"The indie spirit is strong at WRIF, which has a robust complement of offerings for filmmakers seeking support as well as inspiration...Whether you come for hard-hitting stories, heartwarming ones or both, this year's festival offers plenty of opportunities to fall in love with indie film." -Seven Days 2.5.25 | |
Come in from the cold for 12 bold new indie feature films, Oscar-nominated docs, 8 new shorts by local filmmakers and Emerging Filmmaker winners, Q&A's with filmmakers, "Filmmaker Friday" workshops, stand-up comedy, yoga, Valentine's Day Party and immersive media exhibits at WRIF 2025, returning to the Upper Valley for our 20th year! | | |
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Pre-festival Comedy Benefit Show
Feb 12 7:30PM @BOH
Ticketed event for ages 18+
Kick off WRIF with laughs as headliner Paul Ollinger (NYC Comedy Festival) is joined by Ian Levy, Rufat Agayev, and Shaunak Godkhindi for a night of comedy supporting WRIF and JAM's community programs. Tickets $25 or $15 with your WRIF pass! Friends and lovers get 2 tickets for $40!
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Filmmaker competition kick-off
Thursday, Feb 13 5:30PM FREE @BOH
Join the audience at the Briggs Opera House for #PitchFest 3.0, a shark-tank style competition where local film and media makers have 5 minutes to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges with the hopes of winning money to bring their vision to life!
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Local Films
Thursday, Feb 13 7PM @BOH
Enjoy completed short films by 2024 #PitchFest winners, plus VT docu-short, "One Night at Babe's." A filmmaker Q&A with Julia Anderson and Kiersten White of "Black Girls Kissing," Jacob Ford and Loren Howard of "Dizziness Man," and "One Night at Babe's" director Angelo Madsen Minax to follow, with 2025 Pitchfest 3.0 Winners to be announced!
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Indie film breakout
Thursday, Feb 13 8:30PM @BOH
Jean Kayak finds himself stranded in a surreal winter landscape with nothing but his dim wits to guide him. Made for just $150,000, Hundreds of Beavers eschews realism in favor of DIY special effects and slapstick antics. This breakout, self-distributed independent comedy will have you laughing until your ribs ache.
Directed by Mike Cheslik (USA)
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LOVE is in the air at WRIF!
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Filmmaker Workshops
Friday, Feb 14 @JAM
Workshops run 9AM-4:15PM
Join film and media professionals for a series of hands-on master class-style workshops in Cinema Lighting & Color (9AM), Film Scoring & Sound Design (10:30AM), Production Management (1:30PM), and Cartooning & Storyboarding for Pre-visualization (3PM), with a brown bag lunch panel of VT & NH filmmakers sharing creative solutions to getting their ideas to the screen. Join one workshop or get a pass for the day!
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Fesitval Kick-Off Party
Friday, Feb 14
5:30 - 6:45PM @BOH
FREE, ALL WELCOME!
Celebrate 20 years of WRIF with fellow film lovers and good music by Route 5 Jive, good food from Vermont Party Barn and a cash bar in the newly renovated Briggs Opera House Lobby. Take in a special photo exhibit connected to opening night film A Photographic Memory and join us in kicking off the festival with a bang!
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Opening Film + Short
Friday, Feb 14 7PM
@BOH
An intimate, genre-bending portrait of a daughter’s attempt to piece together a portrait of her mother, an avant-garde journalist she never knew. Directed by Rachel Elizabeth Seed (USA).
With short VT doc "Endlessly An Observer," an intimate portrait of portrait maker and Vermont artist Suzann Upton. Directed by Brian Carroll (VT), attending.
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Opening Late Night Film
Friday, Feb 14 9:30PM
@BOH
Unfolding over the course of Valentine’s Day in New Jersey, a young intersex sex worker must run from the mob after a drug deal goes sideways, forcing him to confront his past. Official selection at Sundance and Newfest, Ponyboi bursts off the screen in this bombastic, edgy, and campy roller-coaster ride of a film.
Directed by Esteban Arango (USA)
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Feature Film + Short
Saturday, Feb 15 12PM
@BOH
Canada's 2025 Oscar Submission and official selection at Cannes, TIFF, and New York Film Festival, Universal Language overflows with good cheer and kindness in a comedy told through multiple narratives reimagining a Canada where Persian and French are the two official languages.
Directed by Matthew Rankin (Canada)
With Emerging Filmmaker Winning short "Bee Well"
by Brandon Mioduszewski , attending
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Feature Film + Panel
@BOH
Oscar nominee and winner of Best Documentary at Berlinale, this eye-opening, vérité-style film serves as a moving portrait of the unlikely friendship between Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who form a philosophical and political alliance despite drastic differences in their abilities to exist freely in this world.
Directed by Rachel Szor, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, Basel Adra
(Palestine, Norway)
Followed by Panel Discussion moderated by Asst Prof. of History Aseel Najib with artist-activists Saba Maheen, Mona Shiber, and JuPong Lin
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Feature Film + Short
Saturday, Feb 15 5PM
@BOH
In this gorgeous story of youthful romance, fourteen-year-old Elias feels attracted to his new neighbor, Alexander, and soon realizes he’s in love for the very first time. This tender romance, set in the lush Belgian countryside and exuding warmth, has played for audiences at the Berlin and Frameline film festivals. Directed by Anthony Schatteman
(Belgium & Netherlands)
With Emerging Filmmaker Winning short "Within the Crystal Hills" by Griffin "The" Hansen
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Wellness Break
Saturday, Feb. 15 5PM
@Upper Valley Yoga
Move, stretch and enjoy a restorative yoga practice to help absorb and digest the many emotions that WRIF's films may give rise to (and sore bottoms from sitting). Upper Valley Yoga's Leslie Carleton will offer this 60-minute yoga practice FREE to any and all WRIF attendees. Please bring your own mat.
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Feature Film
Saturday, Feb. 15 7PM
@BOH
When lonely 12-year-old Bailey meets a kind drifter (Franz Rogowski,
Passages), something seems off. Incredible things begin to happen as the film shifts gears to magical realism in a manner that only a filmmaker like director Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, American Honey) could pull off. Official selection, Cannes and NY Film Festival.
(UK/Germany/France/US)
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Late-night Feature Film
Saturday, Feb. 15 9:15PM
@BOH
As a heat wave brings a Marseille neighborhood to the boil, three roommates gleefully meddle in the lives of their neighbours from their balcony. Until a late night drink turns into a bloody affair. Fresh from Cannes 2024, Noemi Merlant’s sophomore feature is an Almodóvarian rape-revenge ghost story that blares its bare-breasted, hard-knuckled feminism with bright colors and breathless plotting.
(France)
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**** WEATHER ADVISORY: We are keeping an eye on a winter storm developing this weekend. We will reschedule screenings on Monday Feb 17 if necessary. Ticket holders will receive EMAIL updates 24 hours ahead of screenings. General updates will be posted at UVJAM.ORG/WRIF | |
Feature Film + Short
Sunday, Feb 16 12PM
@BOH
On an empty road in the middle of the night, Shula stumbles across the body of her uncle. As funeral proceedings begin around them, she and her cousins bring to light the buried secrets of their middle-class Zambian family in filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s surreal and vibrant reckoning with the lies we tell ourselves.
(Zambia/UK/Ireland/US)
With short doc "I Believe I'll Go Back Home: Robert Johnson's Copiah County Roots & Living Legacy" by JAM's own Samantha Davidson Green, attending
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Feature Film + Short
Sunday, Feb 16 3PM
@BOH
In 1968, a group of radical journalists leave the city and politics to live communally as organic farmers. Blending contemporary interviews with a remarkable trove of archival footage,
Far Out tells a lively, inspiring, irreverent and honest story about how these “hippies” not only transformed Vermont and western Massachusetts, but how rural life changed them. Directed by Charles Light, attending with former commune members (USA). With short 16mm doc "Free Farm" from the Newsreel Collective (1970).
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Feature Film + Short
Sunday, Feb 16 6PM @BOH
Ailing filmmaker Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) wants to tell his life story, unfiltered, before it’s too late. From legendary screenwriter/director, Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, First Reformed) comes an outpouring of lapsed-Catholic guilt, lived lies and denied truth, in which the fragments of history fall together in a mosaic of aspect ratios and film stocks for a stunning visual and editing experience.
(US) With Emerging Filmmaker Winning short "Love of the Land" by Travis Van Alstyne, attending
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Feature + Short
Sunday, Feb 16 8PM @BOH
In the must-see debut feature of the year, Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel orchestrates a breakneck, empathetic thriller set within the modern refugee experience. As Palestinians Chatila and Reda hustle and steal their way through a miserly living in a refugee squat in Athens, they dream of one day opening a café in Germany and reuniting with family members displaced at a camp in Lebanon. A refreshing perspective in today’s discourse, Fleifel is emerging as one of the leading cinematic voices of the Middle Eastern diaspora.
(Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Greece, Netherlands, Germany, France, UK)
With Emerging Filmmaker Winning short "Deepfake Girl" by Annika Murdock, attending
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@ JAM – Junction Arts & Media
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Media Arts Exhibits
On display throughout the festival
Feb 12 - 16
@JAM – Junction Arts & Media
Experience STARLINGS : LEAFLETS, an interactive video art installation by artist and designer, Saba Maheen (Dartmouth '20) unpacking the IDF's leaflet campaign in Gaza. Maheen will participate in the 2/15 panel following 2pm screening of No Other Land.
With PEACE BIRDS, a community-engaged art action that grew out of a shared desire of Mona Shiber and JuPong Lin, two artist friends who come from lineages of occupation and struggle for sovereignty in Palestine and Taiwan, to transform the agony of witnessing atrocities. Shiber and Lin will participate in the 2/15 panel following 2pm screening of No Other Land.
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"...the 20th White River Indie Film (WRIF) Festival (is) opting for a lineup of global and local projects that marry humor, love and compassion with political resistance...'we really want to encourage people to come watch the movie and hang out..." - Valley News 2.6.25 | |
WRIF partnered with Hop Film for a preview co-presentation of Soundtrack to a Coup D'État and festival kick off at the Black Family Visual Arts Center. Great to see so many familiar faces and many new ones! | |
TOJ Marceau and Nora Jacobson | |
Carla Kimball and Annabelle Cone | |
Samantha Davidson Green, Craig Sterrit, Ali Punjani, Johanna Evans | | |
How does my gift help JAM?
When you make a gift to JAM – Junction Arts & Media, your donation enables JAM to empower all Upper Valley residents to have a creative voice, actively participate in local democracy, and find joy and belonging in the Upper Valley community. JAM is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Your gift may be tax-deductible.
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