The 2025 Green Mountain Film Festival begins by taking us to Serbia in 1999, during the Kosovo War, and ends a decade earlier, taking us into the White House, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. Between the opening and closing films — “78 Days” and “The White House Effect” — the festival presents more than 30 other full-length and short films from across the United States and around the globe.
In real time, the popular Montpelier tradition, now in its 24th year, runs from March 14 to March 16, with most films showing at the Savoy Theater and Capitol Theater. There are a few events at other locations, including an opening party at Three Penny Taproom.
Festival programmer Sam Kann said she is excited that they will have the United States premiere of Serbian director Emilija Gašić’s “78 Days,” which was released in 2024 and won several awards in Europe. Kann said this is the first time the festival will have the U.S. premiere of a full-length film, and she doesn’t understand why this film hasn’t received more recognition here.
“After their father is conscripted during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, three sisters begin a Hi8 video diary in the countryside home,” notes the International Film Festival Rotterdam website. “They film each other putting on make-up, picking cherries, playing party games, getting into fights, and helping their mother cook. This fragile, intimate world is perhaps their only shelter from the reality of bombings, sirens, and war.”
The Rotterdam website continues: “Gašić’s film zeroes in on a particular time and place to chart the limits of the children’s carefree existence. The narrative adeptly interweaves the perspectives of the three sisters, each one at a different point on the road to adulthood, producing a composite picture of growing up during wartime.”
Gašić was born in Serbia in 1991, but now lives in New York City. Kann said she is expecting someone from the filmmaking team, possibly Gašić herself, will attend the premiere and speak after the movie.
The festival closes with “The White House Effect,” directed by Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos, and Jon Shenk, and has been shown at more than a dozen festivals since its release six months ago.
“A riveting look at a key moment in the history of the climate crisis, ‘The White House Effect’ … travels back in time to document how a crucial opportunity to take real action on global warming was not just squandered but deliberately undermined,” states the film’s website. “Woven entirely of archival material, the documentary focuses on the pivotal years of the George H.W. Bush administration — 1988 to 1992 — when the entire country was waking up to the reality of global warming and Bush had pledged to use ‘the White House effect’ to tackle it. Infuriating and irrefutable, ‘The White House Effect’ tracks cause and effect with devastating precision to reveal just how hollow that promise became.”
Although it may not sound like it from the themes of the bookend films, Kann said a prominent theme of the festival is local, civic engagement. This is highlighted by director Rebecca Davis’s “Join or Die,” a documentary about the importance of being involved in your community. Editor Chad Ervin, who worked on the film and lives in Montpelier, will be there.
Director Brittany Shyne’s “Seeds,” which The Hollywood Reporter called “a quietly stunning (documentary that) contemplates the present and future of Black farmers,” will be followed by a panel discussion.
The Oscar-winning and controversial “No Other Land,” was made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective and shows the destruction of a Palestinian community by Israeli soldiers. There will be a moderated discussion after the film.
Short films are a staple at the festival, and this year, about half of the 18 shorts are by Vermont filmmakers. Vermont director Myles David Jewell will share a work-in-progress screening of his full-length work, “Burlington This Is You.”
Kann, who led a team of 16 volunteers that spent three months previewing and helping to select films, said most of the documentaries are American, but most of the fiction films are international.
Created in 1997, the Green Mountain Film Festival took a four-year hiatus during the COVID pandemic and floods before starting up again last year. Kann said that besides addressing vital issues, the festival is fun, so its longtime, loyal audience keeps coming back, and each year new fans join them.
The festival program and schedule are on the GMFF website (gmffestival.org). Moviegoers can buy tickets there, at the Savoy, or at the Capitol Theater.
