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Next weekend, the two Dartmouth College graduates — Stern in 1987, Sundberg 1990 — and partners at the New York-based Break Thru Films will make an exception and detour to Vermont: In addition to screening two of the duo’s most acclaimed pictures, organizers of the third annual Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival will confer on them the festival’s annual award for sustained excellence in their craft.
“We don’t take any awards for granted,” Stern said during a telephone interview this week, “but I always say, especially to my kids, ‘You don’t do this work to get awards.’ This definitely is a business that gives a lot more awards these days than when we started out. It can be almost embarrassing, when there should be so many awards for really important work in education and helping refugees. Sometimes it feels like, ‘Really?’
“But this one was different.”
Indeed, how could they refuse, when festival artistic director Jay Craven called with the news — a quarter of a century after he brought them together to help him shoot his first feature in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom?
“On The Rivers Flow North, I was Jay’s assistant and Ricki worked on the second unit and ended up managing the set,” Sundberg said this week of Craven’s adaptation of Howard Frank Mosher’s novel. “I will never forget making that film.”
Nor did Craven forget Stern and Sundberg, while they evolved away from narrative, scripted feature films and toward documentaries. Their journey as a working team started in 1993 with The Trials of Darryl Hunt, which took 13 years to bring to the screen while Hunt fought his conviction for rape and murder in North Carolina. During that quest and over the ensuing years, they explored the war-ravaged Darfur region of Sudan and Burma’s military junta; collaborated on an examination of the knuckleball, much of it through the eyes of former Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield; and followed Joan Rivers on her relentless march through the stand-up comedy circuit.
“Annie and Ricki have made brave choices in the material they develop for their intensely personal films,” Craven wrote during an exchange of emails this week. “They have changed the conversation on many issues. … As someone who played a small role in mentoring them, early on, I’m extremely proud of each of them, their long partnership and their uncompromising independent vision. They have earned many accolades in their own right, including multiple Emmy nominations. It simply makes sense to extend our recognition, too, close to the place they started out.”
Before Craven bestows the award during the closing ceremonies on the 27th, the festival will screen Stern and Sundberg’s 2010 film Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, at Middlebury’s Marquis Theater at 10 a.m., and their most recent work, Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing, at the Town Hall Theater at 4 p.m.
In the case of Marathon, Stern recalled, she and Sundberg and their team were facing two obstacles: the upcoming release of Mark Wahlberg’s dramatization of the 2013 terror attack at the Boston Marathon, and the continuing changes in the real-life narrative, including the trial of surviving bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
“When the trial began, I turned to Ricki and said, ‘Hasn’t the story already been told?’” Sundberg recalled. “That’s when we went back and got more deeply into the survivor stories. We didn’t know the story right away. We had to find it.”
That approach of looking through the eyes of people who aren’t necessarily the ones quoted on the evening news and on the cable talk shows applies as well to the project to which Stern and Sundberg will return after their award and their vacations: a documentary about the ever-evolving battle over women’s reproductive rights more than 40 years after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion.
“Things keep happening in legislatures and in the courts,” Stern said. “We can’t go chasing every news event and cover it the way the news would. We have to be true to our characters who are part of the story. … All along, it’s been for us a need to be immersed in individuals who take us through the issues.”
The four-day festival also will highlight Norwich filmmaker Signe Taylor’s new documentary It’s Criminal: A Tale of Bridging the Divide. The movie, which will be screened next Friday afternoon at 1:30 at the Marquis Theater, follows a class of Dartmouth students in an experiential-learning course helping woman inmates of the Sullivan County jail in Unity to write a play about their experience with the criminal-justice system.
The third annual Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival runs from Aug. 24-27. The festival will confer its VTeddy Award for Sustained Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking on Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg during closing ceremonies on the 27th at 6:30 p.m. in Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater. For passes and tickets and for more information about the festival, visit middfilmfest.org.
Coming Attractions
If you missed the Upper Valley premiere of Maudie during last September’s Telluride at Dartmouth festival, or if you’re craving a second immersion in the biopic about Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis, the Hopkins Center is bringing it back tonight at 7 at Loew Auditorium in Hanover. While the sublime Sally Hawkins captures the spirit, inspiration and physical decline of the title character, the big revelation is Ethan Hawke as Maud’s taciturn, uneducated husband Everett. Newfoundland’s wild northeast coast stands in scenically for Lewis’ native west Nova Scotia. For tickets ($5 to $8) and more information, visit hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-727-3304.
On the House
The Library Arts Center in Newport screens the Disney charmer Chitty Chitty Bang Bang tonight at 6:30, as this month’s entry in the center’s series of family movies from the 1960s. Admission is free, and popcorn is available.
The United Methodist Church in White River Junction hosts a free screening of Disney’s live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast on Monday night at 8.
The Mascoma Film Society’s summer series of free movies enters the homestretch next week, with a screening of Cameron Crowe’s 2011 feature We Bought a Zoo on Wednesday night at 6:30 in the new auditorium at Mascoma Valley Regional High School in West Canaan. The film, starring Matt Damon as a widower who struggles to reopen a dilapidated zoo, is rated PG.
The series concludes on Aug. 30 at 6:30, with a screening of Ang Lee’s stirring martial-arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
On Stage
The Hopkins Center screens part 2 of the National Theater Live HD broadcast of the London revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, starring Andrew Garfield as Prior Walter and Nathan Lane as Roy Cohn, on Sunday afternoon at 4 at Loew Auditorium in Hanover. For tickets ($23) and more information, visit hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-727-3304.
Looking Back
As a benefit for the Friends of Hanover Football booster club, the Nugget Theater in Hanover shows Remember the Titans, starring Denzel Washington as the coach of a diverse football team in a racially-divided Southern town, on Saturday morning at 10. Admission is by donation of at least $10. Hanover-area businesses are providing prizes for a raffle drawing.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.