Also screens on Saturday, October 25 | 4:45 PM | SR VTIFF celebrates its regional spring festival, offering six favorite short films from our 2025 edition, focusing on Vermont and Quebec, presented in partnership with Vermont Public. In Chantal Caron’s ravishing dance piece, Somber Tides, two avian creatures battle the elements. In Alexandre Isabelle’s À […]

Annapurna Sriram grew up in Nashville but her Vermont connections run deep. She was born in Burlington and spent much of her childhood here. Sriram and some key crew members even hunkered down in Burlington during the pandemic and hammered out much of the pre-production for Fucktoys right here. So Fucktoys may take place in […]

Radu Jude made two movies about vampires this year: his anarchic Spirit Halloween epic Dracula, where he reclaims and defiles a foundational myth of his homeland, and Kontinental ’25, a brilliant, bone-dry satire in which a government functionary feeds on the sympathy of everyone within earshot. Ostensibly inspired by Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist classic Europe ’51, […]

Also screens on Monday, October 20 | 4:00 PM | BB The Friday, October 24 screening is followed by a panel discussion and Q&A featuring local and regional librarians. In these divisive times, school librarians suddenly find themselves on the front lines of the culture wars. In some states, they can face prison sentences for […]

A woman (Juliette Lewis) somehow sends her consciousness into a coveted vintage chair, and is surprised to find that people like her better as a chair. Meanwhile, her friends tend to her now-inert body, assuming that she’s just just giving them the silent treatment. A highly unconventional comedy from Amanda Kramer (Please Baby Please), By […]

A movie that gets this far under your skin is a rare thing indeed. In director Sven Bresser’s atmospheric debut, a spectral thriller set in Weerribben-Wieden, deep in the Dutch countryside, a solitary farmer (real-life reed cutter Gerrit Knobbe) discovers the lifeless body of a girl on his land. Overcome by an ambiguous sense of […]

Also screens on Sunday, October 19 | 4:30 PM | BB Heads or Fails is an ode to chaos theory and to gross-out comedy. The Guit brothers’—Lenny and Harpo—sophomore effort, after the cult Sundance hit Mother Schmuckers, is a wonderful sugar rush of a movie. Full of pizzazz and lo-fi visual wit—not to mention a […]

The screening is followed by a Q&A with director Nancy Savoca and producer Richard Guay. In Dogfight, Nancy Savoca provides a snapshot of innocence just before it is lost. The story takes place over the course of a single night in 1963, when U.S. Marine Eddie (River Phoenix) encounters idealistic aspiring folksinger Rose (Lili Taylor). […]

In rural China, a farming community hews to tradition even as it feels the intractable pull of industrialization. Gorgeously photographed, director Huo Meng’s film is so perfectly, minutely observed that it often carries the feel of a documentary—or, more specifically, of real life—rather than a narrative film. That’s not to say there’s no artistry here; […]

Also screens on Sunday, October 26 | 12:30 PM | SR VTIFF celebrates the international short film with five magical works. Jason Adam Maselle’s Punter is a South African tale of a wayward father and the son who’s trying in vain to steer him right. Chheangkea’s witty and knowing Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites, set […]

If you’re down for rampant silliness, then you’ll have a blast with Dead Lover. Cheap fright wigs and accents that split the difference between Cockney and Elmer Fudd abound in Grace Glowicki’s sophomore feature. Her Bride of Frankenstein remix—where she’s both Dr. Frankenstein and the Bride—acquaints us with a lonely, pungent gravedigger who just wants […]

Let your little ones discover the magic of the big screen with Little Kid Flicks! This year’s charming collection of animated and live-action shorts features films from France, Chile, Uruguay, Taiwan, Japan, Slovakia, Czech Republic, UK, U.S., and Canada. The stories include beach vacation mishaps (Hello Summer), forest kids craving pancakes (Mojappi It’s Mine!), fed-up […]

A slow-moving, delicately paced gem of a film. A Buddhist family, long exiled to California, must make preparations for the father’s journey to the next life as he slowly dies. The religious practices and customs—and the visiting monks—provide both contrast and a strange harmony for the very middle-class American lifestyle the family has come to […]

There’s reporting, there’s investigative reporting, and there’s Seymour Hersch. In a career that has covered 60 years, including famous scoops on the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam and the torture and abuse of prisoners by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib Prison, Hersch has broken a lot of stories and generated at least an equal […]

Also screens on Saturday, October 19 | 4:45 PM | BB, and Tuesday, October 21 | 2:30 PM | SR Aspiring YA author Edward, an avatar for people-pleasers everywhere, agrees to look after the ailing mothers of some friends who are going on an unexpected vacation. Already caring for his own mother, he finds himself […]

In keeping with the intergenerational magic of Household Saints, filmmaker Martina Savoca-Guay has crafted a compelling documentary, The Many Miracles of Household Saints, revealing the improbable story behind the making of the film. It’s a fitting work, since director Nancy Savoca was pregnant during the shoot and Savoca-Guay was the baby she carried. Combining behind-the-scenes […]

The screening is followed by a Q&A with director Nancy Savoca and producer Richard Guay. A masterpiece of 1990s American independent cinema, Nancy Savoca’s Household Saints is also really hard to summarize, as it packs a universe or two into its small section of New York City. It’s there that Italian-American butcher Joseph (Vincent D’Onofrio, […]

Also screens on Monday, October 20 | 7:15 PM | BB Filmmaker Livia Vonaesch spent seven years at sea with the ever-growing Swiss family Schwörers, but it’s hard to imagine how they made space for her on their crowded vessel. The parents, Dario and Sabine, set sail 25 years ago to conduct field research in […]

Also screens on Thursday, October 23 | 8 PM | SR VTIFF celebrates its regional spring festival, offering six favorite short films from our 2025 edition, focusing on Vermont and Quebec, presented in partnership with Vermont Public. In Chantal Caron’s ravishing dance piece, Somber Tides, two avian creatures battle the elements. In Alexandre Isabelle’s À […]