VTIFF Program-Guide 2024 - Flipbook - Page 2
CONTENTS
WELCOME TO VTIFF 2024!
Welcome to the 2024 Vermont
International Film Festival.
It’s been a year of changes at
VTIFF with new leadership, new
offices, and even a new screening
venue (The Screening Room on
the first floor of Main Street
Landing…check it out!), but this
year’s festival emphasizes what
we’re known for: dozens of great
films from around the world, filmmaker Q&As, historical
context, and lots of animated discussions in the lobby.
If I was forced to pick some highlights, here are a few I’d
look at:
• Three wildly different music documentaries—Eno,
Pavements, and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat—subvert
the genre to come up with something fabulous.
• Fully half of this year’s films feature women directors.
• We’ll present maverick filmmaker Lizzie Borden with this
year’s VTIFF Award for Outstanding Contribution to
American Cinema, the auteur behind the revolutionary
films Born in Flames and Working Girls. She’ll be on hand
to introduce those films, discuss them, work with UVM
classes and students, and be an honored guest of the
festival.
• In the world of restorations, we revisit 1974 with Coppola
(The Conversation) and gore (The Texas Chain Saw
Massacre), and the hot-topic year of 1999 with the
ever-exciting Run Lola Run, all in pristine new 4K
restorations in the Film House.
• Thanks to the fine people at Coolidge Corner Theater in
Boston, we received a Science on Screen grant to bring
scientific content to movie screenings. In this, our
inaugural season, we’ll be hosting scientists for
presentations and conversations in connection with two
films, Agent of Happiness and Nocturnes (see the listings
for more information).
• Vermont is represented in a big way at this year’s festival
with new films by Vermonters, about Vermonters, set in
Vermont. There’s Angelo Madsen Minax’s doc about a
special bar in Bethel, One Night at Babes; Susan
Bettmann’s portrait of the great Peter Schumann,
Painting the Dandelion Resurrection; Charles Light’s Far
Out: Life on and After the Commune, a deep-dive on
commune life in Vermont and Massachusetts in the ’60s,
’70s, and beyond; Family Matters: A Tour of Short
Vermont Films, in which a group of four award-winning
Vermont filmmakers explore what it means to be a family
in Vermont; and, finally, there’s film conceived, created,
and made in Burlington about life at college, Pomp &
Circumstance.
• We’ll have some New England baseball fun with Eephus,
a film about a senior-league baseball team’s last game at
a revered field. The film features Vermont resident and
Burlington Cardinal (and former Boston Red Sox ace)
Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who’ll be on hand for the
festivities, along with a number of the Burlington
Cardinals, who are sponsoring the film.
Next year will be VTIFF’s 40th anniversary, and it’s
refreshing and humbling to think that, for all the changes
in the world and how we see and consume movies, VTIFF
is still thriving as a home for quality independent cinema
from around the world, and for audiences who want to
see it.
Let’s go watch some movies.
STEVE MACQUEEN,
VTIFF Executive Director
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VTIFF.ORG | VERMONT INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024
