Schedule Of Events:

Saturday, February 8, 2025

2:00 PM - Soundtrack to a Coup d'État
Location: Hopkins Center for the Arts (Loew Auditroium)

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

7:30 PM - WRIF, LAUGH, LOVE: A Night of Stand Up Comedy
Location: The Briggs Opera House

Thursday, February 13, 2025

5:30 PM - PitchFest 3.0
Location: The Briggs Opera House

7:00 PM - PitchFest 2.0 Shorts + One Night at Babes
7:00 PM - Black Girls Kissing: Episode 1 "You Don’t Know…"
Location:  The Briggs Opera House
7:00 PM - Dizziness Man
Location: The Briggs Opera House
7:00 PM - One Night at Babes
At Babe’s Bar, cribbage tournaments overlap with punk shows, while drag performances weave through afternoons of football and potluck chili. “One Night at Babe’s” takes an intimate glimpse into the life of a rural queer bar and its dynamic intersection of patrons to trace a tenuous yet rich alliance.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

8:30 PM - Hundreds of Beavers
Jean Kayak finds himself stranded in a surreal winter landscape with nothing but his dim wits to guide him. Against a backdrop of ruthless elements and sinister creatures - all played by actors in full-sized mascot costumes – Kayak develops increasingly complex traps in order to win the hand of a mischievous lover.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

Friday, February 14, 2025

10:30 AM - Filmmaker Friday: Film Scoring & Sound Design
In this master class, we will introduce the topics of film scoring and sound design. In the first half, Instructor Christopher Lehmann will explain how scoring and sound design differ from one another, and how they both help to tell the story of a film. In the second half we will cover how modern music and sound design are made using a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
Location: JAM - Junction Arts & Media

12:00 PM - Filmmaker Friday Lunch Panel: Independent Production In Vermont and New Hampshire
Julia Anderson and Kiersten White (Black Girls Kissing) discuss with Brian Carrol (Endlessly an Observer) independent filmmaking in Vermont and New Hampshire over lunch. They will discuss the challenges and benefits of filmmaking in our area, getting creative with financing, finding community and collaborators, and answer questions from participants. Bring a brown bag lunch or get take-out from one of White River Junction's many great restaurant options!
Location: JAM - Junction Arts & Media

1:30 PM - Filmmaker Friday: Production Management
Location: JAM - Junction Arts & Media

5:30 PM - WRIF Valentine's Day Party
Love (of movies) is in the air! Celebrate 20 years of WRIF this Valentine's Day with good food, good music by Route 5 Jive, and good people in the newly renovated Briggs Opera House Lobby. Mingle with filmmakers and film lovers alike as the festival kicks off.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

7 - 9 PM - A Photographic Memory & Endlessly an Observer
A filmmaker ventures into the archives of her photographer mother to construct a personal story of love, loss, and finding someone in the work they leave behind.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

9:30 PM - Ponyboi
Unfolding over the course of Valentine’s Day in New Jersey, a young intersex sex worker must run from the mob after a drug deal goes sideways, forcing him to confront his past. Official selection at Sundance and Newfest, Ponyboi bursts off the screen in this bombastic, edgy, and campy roller-coaster ride of a film.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

Saturday, February 15, 2025

10 AM - 12 PM - Emerging Filmmakers Brunch
A breakfast celebrating WRIF's regional Emerging Filmmakers and local filmmakers from the Upper Valley. All WRIF attendees are invited to join us in Putnam's secret garden and meet cool people making cool stuff.
Location: Putnam's Vinyard

12 - 2 PM - Universal Language
A comedy unfolding in a reimagined Canada where Persian and French are the two official languages. Universal Language follows the lives of multiple characters, including Gradeschoolers Negin and Nazgol who find a sum of money frozen in the winter ice and try to claim it. Meanwhile, Massoud leads a group of increasingly-befuddled tourists through the monuments and historic sites of Winnipeg. Matthew quits his meaningless job in a Québecois government office and sets out upon an enigmatic journey to visit his mother.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

2 - 4 PM - No Other Land
Made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors over the course of five years, this documentary shows the systematic destruction of Masafer Yatta (a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank) at the hands of the Israeli military. Winner of Best Documentary at Berlinale, this eye-opening, vérité-style documentary serves as a moving portrait of the unlikely friendship between Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who form a philosophical and political alliance despite the drastic differences in their abilities to exist freely in this world.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

5 - 6 PM - Yoga Break with Upper Valley Yoga
Move your body and enjoy a restorative yoga practice to help absorb and digest the many emotions that WRIF's films may give rise to. In partnership with Upper Valley Yoga, Leslie Carleton will offer this 60-minute yoga practice FREE to all WRIF attendees. Please bring your own mat if you have one!
Location: JAM - Junction Arts & Media

5:00 PM - Young Hearts
In this gorgeous and heartfelt story of youthful romance, fourteen-year-old Elias feels attracted to his new neighbor, Alexander, and soon realizes he’s in love for the very first time. Unsure of how to approach these new feelings and what they might mean for his relationships with friends and family, Elias enters a deep state of confusion before he’s able to accept himself and follow his heart.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

7:00 PM - Bird
12-year-old Bailey lives with her single dad Bug (Barry Keoghan, Saltburn) and brother Hunter in a squat in North Kent. Bug doesn’t have much time for his kids, and Bailey, who is approaching puberty, seeks attention and adventure elsewhere.  When she meets a kind drifter (Franz Rogowski, Passages), something seems off, and incredible things begin to happen as the film shifts gears to magical realism in a manner that only a filmmaker like Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, American Honey) could pull off. Bird has played for audiences at Cannes and New York Film Festival.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

9:15 PM - The Balconettes and Itch
The Balconettes
As a heat wave brings a Marseille neighborhood to the boil, three roommates gleefully meddle in the lives of their neighbours from their balcony. Until a late night drink turns into a bloody affair.

Itch
Manon sits at a table waiting for her date as an uncontrollable itch overtakes her.

Location: The Briggs Opera House

Sunday, February 16, 2025
12 - 2 PM - On Becoming a Guinea Fowl & I Believe I’ll Go Back Home: Robert Johnsons Copiah County Roots & Living Legacy

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
On an empty road in the middle of the night, Shula stumbles across the body of her uncle. As funeral proceedings begin around them, she and her cousins bring to light the buried secrets of their middle-class Zambian family, in filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s surreal and vibrant reckoning with the lies we tell ourselves.

I Believe I’ll Go Back Home: Robert Johnsons Copiah County Roots & Living Legacy
In 1931 legendary bluesman Robert Johnson went home in search of his father. Instead, he became one. Johnson's descendants reveal the human being behind the myth and his living legacy as a father, grandfather, and musical inspiration in Copiah County.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

3:00 PM - Far Out: Life On & After the Commune
In 1968, a group of radical journalists leave the city and politics to live communally as organic farmers. The film examines their lives and return to the political world and how the commune became a community. Blending contemporary interviews with a remarkable trove of original archival footage, Far Out is lively, humorous, inspiring, and irreverent. The film vividly recounts history while exploring universal themes of grappling over a lifetime with politics, relationships, morality, spirituality, civic engagement, and the search for home.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

6:00 PM - Oh, Canada
From legendary screenwriter/director, Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, First Reformed) comes an outpouring of lapsed-Catholic guilt, lived lies and denied truth, in which the fragments of history fall together in a mosaic of aspect ratios and film stocks for a stunning visual and editing experience.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

8:00 PM - To a Land Unknown
The stakes couldn't be higher for displaced Palestinian refugees Chatila and Reda in this knife-edge drama. The cousins are saving to pay for fake passports to get out of Athens, but when Reda loses their hard-earned cash to his drug addiction, Chatila hatches an extreme plan to pose as smugglers in an attempt to get them out of their desperate situation before it is too late.
Location: The Briggs Opera House

Date: February 13-16, 2025

Location:
Various Venue in White River Junction, VT 05001

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