• Courtesy
• Movies posters for the Vermont Film & Folklore Festival

The Vermont Film & Folklore Festival, a new, four-day event celebrating the art of storytelling, begins on Thursday, May 23, in Manchester. Its lineup of 45 award-winning movies includes documentaries, shorts, and new and classic narrative features made in Vermont and around the world.

The inaugural event is the brainchild of two film industry veterans and former rivals in entertainment publishing who both moved to Vermont with their respective families: Tim Rhys, founder of MovieMaker, an international magazine for independent filmmakers; and Karol Martesko-Fenster, cofounder of Filmmaker Magazine. The competing publications launched within six months of each other in 1992, though the publishers, who for decades were based on opposite coasts, never met or spoke.

That is, until the early days of the pandemic, when they met outside a Jamaican food truck in Manchester, recognized each other from photos and struck up a conversation.

Over dinner one night, Rhys and Martesko-Fenster got to talking about Vermont — what they liked and found lacking. Since both were independent film enthusiasts and regular jurors at international film festivals, they remarked on the absence of a comparable event in southern Vermont. The Vermont Film & Folklore Festival was born from their conversation.

Why "folklore"? As Rhys explained in an interview, the founders don't want their Manchester event to be just another of the roughly 6,000 film festivals held worldwide every year. They envision it as a celebration of storytelling in all of its written and oral forms.

This year's fest features a seminar on traditional Vermont storytelling with local author and folklorist Joe Citro. In future years, Rhys said, they hope also to delve into poetry, music and spoken word.

An initial challenge for the festival was the lack of a cinema in Manchester; the town's only movie house, Village Picture Shows Cinema, closed in 2019.

In its place, the Vermont Film & Folklore Festival will screen movies at four venues in Manchester: Southern Vermont Arts Center, Riley Center for the Performing Arts at Burr & Burton Academy, Manchester Community Library, and Wheelwrite Imaginarium.

The last venue, a small bookshop and coffeehouse owned by Rhys and his wife, Jessica, will offer limited-seating showings of such cinematic classics as White Heat (1949), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), On the Waterfront (1954) and Criss Cross (1949), all on 16-millimeter film.

The now-rare format was popular in the decades before home videos, Rhys explained. When movies such as La Strada (1954) or Double Indemnity (1944) — both also being screened — didn't come to a nearby theater, film buffs could order a 16-millimeter print and watch it at home. Collectors have since restored those old prints, some of which Rhys obtained for the festival. For viewers who've never watched a film on celluloid, he added, "It's just a warmer ... magical experience."

The festival will highlight Vermonter-made films such as "Lia: A Bodybuilding Story" (2023) by director Susan Weiss and "Love of the Land" (2024), a short animated film by Travis Van Alstyne based on the tragic tale of Vermont farmer Romaine Tenney. "Steve's Chapel: Building a Sacred Space" (2023), by Gail Osherenko, tells the true story of an 80-year-old man's quest to build a chapel similar to those of northern Europe on his property, while Bess O'Brien's 2024 documentary Just Getting By follows the day-to-day challenges of low-income Vermonters.

One bit of kismet from the festival: When Rhys was 12, his aunt gave him a book for Christmas titled Mischief in the Mountains: Strange Tales of Vermont and Vermonters. Among the short stories in the 1970 book was one that Rhys used years later as the basis for a movie script, which was never filmed. Bizarrely, one of the first submissions for the festival was a 16-minute short, made in 2023 by Vermonters Sarah Wisner and Sean Temple, called "The Thaw." It was based on that same story.

You can't script that kind of serendipity.