The Green Mountain Film Festival marks its 25th anniversary this week with screenings of 32 feature films, ranging from the fiery documentary WTO/99 (about 1999’s landmark anti-globalism protests) to the winsome, Oscar-nominated animation Arco.
Running Thursday through Sunday, March 12 to 15, at the Savoy Theater, Capitol Theater and other venues in downtown Montpelier, the fest offers a chance to see the world premiere of The Birds Tell Me All There Is to Know, a drama set in upstate New York about the unlikely camaraderie between a retired artist with dementia and a young woman struggling with grief. Brooklyn director Aidan Cronin will be on hand for a Q&A.
Making its Vermont premiere is opening-night drama The Scout, about the unusual job of location scouting for film crews; filmmaker Paula Andrea González-Nasser drew on her own experience in the profession. Another local premiere, Sky Hopinka’s documentary Powwow People, follows a group of Native artists over a day as they prepare and stage a performance.
GMFF continues a tradition of presenting highly topical films with Cutting Through Rocks, the first Iranian documentary to be nominated for an Oscar. It profiles Sara Shahverdi, a divorcée, “motorcycling midwife” (as the BBC called her), advocate for girls’ education and the first woman to be elected to the government of her rural village. The film shows us a segment of Shahverdi’s life without much context or commentary, but this forthright, tireless woman speaks for herself, without apologies. We see her interact with a broad swath of her community, including schoolgirls she hopes to inspire and judges and doctors who lay down patriarchal theocratic law. It’s an illuminating look beyond the headlines.
Another selection, Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 — Last Air in Moscow, is a searing chronicle of the end of Russia’s free press with the invasion of Ukraine. All five hours of it (with two intermissions) are fascinating and urgently relevant.
LGBTQ culture takes center stage in two restored films from 2001. By Hook or by Crook is a buddy comedy about two trans men, while Gypsy 83 takes us on a coming-of-age road trip to a Stevie Nicks look-alike contest. A newer selection, Burlington native Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys, has “future cult classic” written all over it, following a pansexual sex worker through a surreal landscape on a quest to restore her karma.
Architecture fans will want to catch Waitsfield director Allie Rood’s Prickly Mountain and My Design/Build Life, about the improvisational architecture movement that her father helped spearhead in Warren. Vermont filmmakers are also represented by two programs of shorts, one of them showcasing the products of ORCA Media’s sci-fi-themed 2026 Film Slam.
A Friday gala at Lost Nation Theater features a short film inspired by late Vermont poet Louise Glück’s “Heaven and Earth” and an excerpt from a forthcoming Hannah Dennison dance-theater piece. A Friday the 13th Dance Party follows at Montpelier Performing Arts Hub.
Check out a bold experimental documentary about Black history (BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions), explore the contradictions of colonialism (Portuguese drama I Only Rest in the Storm), or simply descend to the Savoy’s basement and bask in Natalie Jones’ looping short “Mantle of Dusk,” billed as “an abstract landscape film from the mouth of the mad river.” Whatever you choose, the appetite for adventurous cinema appears to be alive and well in Vermont’s capital.
This article appears in March 11 • 2026.
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