Vermont Shorts

Welcome to VFFF! 🎬

This page is for individual tickets to this screening. Want the full Festival experience? All-Access Passes include screenings and events throughout the weekend, plus access to our Festival after parties.

[Get an All-Access Pass →](opens in a new tab)

(opens in a new tab)

From sugaring camps and rural farms to experimental landscapes and museums devoted to the everyday, these films offer a varied portrait of Vermont and the people who make it home. Moving between documentary, animation, and experimental forms, the block considers tradition, mortality, memory, isolation, and the strange beauty of ordinary life.

Hell by Parker Croft

A place where dreams are real, wishes come true, and everything is always awful for everyone.

Hell follows the patriarch of a dying farm on the outskirts of Ash Harbor as he is methodically ground down by the machinery of despair. What begins as endurance curdles into something far more existential, a portrait of collapse told through dust, labor, and silence.

Hell premiered at Animation Dingle and has been selected for more than 100 festivals worldwide, including the Florida Film Festival, Dallas International Film Festival, ANIMATOR, Bengaluru International Short Film Festival, and Popcorn Frights. Upcoming screenings include Aesthetica and FilmQuest. Christopher Francis of Salute Your Shorts called it “a stop-motion masterpiece that strikes each moment, each beat, each piece of filmmaking perfectly.”

Director Biography - Parker Croft

Parker Croft is an American director and screenwriter known for his portrayal of flawed, conflicted characters and his exploration of themes like mortality and love through a bold, voyeuristic visual style. His most recent short film, As Easy As Closing Your Eyes (2024), has earned 144 awards across more than 200 film festivals, including 16 for Best Director. His debut short, Suncatcher (2019), was similarly acclaimed, screening at 62 festivals and earning 13 awards.

Croft first made his mark as a screenwriter with the feature Falling Overnight (2011), which won the Special Jury Prize at Cinequest and later streamed on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. In 2017, he co-founded Paper Horse Pictures, an award-winning film production company based in West Hollywood, California. In addition to his narrative work, he has directed music videos for artists such as The All-American Rejects.

The Photo Returner by Garret Harkawik

Erin Bohannon has devoted the latter part of her life to a singular pursuit: collecting lost portraits from decades past and tracking down the descendants of those featured in the photos. To date she has returned hundreds of photos thought to have been lost. While this work brings her immense joy, it sometimes comes at a high cost to her personal life.

Director Biography - Garret Harkawik

Garret Harkawik is a documentary filmmaker and composer based in southern Vermont. He has been making short documentaries since 2010, his most recent being This Temporal World, about a Muslim teen who was catfished by the FBI. His previous films have screened at DOC NYC, Rooftop Films and been selected as Vimeo Staff Picks three times.

Sugarhouse by Jesse Kreitzer

In rural Vermont, aging sugarmakers honor a centuries-old tradition in this powerful meditation on family legacy, loss, and resilience. Through seven distinct portraits, the film forms a rich tapestry of stories about how we spend our time on this earth—and what we leave behind.

Director Biography - Jesse Kreitzer

Jesse Kreitzer is a Vermont-based filmmaker whose fiction and nonfiction work explores rural life, folk cultures, and traditions. His films have received Oscar®-qualifying and New England Emmy® awards and screened at galleries, museums, and festivals worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art, Museum of the Moving Image, Biografilm, Raindance, Rooftop, Big Sky, Camden, Woodstock, and Oldenburg.

Kreitzer holds an MFA in Cinema and Comparative Literature from the University of Iowa and a BA in Visual & Media Arts from Emerson College. His work has been supported by Kodak, AARP, National Arts Strategies, the LEF Foundation, and state arts councils in Massachusetts and Vermont, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in southern Vermont where he spends his free time restoring an 1830 schoolhouse.

12 Dozen Brown Eggs by Jacques Thomas

The anatomy of an egg, surface, cracks, yolk, and all.

Director Biography - Jacques Thomas

Jacques Thomas-Snell is a student filmmaker who currently attends Concordia University in Montreal.

Originally from Vermont, Jacques's work explores themes of isolation and a loss of control. His films are often stylized to create a surreal and vibrant atmosphere.

The Last Syllabus by Corey Walker Hendrickson

A retired professor reframes aging as a “honeymoon period,” translating a lifetime with literature and the Vermont landscape into analog rituals—music and reading aloud—that explore love, limits, and what we owe each other while we still can.

Director Biography - Corey Walker Hendrickson

Corey Hendrickson is an award winning filmmaker and photographer with 15 years of experience and whose clients include American Express, Apple, Facebook, Food & Wine, HBO, NBC, Johnson & Johnson, New Yorker, Patagonia, Phish, Smithsonian Magazine, Travel & Leisure, Vanity Fair, and Wall Street Journal. He currently serves as the Director of Photography and editor of Weekends with Yankee, a nationally broadcast adventure travel show for PBS, and has also filmed for several forthcoming independent documentaries as well as for PBS's American Masters. His films have been screened at festivals such as the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival, Green Mountain Film Festival, Activists Without Borders Film Festival, International Social Change Film Festival, and the Lulea International Film Festival. His photography has been exhibited in solo shows by the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston and at the Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier, VT. He was recognized in the American Photography publication and Photo District News. He has an MFA in Photography from the Academy of Art University and lives with his family in Middlebury, VT.

Eons by Natalie Jones

A study of time’s dark-flowering unknown center.

Director Biography - Natalie Jones

Natalie Jones is a Vermont-based experimental filmmaker who works with the landscape. Her short films have screened at regional and international film festivals.

Glorious Obscurity by Ronan Furuta

Can you make a difference in the world even if you’re obscure?

Nestled in the hills of rural Vermont, the Museum of Everyday Life is dedicated to chronicling the minutia of our lives. Glorious Obscurity transports you into this unique world and follows Clare, the museum creator, as she wrestles to balance her own everyday life with her artistic goals.

Director - Ronan Furuta

ACCESSIBILITY NOTICE: This screening takes place in a pop-up venue that requires stairs to enter and is not wheelchair accessible. For questions about accessibility or accommodation needs, please call Bennington Theater at 802-500-5500.