The Vermont Film Festival will return to Woodstock for its fourth year on the weekend of July 31, moving for the first time to Billings Farm & Museum and leaning further into its founding mission: putting Vermont-made film in front of Vermont audiences.
“Billings Farm is a little bit more intimate,” said Collen Doyle, who co-founded the festival and also runs the Vermont Comedy Festival and the Woolen Mill Comedy Club in Bridgewater. “The setting is kind of the quintessential sort of Vermont experience. We have filmmakers coming in from all over the country…so we’re really excited to be able to host them in a place like Billings Farm that has livestock there, the cows and the grounds and the theater is really great. It’s state-of-the-art.”
Doyle runs the festival with Matt Vita, and this year, the two brought on a third co-director, Brian Carroll, founder of the online resource Film in Vermont and a board member of the Vermont Production Collective. Vita credited Carroll with helping steer the festival toward this year’s marquee film and said the addition reflects how the event has grown.
“He’s been honestly instrumental in filmmaking in Vermont,” Vita said. “It was really Brian that gave us a tip onto our premier feature film, ‘The Obelisk.’”
“The Obelisk,” directed by Béla Baptiste and produced by Emma Schlenoff, is the Vermont Film Festival’s featured film this year. Courtesy of the Vermont Film Festival
“The Obelisk,” directed by Béla Baptiste, produced by Emma Schlenoff and shot in southern Vermont, is the featured film on Saturday at 7 p.m. and is this year’s “shining gem,” Doyle said. The post-apocalyptic story follows a drifter and a mysterious veteran surviving in the wilds of the Northeast. Carroll, who watched an early cut after working alongside Schlenoff on the Vermont Production Collective board, said the film stood out for how it uses the state’s landscape.
“It just kind of captures the enormity of the landscapes here in a way that almost feels like a documentary, but it’s a narrative film,” Vita said. “I was just kind of blown away by the way that they were able to feature the state that we live in in a movie.”
Vermont ties run through much of this year’s slate, organizers said, an emphasis that has sharpened as submissions have grown. Doyle said the festival partnered this year with the Vermont Production Collective and that Carroll is separately running a program offering $50,000 to selected Vermont films as part of a broader study of the state’s film economy.
Beyond the screenings, organizers said they’ve tried to build in space for audiences and filmmakers to connect, including evening “CineMixer” gatherings in downtown Woodstock after Friday’s and Saturday’s blocks.
The Vermont Film Festival runs from July 31 to Aug. 2, with screenings at Billings Farm & Museum and CineMixer events in downtown Woodstock on Friday and Saturday nights. Day passes are $25.
For more on this, please see our July 16 edition of the Vermont Standard.
