise,” Jan. 13-14, focuses on the legendary folk singer and political activist as she takes an honest look back at her 60-year career and a deep look inward at her history-making life.
“All That Breathes,” Jan. 27-28, explores the lives of two brothers in one of the most crowded cities in the world who fall in love with a bird, the black kite. The relationship between the Muslim family and the neglected kite provides a poetic chronicle of a collapsing urban ecosystem and rising social tensions in contemporary India.
“Joonam,” Feb. 3-4, is the other Vermont-made film in the 2023-24 series. A young Vermont filmmaker, Sierra Urich, delves into her mother and grandmother’s complicated pasts while exploring her own fractured Iranian-American identity.
And lastly, “It Ain’t Over,” Feb. 17-18, an intimate portrait of an American icon, an inspiring documentary about Yogi Berra that moves beyond the Hall of Fame catcher’s fractured quotes, beloved as “Yogi-isms,” to explore the sports legend’s unparalleled, Hall of Fame accomplishments on the baseball diamond.
Tickets to each film in the 2023-24 Woodstock Vermont Film Series are $12 for Billings Farm members and $15 for general attendance. Films are shown at 3 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday. Several of the screenings will feature post-showing Q&A sessions with the filmmakers. View film trailers and purchase tickets in advance at billingsfarm.org/filmseries.