In 2023, after seven years of filming, Robbie Leppzer was ready to begin editing his documentary about Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theater. Then Hamas attacked Israel. The ensuing war sent Schumann, now 91, on a creative roll.
For more than 60 years, the Glover artist has protested war and injustice through radical theater, using towering papier-mâché puppets and the minimalist paintings he swiftly renders on bedsheets. Crowds at performances in his grassy Northeast Kingdom outdoor amphitheater are served sourdough rye bread, hence the company’s name.
In late 2023, Schumann and his troupe focused their work on the death and destruction in the Middle East. “And so I had to keep filming,” Leppzer said. Schumann has now churned out well over 100 paintings protesting the war and genocide in Gaza, and the company has presented numerous productions on the theme. “I feel I’ve been chronicling Peter and the theater troupe doing some of their best work,” the Shaftsbury filmmaker said.
Sensing an urgency to release that footage, Leppzer further delayed his feature-length documentary to first make a 45-minute film about Bread and Puppet’s latest work. “An Artist Responds to War” has its world premiere at Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro on Sunday, May 3. Schumann’s daughter Maria will join Leppzer and others for a post-screening discussion moderated by Rev. Ed Sunday-Winters, pastor of Greensboro United Church of Christ. The film will premiere virtually on May 12 on streaming platform Kinema and then tour Vermont this summer and fall.
Leppzer’s feature-length film, Bread and Puppet: The Theater of Peter Schumann, which he started making in 2017, will now be released next year. That project has been a goal of Leppzer’s since he was introduced to the theater company in 1984 at age 26. He was invited there to screen his in-progress documentary Harvest of Peace, about U.S. peace activists traveling to Nicaragua. “I was personally blown away by how powerful Bread and Puppet is, in terms of using these giant puppets to make really deep social statements about what’s happening in the world and supporting issues of social justice,” Leppzer said.
The 67-year-old award-winning filmmaker got his start doing interviews for his high school radio station in Winchester, Mass. While other kids spun rock and roll and covered football games, he produced a weekly public affairs and news program called “American Pie.” His interview subjects included linguist and activist Noam Chomsky and radical historian Howard Zinn.
In the 50 years since, Leppzer has trained his camera on grassroots social activists. His first film, Seabrook 1977, chronicles the mass civil disobedience surrounding the construction of New Hampshire’s Seabrook nuclear power plant. Leppzer finished it when he was 20 years old. His subsequent work features protests against the U.S. war in Iraq; the battle to shut down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant; and a Massachusetts couple whose home was seized by the IRS because they refused to pay federal taxes as an objection to war and military spending.
From his home studio in Shaftsbury, Leppzer spoke with Seven Days about his process, the privilege of getting to know Schumann and finding archival footage in a most unexpected place.
You have worked on this film since 2017. Tell me about your process.
I do have a history of working on long-term films, but this is the longest for sure. There’s something about diving deep into a story as a filmmaker and following characters over a period of time and really going underneath the surface to show not only the behind-the-scenes elements but the real, deep personal stories of people. I’ve done a lot of interviews with young apprentices, the longtime older puppeteers, Peter and Elka Schumann, and most of their adult children.
Initially, I thought I was making a film about what is Bread and Puppet today, because the last documentary film that was made about Bread and Puppet, by DeeDee Halleck [and Tamar Schumann, Ah! The Hopeful Pageantry of Bread and Puppet], was made 24 years ago. But the more I work on it, the more I realize that the personal story of Peter Schumann had to be a central part of the film, because he is the glue that holds all of this together. He is the artistic vision and visionary that makes all of this happen. The more I’ve gotten to know him, the more I’m totally blown away at what a prolific and important artist he is for the world.
Your short film touches on Peter’s history. I was particularly moved hearing him talk about living in Nazi Germany as a child when Allied forces bombed his village. When his family fled in 1944, his parents told their children that they could each pack one bag of belongings — and Peter took puppets.
He was doing his first public puppet performances at age 11 in the refugee community where he was living — and then learning to bake the sourdough rye bread from his mother in the communal ovens of the refugee camp in northern Germany. So he had all the elements, bread and puppet, at age 11. What an extraordinary person to then have his direction in life be using these elements to create a radical art movement.
You certainly have spent a lot of time in Glover. Did you embed with Bread and Puppet?
I spent most of the summer of 2017 filming behind the scenes, the young apprentices who came from all around the world, young people in their twenties, to learn from Peter. Since then, I’ve been going up several times a year to do filming of each new circus. I’ve been diving deep into the archival trove. Bread and Puppet has an archive of tens of thousands of photographs.
To give you a little story about it: I did this interview with Peter where he talked very specifically about this one demonstration in the mid-1960s protesting the Vietnam War, saying, “We had these 8-foot-tall Vietnamese women blindfolded, pulled along by ropes. And then we had other performers with skeleton masks and a shark papier-mâché airplane. They were bombing them in this street theater performance on Fifth Avenue in New York City.” So he’s telling me this story, and it’s so gripping and so full of details. And I’m like, This is a great story, but unless I can find the visuals to illustrate it, I’m not going to be able to use it. Like a year later, I’m going through the folders and folders of archives, and not only do I come up with one photograph of that protest, I come up with a whole packet.
Didn’t I see video of that performance in “An Artist Responds to War”?
Not in that film, but in the feature-length film. Get this! Guess who shot some of the best 16-millimeter black-and-white footage of that day in New York City?
I have no idea.
They’re referred to as “the unintentional historians” — the New York City Police Department. There were some progressive people in the New York City administration who realized that they had this incredible archive of hours and hours of surveillance footage that the New York City Police Department had filmed with their handheld cameras of protests during the 1960s. They hired a professional film archivist to digitize this film and then make it public.
What do you want “An Artist Responds to War” to accomplish?
My hope with this film is that it opens people’s hearts, because we’re seeing the story of war through the lens and eyes of this artist, Peter Schumann. We don’t actually see any documentary footage of Gaza. We only see Gaza through the paintings and theater productions of Peter Schumann. [At] some of these work-in-progress screenings that I had with people in Vermont, they told me that they often get overwhelmed by the actual news footage of the devastation in Gaza, but watching Peter’s paintings in my film allowed them to open up their hearts and actually feel deep grief.
And your goal for the feature-length documentary?
My hope for the feature-length film is to generate recognition of Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater for their deep contributions to the world of theater and art. They are American masters.
In your film, Peter Schumann says the horror of war is in his bones. Reacting is not his choice but his fate. What drives you?
I have dedicated my life as a documentary filmmaker to chronicle people who stick their necks out to take risks for grassroots social change. I want to inspire people with my films to take a more active role for making positive change in the world. ➆
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
The original print version of this article was headlined “View of a Visionary | Robbie Leppzer’s new documentary, “An Artist Responds to War,” features Bread and Puppet’s Peter Schumann”
This article appears in April 29 • 2026.
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