BRADFORD—When Liam O'Connor-Genereaux was 4, his parents took him and his brother to a screening of the Star Wars film “The Phantom Menace” at a drive-in theater near their home in Ryegate, assuming the youngsters would fall asleep in the back seat.
His brother did, but O’Connor-Genereaux, stayed awake. He wasn’t interested in his parents’ film choice but climbed into the trunk of the car and turned around to watch “A Bug’s Life” on the screen behind them.
“It’s one of my earliest memories,” said O’Connor-Genereaux, now 27, who is now a filmmaker himself. He could not hear any sound but was enraptured by the visual storytelling.
"Film is really cool because it is an unfiltered medium,” he continued, during a recent interview. “It gives you the story and the accompanying images without relying on the audience to conjure much on their own."
O’Connor-Genereaux hopes to enrapture viewers with his most recent release, “The Butterfly Queen,” which he filmed mostly on his parents’ sheep farm over five weeks in summer 2021. Now making the rounds across the state, “The Butterfly Queen” will screen in Bradford on March 8 at The Space On Main.
The film follows two estranged high school best friends. Casey is a sheep farmer and cartoonist. Robin is a listless vagabond. The two reunite unintentionally and end up lost in an other-worldly forest trying to track down Casey’s sketchbook, which will allow them to find their way back home. The story examines childhood friendship, trust and, most importantly, magic. O’Connor-Genereaux wants to treat magic as an element of the real world and make fantasy accessible.
"The magical world they go into is the woods around my childhood home, and the real world is the actual village nearby," O'Connor-Genereaux explained. "All of the portals that the characters jump through are very practically physically done. There's no digital witchcraft."
The portals are found objects, such as old miniature refrigerators and suitcases. The magic resides in the characters' interactions with those everyday objects.
Many local viewers will recognize themselves or their neighbors on screen. Most of the cast and crew are Vermonters — several from Bradford. Cassidy Pryer, an Oxbow graduate, did on-location sound mixing and portrayed the Monster. Alden Weiss was a production assistant and another on-screen monster.
Paul Hunt, a longtime actor in the Old Church Community Theater, played Devon the newspaperman. Gail Trede, the Bradford librarian, cut hair for the lead actors.
Tuttle’s Family Diner in Wells River catered the set, and local mechanic Tim Spooner built the pickup truck with scraps from other vehicles and drove it in stunt scenes. The cast and crew largely came from other parts of Vermont, and lived in with locals who generously opened up their homes during the shooting schedule.
All the local contributions helped O’Connor-Genereaux save money. He put most of the $90,000 budget into production aspects of the film. He actually calculated what the voluntary support was worth in 2021, and it would have pushed the cost to $750,000.
Without that donated time and effort, the filmmaker concluded, he couldn’t have afforded to complete the project. Quite the magical feat.
After that eye-opening visit to the drive-in, O-Connor-Genereaux’s slowly made his way into a film career. His parents noticed his proclivity for storytelling and bought him a video camera when he was about 10.
Five years later, in 2010, he attended the Cohase Chamber’s 48-Hour Film Slam with some of his childhood friends. At the film slam, teams had 48 hours to write, shoot and edit a 7-minute short film. Participants draw out of a hat on opening night to learn the genre of the movie and some elements they must include.
“It really solidified my love for filmmaking,” O’Connor-Genereaux said. “It took my childhood ambitions to the next level.”
And it gave him a taste of the real-life process of filmmaking, even for a full-length production.
“It’s the same pace that you have to keep … six days a week, and we didn’t work fewer hours each day,” he said, though a longer production would stretch those days over many weeks or months.
O’Connor-Genereaux would go on to attend the Bradford Film Slams in the fall and Montpelier Film Slams each spring for the next five years. One year in Bradford, he met Whittaker Ingbretson, a Woodville resident who was on a competing team. The two became friends and collaborators. Ingbretson served as director of photography for “The Butterfly Queen,” as he did for O’Connor-Genereaux’s previous movie, “Zephyr.”
To Vermonters, O’Connor-Genereaux’s films might look familiar, with scenes featuring rusty, abandoned farm equipment, household objects and old children’s toys.
“In terms of art direction, in every shot I was always saying, ‘I would like it to be dirtier.’ I think it works with a lot of grit,” he said.
This isn’t just because of his limited budget. Through his filmmaking eyes, O’Connor-Genereaux sees magic in the real Vermont.
Read the original in the Journal Opinion.
