-Vermont filmmaker Bess O’Brien had finished her last documentary — the 2024 on-the-ground look at food and housing insecurity, Just Getting By — when she hungered for a change.
“A lot of my films through the years have tackled big issues,” recalled O’Brien, whose feature about drug use disorder, The Hungry Heart, made national news after it inspired then-Gov. Peter Shumlin’s 2014 State of the State address. “Going into this next election cycle and where we are right now in this country, I wanted to do something hopeful.”
And so O’Brien aimed her camera at Luke’s Military Museum in Danville, where teenager Luke Morrison has filled a backyard trailer with artifacts donated by local veterans.
“Thank you for coming,” Morrison can be heard telling visitors.
And Habitat for Aviation in Swanton, where young women learn the aircraft business by building and maintaining single-engine, two-seater planes.
“You got it, girl,” students there assert.
And the High Horses Center for Equine-Assisted Services in Sharon, where Vietnam War veteran Gayle Smith, approaching her 80th birthday, rides regularly to temporarily outrun her physical and emotional challenges.
“Instead of going downhill, I’m going uphill,” Smith says.
Aiming to share those feelings, O’Brien has spliced 90 minutes of such moments into a new documentary, Every Day: Big and Small, which premiered Sept. 25 in Burlington before touring a dozen Vermont cities and towns this fall, including an Oct. 9 stop at the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro.
“It’s about community; it’s about connection; it’s about resiliency,” O’Brien said in an interview. “We can hear all the horrible, hateful rhetoric, but most human beings want to help each other out. I wanted to go to places all over the state where people are doing good things.”
‘There are extraordinary things happening every day’
O’Brien began in her Northeast Kingdom town of Peacham, where flooding in 2024 ravaged the riverside home of her friends John and Jenny Mackenzie.
The film could have focused on the big $181,355 haul from a GoFundMe page to help the couple and their children with rebuilding. Instead, it spotlights a miniature sock elephant whose tiny red scarf attracted attention amid the rubble.
“It was the saddest little thing you’ve ever seen,” Jenny Mackenzie says on camera. “I washed it five times. The sink water would turn black.”
Today, her daughters find comfort in the return of a favorite childhood toy.
“There have definitely been small miracles,” the mother says.
Moving on, O’Brien took Mackenzie’s suggestion to meet Kevin Zheng, a student who works at his family’s East Garden Chinese restaurant in St. Johnsbury. Zheng’s mother and father run the business seven days a week so their children can be the first generation to go to college.
O’Brien filmed Zheng amid a kitchen of flaming woks. His parents know more Chinese than English. But the footage of his mother hugging him after seeing his acceptance letter to Dartmouth College speaks volumes.
So goes the movie, hopscotching to places ranging from the Rutland Elks Lodge, where a drag performer lipsyncs to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” to Goss’s Mud Bog in Barnet, where upward of 1,000 locals shake their heads and smile as neighbors attempt to speed cars and trucks through a field of muck.
“I wanted to be as diverse as possible,” O’Brien said. “I wanted men, women, young people, old people, people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, different races. And I was interested in very granular, grassroots stuff.”
O’Brien — whose past projects have addressed such subjects as Vermonters fighting substance-use or eating disorders, entering foster care or exiting prison — has always sought to find silver linings. But this is her first documentary to showcase them from start to finish.
“We shot more stories than we could get in,” the filmmaker said of her latest work. “Once you start telling people what your movie is about, they say, ‘Have you heard about this? Have you heard about that?’
“I could have just kept shooting and shooting and shooting. There are extraordinary things happening every day.”
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Every Day: Big and Small will screen at the Latchis Theatre, 50 Main St., Brattleboro, on Friday, Oct. 9 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $15 for all seats, available in advance at catamountarts.org/show/details/every-day-big-and-small-brattleboro/. For more information, visit kingdomcounty.org.
This story was republished with permission from VTDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To support this work, please visit vtdigger.org/donate.
This Arts item by Kevin O'Connor originally appeared in VTDigger and was republished in The Commons with permission.