The late Fred Rogers, creator and host of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” once recalled that “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
Filmmaker Bess O’Brien has plenty of experience in “looking for the helpers.” For the past three decades, she has made award-winning documentaries about Vermont’s social ills and the people whose lives they consume. Her 2003 film Here Today and 2013’s The Hungry Heart highlighted the devastating consequences of heroin and prescription pill addiction, respectively, for everyday Vermonters. All of Me (2016) focused on young women and men trapped in the downward spiral of eating disorders. And her 2024 documentary, Just Getting By, profiled Vermonters struggling with food and housing insecurity.
While various types of “helpers” often feature in O’Brien’s work, in her latest project she spotlights the helpers themselves. The idea struck in November 2024, when the Barnet filmmaker had completed a statewide tour of Just Getting By and Donald Trump was reelected president.
“The next four years are going to be hell,” O’Brien remembers thinking. “I was feeling the doom of where our country was going.”
For the benefit of her own mental health and that of viewers, O’Brien said, she decided her next movie wouldn’t be another deep dive into Vermonters’ pain and misery. Instead, she wanted to highlight people who are doing good deeds, bridging cultural divides, building community and bringing joy to others.
“I wanted to be shooting a film and have a smile on my face the entire time,” she said.
The result is Every Day: Big and Small, O’Brien’s love letter to the state of Vermont, which begins a screening tour on Friday, September 25. Unlike her previous documentaries, this one has no central characters or narrative, instead resembling a collection of short stories. Its 18 vignettes were shot around the state, capturing fly-on-the-wall moments when people came together, helped each other out, or just gathered to be themselves and have fun.
One major impetus for the film was the catastrophic, back-to-back floods of July 2023 and 2024, stories of which bookend the film. Every Day: Big and Small is dedicated to the memory of Dylan Kempton, the 33-year-old Peacham man who died on July 10, 2024, when floodwaters swept him away in an off-road vehicle.
The 90-minute documentary begins at the Peacham property of Jenny and John Mackenzie, schoolteachers who lost their home and most of their possessions in the July 2024 flood. In the midst of this devastation, the flood also delivered an unexpected gift: a deep connection to their neighbors.
“It’s a weird dichotomy,” John says in the film. “I’d lost everything, but I hadn’t lost anything. It was extraordinary.”
The outpouring of community support during the floods, as people mucked out their neighbors’ basements, delivered food, cared for others’ pets and stored personal belongings, became an aha moment for other Vermonters, too.
“But guess what?” O’Brien said. “This is happening all around us every day. We just don’t notice it.”
Every Day: Big and Small features a visit to Amy’s Armoire in Barre, which sells and gives away children’s clothes, furniture and other youth items, from cribs to prom dresses, to people in need. Less like a thrift store than a community center, Amy’s Armoire offers its clients a sense of comfort and security. One man in the film, who started going there for his kids after his release from prison, says tearfully, “It’s not just what [Amy’s Armoire] gives me. It’s emotionally so warming. I haven’t had anyone like that in my world.”
O’Brien also spent time at the Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center in Middlebury, where a group of young women preparing to graduate from a local high school discuss plans for the future. After sharing some prom pictures shot on a hay wagon — “No tractor oil on my prom dress this year!” one of the girls exclaims — many express a desire to return to Vermont after college and work on their families’ farms.
From there, the film moves to Swanton, where another group of young women is building a single-engine airplane as part of a Habitat for Aviation project. O’Brien also drops in on a teen center in St. Johnsbury; a Movement for Parkinson’s dance class in South Burlington; a Pride rally in Barre; a drag show at the Elks Lodge in Rutland; and a small military museum in Danville, set up in an aluminum trailer by 15-year-old Luke Morrison, who is obsessed with U.S. military veterans and their memorabilia.
Every Day: Big and Small has a minimalist, almost ethereal feel: O’Brien provides no narration or on-screen text to inform viewers where they are or who is speaking. While the effect is slightly disorienting at first, the filmmaker offers enough aural and visual cues to allow viewers to quickly grasp the sentiments she captures.
In an interview, O’Brien described the film as a visual journey across Vermont in an almost dreamlike state, without the intrusion of textual information every few minutes. It’s not until the closing credits that the viewer learns who these people are and with which businesses and organizations they’re affiliated.
The film is less about telling a story than creating a mood, she added. Once the viewer catches on, the transitions — from a kids’ yoga class at Wolcott Elementary School to a men’s group for domestic violence offenders in St. Johnsbury to four-wheel drivers gunning their engines at Goss’s Mud Bog in Barnet — feel seamless.
Some of the vignettes could have been expanded into stand-alone documentaries, O’Brien noted. One features the High Horses Center for Equine-Assisted Services in Sharon, where we meet Gayle Smith, 78, a retired Army nurse who served in a MASH unit in South Vietnam. It was there that she met her husband, Dr. Matthew Friedman, a psychiatrist and national expert on posttraumatic stress disorder, who went on to found the National Center for PTSD in White River Junction.
Most of those details aren’t mentioned in the film. What matters is that Smith, who for many years hid her status as a Vietnam vet, still struggles with PTSD and benefits tremendously from the equine-assisted therapy at the High Horses Center.
“The horse knows how I feel before I know how I feel,” she explains in the film. “When I’m sad, they’re so kind and gentle. They’re like, I’ll take care of you. And they always do.”
O’Brien also visits a Writers for Recovery group, a project she cofounded with writer and teacher Gary Miller in July 2014, a year after the release of The Hungry Heart. The nonprofit hosts creative writing workshops to help people healing from substance-use disorder, trauma and addiction. Some of the group’s prose, penned by clients with little or no prior writing experience, is powerful stuff.
“My greatest gift to humanity is my self-realization that I know just enough to know that I know nothing,” group member Mike reads aloud to the others. “There is a limitless expanse between myself and perfection. One day I may briefly bridge that gap.”
When Mike is done, Miller offers all the writers a final word of encouragement, one that also encapsulates the film’s message: “We all have something the world needs. So let’s bring it.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Helpers | Bess O’Brien’s new film, Every Day: Big and Small, shines a light on Vermonters creating community, resilience and joy”
This article appears in September 23 • 2026.
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