The Maple Corner Community Center sits at 84 West County Road in Calais. On the evening of October 19, its doors open for a different kind of gathering: an hour of short films by three Central Vermont filmmakers, followed by a half-hour conversation with the directors about the stories and the process behind them. The program is open to all ages, and there is free parking on site.
The lineup is small but deliberately varied. Lukas Huffman's Bloodroot is a scripted narrative that follows two brothers across seventy years as they reckon with kinship and mortality, returning again and again to a granite quarry in their backyard. Kristina Lear's Cough Drop, a fifteen-minute drama, turns on a ten-year-old girl named Kate who takes a different route home from school one afternoon and accepts a ride from a stranger — a small act of rebellion against a self-absorbed father and a loving but controlling mother. Al Karr's Welcome to Paris, completed in 2025 and running about fourteen minutes, rounds out the bill.
What ties the three together is less a theme than a geography. All three filmmakers have roots in this part of Vermont, and two of the films carry the unmistakable imprint of having been made here rather than merely about here.
Huffman's path to Bloodroot is not the usual one. He grew up in Vermont and spent a decade as a professional snowboarder before turning to filmmaking, an action-sports background he has said informs the kinetic energy of his work. His studio has produced commercial and documentary projects for clients including The New York Times, Vice Media, Ben & Jerry's, Microsoft and The North Face, but Bloodroot is something more personal: an original scripted short that he wrote and directed and produced with Hannah Dennison. It was shot by cinematographer Brad Salon, with original music by Menghan Wang, and a cast that includes Tarin Kucera, Otis Taylor, Asa Learmonth, Matthew Haverty, Jesse Cooper, Matthew Goudy, Rusty DeWees, Chris Hennessey and Jack Bradt.
The film has since traveled well beyond the state. It won the Grand Prize for New England Film at the Rhode Island International Film Festival. It also screened at the Made Here Film Festival and at the Green Mountain Film Festival, where in 2024 it appeared in the festival's local-filmmaker section alongside other work made in Vermont. Huffman is also a co-founder of the Vermont Production Collective, the state's leading film and television industry organization.
Lear's Cough Drop has an even longer history. She was admitted to the American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women, where she was a fellow and grant recipient, and the resulting short had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival in 2007. Lear trained at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater and is a graduate of the Buxton School; she has worked steadily as an actress in theater, film and television, and today serves as artistic director of the Goddard Institute of Dramatic Arts, a new training and new-work program housed in the Haybarn Theater at Goddard College in Plainfield, about twenty minutes up the road from Calais. The institute describes dramatic storytelling, in theater and film alike, as a community event — an idea that sits comfortably with a Monday-night screening in a village hall.
Karr, who is credited on Welcome to Paris as Al Oxborough Karr, is based in Brooklyn and is co-founder of the production company Eldest Daughter. Their earlier docu-fiction short Distance, from 2018, drew praise from NoBudge for its ability to capture private conversations with dead-on accuracy. Welcome to Paris, finished in 2025, is the newest of the three pictures on the program.
The venue itself has a story worth telling. The building began life as a hardware store and blacksmith shop three miles away in a hamlet called Gospel Hollow. On January 25, 1921, the Maple Valley Grange bought it for $175 and moved it down the road to Maple Corner, where it served the Grange until 1949, when the newly formed Maple Corner Community Center took it over. Since then it has hosted weddings and funerals, birthday parties, potlucks, community theater and variety shows — the ordinary and extraordinary occasions of a small town. The center's own history page notes, with some pride, that it is the birthplace of the Men of Maple Corner, the nude calendar that raised money for the community and, in 2002 and 2003, briefly made this corner of Calais famous well beyond Vermont.
That is the kind of room this is: the sort of place where a film series can be mounted on a Monday night without much fuss, where the audience is likely to include neighbors of the people on screen, and where the question-and-answer session afterward may be as interesting as the films. The program runs from 7 to 8:30 p.m. — roughly an hour of shorts and thirty minutes of discussion — and the filmmakers will be in the room to talk about how the work came together.
For anyone who has wondered what Vermont filmmakers are actually making, or who simply wants an evening out in a hall that has been holding the attention of its village for a hundred years, the answer is a short drive to Maple Corner.