Liam O’Connor-Genereaux was born 27 years ago in a church in South Ryegate. His family moved from the converted church to a sheep farm in the same town when he was a young boy. But Liam and his brother, Caleb, would sometimes go back to the former Presbyterian church to play. They’d swing from the rope that hung from the bell tower, ringing the church bell with their games. No one ever knew what time it was.
O’Connor-Genereaux, an independent filmmaker, returned to his hometown to make The Butterfly Queen, a fantasy-adventure feature film that makes its Vermont premiere on Saturday, February 11, at the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro. Like O’Connor-Genereaux’s childhood ringing of the bell, The Butterfly Queen plays with time (and memory) in a story that centers on the journey of two friends who are trying to retrieve a sketchbook.
The art-filled book holds a certain promise and could ultimately lead the friends, played by Kade Pintado and Sofia Anthony, back home. But their quest is derailed and threatened by a fantasy being — the film’s title character, played by New York City-based interdisciplinary artist Despoina — who also wants the book.
To complicate matters, the Butterfly Queen changes the rules of the search as it unfolds through a magical (and sometimes freaky) forest. The trip through the woods, complete with lavish costumes and marvelous sets, is an exploration of friendship and making art.
The friends find themselves in this strange world after they enter a rusty oil drum from which a herd of sheep has just exited, as if the livestock were rabbits spilling from a magician’s hat. The two emerge from the oil drum/magic portal into a beat-up pickup truck in a farm field. In O’Connor-Genereaux’s film, which he produced, wrote and directed, the imagery is rooted in the place he grew up.
“There’s a lot of autobiographical elements in the film,” O’Connor-Genereaux said. “And certainly in the production.” He spoke to Seven Days by telephone from a cabin in Worcester where he lives with his partner, Seana Testa, the film’s art director and coproducer.
O’Connor-Genereaux shot the movie in five weeks in summer 2021, mainly at his parents’ farm. Family members, neighbors, local businesses and his parents’ herd of sheep were instrumental in making the movie, which was produced on a $90,000 budget, O’Connor-Genereaux said.
Tuttle’s Family Diner in Wells River catered the set. A local mechanic, Tim Spooner, built the pickup truck from a couple of vehicles and drove it in the stunt scenes. Groton Timberworks donated lumber for building sets. Folks opened their homes to cast and crew to live in temporarily.
“There are so many people of my community who helped and supported [the project],” O’Connor-Genereaux said. “The film itself is a really exciting film for Vermonters. It’s a story about rural living.
“The texture of the film itself is so very Vermont: It has bits of corrugated metal, and it’s out in the woods,” he went on.
O’Connor-Genereaux, who was home-schooled, has always been fascinated by storytelling. He’s a voracious reader who started writing his own stories when he was young. His parents gave him a little camcorder when he was 8, and O’Connor-Genereaux started shooting and editing videos.
The first one was about a homemade sled with skis bolted to the bottom; a car tows the sled through a snowy winter hayfield. His filmmaking with friends “snowballed” from this initial effort and grew more elaborate over time, O’Connor-Genereaux said.
After high school — during which he supplemented homeschooling with classes at Blue Mountain Union School in Wells River — O’Connor-Genereaux spent a year as a ski bum in Utah. Then he studied film at Emerson College in Boston for a year before leaving because city life didn’t appeal to him.
“I didn’t like that I had to go inside to be alone,” O’Connor-Genereaux explained. But at Emerson, he met a lot of “really cool artists,” including Kade Pintado, who has a starring role in The Butterfly Queen.
Pintado, who is nonbinary, O’Connor-Genereaux said, plays the nonbinary character Casey, a cartoonist-farmer who is one of the two friends at the center of the film. They also had a role in Zephyr, the 2016 movie O’Connor-Genereaux made after dropping out of Emerson. That film, which he described as a kind of rock opera, was also shot at his parents’ farm.
After Zephyr, O’Connor-Genereaux spent a couple of years hitchhiking and backpacking around North America and Europe. During this time, he was working on the screenplay for The Butterfly Queen. He remembers revising the script while riding on a bus in Estonia in summer 2018.
Back in the states, O’Connor-Genereaux enrolled at the University of Vermont, from which he graduated with a degree in English in 2021. He said classes in the theater department, with an emphasis on storytelling, were a particularly valuable part of his UVM education.
With a crew of about 20 people and broad community support, he shot The Butterfly Queen the summer after he graduated from UVM. O’Connor-Genereaux and Testa completed post-production work last summer. In fall 2022, the two traveled by van to show the film at a few festivals. The Butterfly Queen won best feature film at the 2022 Chicago International Indie Film Festival.
O’Connor-Genereaux is excited to present the film to Vermont audiences. At the Brattleboro premiere, he, Testa and other members of the project will be on hand for a Q&A after the movie. The Butterfly Queen will then tour the state through the end of March, with stops in Randolph, St. Johnsbury, Burlington, Montpelier and other towns. Postscreening Q&A sessions at those showings will include O’Connor-Genereaux and Testa and sometimes other members of the cast and crew.
“I think there’s an expectation that you have to leave Vermont in order to pursue your dreams,” O’Connor-Genereaux said. “Something that I think is powerful about this film, and the creation process, is that it’s possible to create something that is meaningful to you as an artist without having to leave the place where you find that meaning.”
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This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2023.
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