Middlebury Film Festival comes to Dover with a double feature

DOVER - The Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival Vermont tour will stop at the MHCA Dover Cinema and Arts facility on Sunday, February 6, for a double feature screening of “Storm Lake” and “The Ants & The Grasshopper,” at 3:45 pm. The MHCA Dover Cinema and Arts facility is a new Vermont Tour partner venue and an important part of the local arts community.
“Storm Lake,” directed by Levison and Jerry Risius, was the celebrated opening night film at the seventh annual Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival last August. “The Ants & The Grasshopper,” directed by Raj Patel and Zak Piper, was the popular closing night film at the festival, where it was introduced by environmental activist Bill McKibben.
“Storm Lake” tells the compelling story of 63-year-old Pulitzer-prize winning editor Art Cullen and his family-run newspaper, The Storm Lake Times, in Storm Lake, IA. Twice weekly, week in and week out, the Cullens deliver local news and biting editorials on a shoestring budget for their 3,000 readers. In the face of significant long-term economic challenges in western Iowa and the added stress of the pandemic, the paper fights to preserve its editorial integrity, shore up its finances, and bolster the quiet community the Cullens call home. An intimate and revealing chronicle of local journalism in rural America, “Storm Lake” is a living and breathing documentary that lets its central characters tell their essential story.  
“The Ants & The Grasshopper” focuses on Anita Chitaya, an extraordinary woman from Malawi, who has a marvelous gift: she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, make men fight for gender equality, and can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real.
Traveling from Malawi to California to the White House, she meets climate skeptics and despairing farmers. Her journey takes her across all the divisions shaping the United States, from the rural-urban divide; to schisms of race, class, and gender; to the thinking that allows Americans to believe that we live on a different planet from everyone else. It will take all her skill and experience to persuade them that all are in this together. “The Ants & The Grasshopper,” a documentary 10 years in the making, weaves together the most urgent themes of the times: climate change, gender and racial inequality, the gaps between the rich and the poor, and the ideas that groups around the world have generated in order to save the planet.
Tickets for the event are available only at the box office, at 4 Mountain Park Plaza, and ticket pricing will be available at memhall.org. Complete MNFF Vermont tour information, including film trailers, can be found at middfilmfest.org/vermont-tour-2022.