Verbec Film Fest (2026)

After wondering what a good event would be to hold at The Haskell Opera House which sits directly on the border between Vermont and Quebec, Melissa and I came up with the idea of the "Verbec Film Fest". A few nights later I had a poster designed, all we needed was everything else.

Our idea with the Verbec Film Fest was to highlight the people and places of Vermont and Quebec, showing movies about things we know people in the area enjoy. First I reached out the creators of There from Here, a documentary about bikepacking in Vermont that I absolutely loved. Then while hanging out with buddies in Vermont, one of them suggested the film Roland & Mary and we loved it as well.

Recently we did some work with the filmmaker Louise Abbott in the lower north shore of Quebec and she was just finishing a documentary about a local knife maker and we thought our new festival would be a great place to premiere it and she agreed. At this time we had a small lineup that we were very proud of, so we put a call out to look for more films. Melissa and I loved receiving all of the submissions and watched every one.

Here's the audio from an interview I did with CBC "All in a weekend". I had to wake up very early for this:

The Verbec Film Fest was held on Saturday September 19th 2026. I've never held a film festival before, and thankfully our friends Patrick and Flo came down from Montreal to help out because there was a lot of work to be done. We showed 7 films, some were in English and some were in French and 5 of them were premieres. Filmmakers from Vermont and Quebec came and we held informal Q/A sessions with the audience during the intermissions between blocks of films. For the intermissions I also shot an hour of drone footage that we set to the music of Montreal band Light Conductor who were cool enough to let us use their music.