BRATTLEBORO — This year marks the 21st Women's Film Festival, which strives to represent the lives, relationships, struggles, and triumphs of women and girls - not as victims of circumstance, but as innovators of their own realities.
In spring of 1992, the idea was born as a fundraiser and an outreach vehicle for the Women's Freedom Center (WFF), then known as the Women's Crisis Center.
Christie Herbert, who was on the festival committee for the first six years, said the event “was always thought of as not only a fundraiser, but a consciousness raiser.”
Then came the summer of 1992, when Judith Hart Fournier was killed by an ex-lover who followed her and a friend to a gas station, then stabbed her to death as she sat in her car.
“It was just remarkably shocking and a tragic situation of violence that happened against a woman,” Herbert remembers.
Marilyn Buhlmann, a festival steering committee member for the last nine years, remembers the event vividly. She did not know Fournier, she says, but she recalls a community that had been touched by the tragedy and reacted with a number of vigils.
“We were totally shocked,” Buhlmann recalls. “It was probably our community's really most dramatic violent and visual sign of men's violence against women.”
The festival, which occurred later that year, was dedicated to Fournier's memory.
It was intended “to point out the problems of women in the world, to point out how women survive, against a pretty steep slope,” Buhlmann says.
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Merry Elder has volunteered every year since the festival's inception and heads the film selection committee, which shapes the event through the thoughtful film choices of its members.
The festival, which last year drew almost 3,000 people to town due to the efforts of Elder and other members of the committee, is now known for its high quality and high standards in both drama and documentary films.
It wasn't always that meticulous.
The committee began by looking at blurbs for films and choosing ones that seemed compatible with the goals of the festival. Elder, with a chuckle, now describes this method of film selection as a “very risky way to do it.”
In the first decade of its existence, the festival operated solely out of the Latchis Theatre.
“The festival was much smaller than it is now,” Elder says. “We didn't get corporate sponsorship. We didn't get local sponsorship...all we did was get the films, and preview the films working with Latchis staff.”
After six years, the festival overwhelmed the Latchis capacities and had to carry on with the efforts volunteers alone. As a result, the festival became a lot more work.
“We didn't realize what we were getting ourselves into,” Elder says, shaking her head.
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The year after the split from the Latchis, the festival held on by a thin thread, showing just three films in 1999. The following year, after revamping the festival and re-creating its committees, the WFF survived and began thriving in the Brattleboro community.
The reputation of the film festival is growing internationally, with an increasing number of unsolicited submissions of increasingly high quality coming in every year, due to what is now a year-round effort by festival volunteers.
And the enthusiastic audience keeps growing, too.
Arlene Distler, who has volunteered with the festival in a variety of capacities, feels grateful for time she has spent.
“The festival has helped me see that we are all so much more connected than what one would think,” Distler says. “I've had people say to me that the films they saw at the festival changed their lives.”