By Jim Lowe
TIMES ARGUS
The Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival resumes its statewide Vermont tour, following a two-year hiatus. Two top films from its 2021 seventh annual festival will screen in six towns across the state on the expanded weekend of Feb. 3-6.
“We found ourselves working to address a theme of connection at this year’s film festival,” Jay Craven, MNFF artistic director, said, “perhaps because, during the pandemic, connection has been such a challenge — and has never seemed so important.
“The two films we’ll tour are exemplary for the ways they articulate this theme,” Craven said. “In ‘Storm Lake,’ an intrepid newspaperman and his family produce an essential small-town newspaper that, like similar endeavors in America’s nooks and crannies, provides the connective tissue that defines community.
“In ‘The Ants and the Grasshopper,’ an enterprising small village farmer, Anita Chitaya, decides she wants to travel half-way around the world, to meet American farmers, seeking connection and a dialogue on climate change that poses an existential threat to her way of life,” Craven said.
The tour will stop in Rutland on Saturday, Feb. 5, for a screening of “Storm Lake” at 1 p.m. and “The Ants & The Grasshopper” at 4 p.m., at the Paramount Theatre. “Storm Lake” director and producer Beth Levison will attend and participate in a Q&A session following the screening, moderated by Jim Lowe, arts editor of the Rutland Herald.
Other Vermont Tour dates include: Burlington Feb. 3, Putney Feb. 4 and 5, Woodstock Feb. 5 and 12, Randolph Feb. 6 and Dover Feb. 6.
When the tour was initiated in 2016, included were all New England states, but it was reduced to Vermont only after two years.
“We need to focus exclusively on Vermont,” explained Lloyd Komesar, the festival’s producer and co-founder with Craven. “The vast majority of our attendees, our market, folks who care are here. So we reshaped it as the Vermont Tour and took it out in 2018.
So this is our fourth go-round,” he said. “We’re back, very grateful to our six venues who are open, and want to screen these two documentaries, regardless of the challenges they face.”
“Storm Lake,” directed by Levison and Jerry Risius, was the opening night film at the August festival. It’s the story of the 63-year-old Pulitzer-prize winning editor Cullen and his family-run newspaper, The Storm Lake Times, in Storm Lake, Iowa. Twice weekly, the Cullens deliver local news and biting editorials on a shoestring budget for their 3,000 readers.
In the face of significant long-term economic challenges in western Iowa and the added stress of the pandemic, the paper fights to preserve its editorial integrity, shore up its finances and bolster the quiet community the Cullens call home. An intimate and revealing chronicle of local journalism in rural America, featuring the charismatic Art Cullen, his brother and publisher John, Art’s wife Dolores and Art’s son Tom,
Levison, multiple Emmy Award-winner and a graduate of Middlebury College, will accompany the film and participate in Q&A sessions at several tour stops. She has toured extensively with the film in Iowa and throughout the Midwest.
“The Ants & The Grasshopper” was the festival’s closing night film where it was introduced by environmental activist Bill McKibben. It tells the story of Anita Chitaya, a woman from Malawi who has a marvelous gift: She can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality and she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she attempts her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real.
Traveling from Malawi to California to the White House, she meets climate skeptics and despairing farmers. Her journey takes her across all the divisions shaping the United States, from the rural-urban divide, to schisms of race, class and gender, to the thinking that allows Americans to believe that we live on a different planet from everyone else.
Directed by Raj Patel, New York Times best-selling author and currently teaching at the University of Texas, and Zak Piper, Emmy Award-winning producer and director, “The Ants & The Grasshopper” has often been described as a film that genuinely embodies the impact of social activism.
“By reviving its popular Vermont Tour, the festival rekindles its connection with audiences around the state,” Komesar said.
jim.lowe @rutlandherald.com
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