The story of Lost Nation begins, as Jay Craven tells it, with a broken arm. When the filmmaker moved to Vermont in the spring of 1974, the only way he could heat his farmhouse was with wood. He borrowed a truck to haul logs home, but one drive downhill and a pair of failed brakes later, he was laid up with a cast on his right arm. Unable to finish editing a documentary, he suddenly had time on his hands. He spent it wandering the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier, where he first encountered the story of Ethan Allen. Fifty years later, that idle afternoon has become a feature film.
On Thursday, October 8, Craven will bring Lost Nation to the Williamsville Hall, the community gathering place at 35 Dover Road in the small Windham County village of Williamsville, part of the town of Newfane. The screening runs from 6:30 to 9 p.m., with Craven introducing the film and then leading a question-and-answer session afterward. Admission is fifteen dollars, with tickets available at the door.
Lost Nation, released in 2024, is Craven's tenth feature film. It braids together two stories that unfolded in Vermont at the same moment in the late eighteenth century but have rarely been told side by side. One belongs to Ethan Allen, the farmer, writer, soldier and politician who led the Green Mountain Boys and became one of the state's founding fathers. The other belongs to Lucy Terry Prince, a Guilford settler whose poem "Bars Fight" is considered the first known work of African American literature.
Allen's legend is familiar to most Vermonters: the guerrilla leader who fought New York's claims to the region's land and pushed for Vermont's independence. Prince's is far less known. Kidnapped in Africa as an infant and sold into slavery in Rhode Island, she was, by the age of five, the property of Captain Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Around the age of sixteen, she composed "Bars Fight," a ballad recounting a 1746 Native American raid on two white families in a section of Deerfield known as "the Bars." The poem was passed down orally for generations before appearing in print in Josiah Gilbert Holland's 1855 History of Western Massachusetts. It remains the earliest known piece of literature by an African American.
Prince remained enslaved until 1756, when Abijah Prince, a prosperous free Black man, purchased her freedom and married her. In 1760 the couple moved to Guilford, Vermont, where Lucy became known as a storyteller and orator and raised six children. She was also a determined activist, fighting racist harassment and vandalism against her family and petitioning, unsuccessfully, to get her oldest son admitted to Williams College. Widowed in 1794, she moved to Sunderland, Vermont, where she died in 1821. At her funeral, the antislavery preacher Lemuel Haynes predicted that "tyrants and oppressors" would "sink beneath" her feet — a wry nod to her poetry.
The film casts Irish actor Kevin Ryan, known for the series Copper and Harry Wild, as Allen, and Los Angeles actress Eva Ndachi as Prince. It was written by Craven with Elena Greenlee and Jesse Bowman Bruchac, and filmed in Vermont, western Massachusetts and Nantucket, with local scenes shot in Marlboro and Brattleboro. With forty-three speaking parts, it is the largest cast Craven has assembled.
Making the film produced its own small store of coincidences. While staying in Brattleboro during the shoot, some cast members went into town to find dinner. Outside the River Garden Marketplace, Ndachi's co-star Matt Orduna, who plays Abijah Prince, struck up a conversation with a passerby. After he described the film in progress, he learned he was speaking with the owner of his character's former land in Guilford. The landowner invited the actors to visit the property — an experience Ndachi said gave her goosebumps. "I feel like we were probably guided by the Prince family to do that," she said. Greenlee, the producer, found a related echo while researching the two leads: when Lucy tried to claim a second property to which Abijah held the deed, she discovered her family's land had been illegally sold to a new owner — who turned out to be a relative of the man who had enslaved her.
Craven, who lives in Peacham, founded Kingdom County Productions with Bess O'Brien in 1991. His earlier films include Where the Rivers Flow North, A Stranger in the Kingdom, Disappearances, Northern Borders and Wetware, and his work has screened at Sundance, Lincoln Center and the Smithsonian, in more than 500 American cities and towns and in 53 countries. He also founded and directed Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury from 1975 to 1991, co-founded Circus Smirkus with Rob Mermin in 1987, and directs the biennial Semester Cinema program, in which professionals mentor students from multiple colleges in making a feature film. At 71, he has said Lost Nation may be the last major project he oversees.
The Williamsville Hall, where the film will screen, is a familiar kind of Vermont venue — an ADA-compliant, air-conditioned community hall that hosts the Rock River Players' summer theater season and a rotating calendar of local events. It is the sort of room where a state's history gets argued over in person, which suits a film about two people who spent their lives insisting on their own place in it. Allen's story, after all, is not a simple one either: he and his brother Ira came close to handing Vermont to the British during the negotiations known as the Haldimand Affair, a chapter that sits uneasily beside their reputations as patriots.
That tension — between the founders a state celebrates and the people it forgets — is the ground Lost Nation works. For one night in October, in a hall that holds a few hundred at most, its director will be on hand to talk about why he spent half a century getting there.