As an eight-year resident of Corinth, and a frequent visitor to his wife’s family there prior to relocating, Brian Carroll knew of the photographer Suzanne Opton, a fellow resident.

But it wasn’t until a mutual friend, Kerry DeWolfe, expressed an interest in interviewing Opton on camera that Carroll, a photographer and filmmaker himself, met her.

“Suzanne was always on my periphery,” Carroll said in a phone interview. Opton has done some of the deepest work by a Vermont photographer, and has survived bouts of cancer for the last 30 years.

While DeWolfe wanted to record an interview, Carroll saw something in Opton’s stance as an artist that warranted more. Carroll directed and DeWolfe produced “Endlessly an Observer,” a short documentary on Opton that will have its world premiere Friday evening at 6 at the Vermont Film Festival in Woodstock.

There are two stories here, and one nest s inside the other. In a way, the sense of connection in Carroll’s film, which is about Opton and her work, but is informed by DeWolfe’s solicitousness, is what the budding festival, now in its second year, is all about. They’re both emblematic of what film should be about: being seen.

Collen Doyle, who founded the festival with collaborator Matt Vita, owned a film production company in New York. He and his friends were always too busy out making movies to catch up with each other.

“We rarely had the time to see them together, and to see them on the big screen,” Doyle, a Bridgewater native, said in a phone interview. One ground truth of his nearly 20 years in entertainment is that “sometimes you don’t feel like you’re getting the support you deserve” for the amount of work you’re putting in.

So while the festival is intended to put films in front of audiences, it’s also intended to bring filmmakers together, particularly Vermont filmmakers.

Of the 30 films the festival will screen from Thursday through Sunday, nine were made in Vermont, including the short films “Therapy Won’t Kill You,” which was shot largely in Vermont, and “Love of the Land,” a short animated film about Romaine Tenney, a Weathersfield farmer who took his own life after part of his farm was taken for the construction of Interstate 91.

The festival starts Thursday evening at the Woolen Mill Comedy Club, in Bridgewater, but the rest of the programs take place in Woodstock’s Town Hall Theatre. In addition to the screenings, the festival includes a 48-hour film slam, with the resulting films to be screened on Sunday. For a full schedule, go to vermontfilmfestival.com.

The ubiquity of visual media in the YouTube era makes a film festival, particularly a new one, seem an odd endeavor, at least from the perspective of someone watching videos on a phone.

Doyle paraphrased an Academy Award speech given by a cinematographer, and I’ll paraphrase Doyle: Nobody has ever strode onto movie set, looked down the barrel of a camera and said, “I can’t wait to see this on a 3-inch screen.”

Doyle had a role in “Major Arcana,” Barnard filmmaker Josh Melrod’s 2018 feature. He recalled a scene in which the protagonist fells several massive pine trees as one that needed to be experienced on a big screen. As much as film has been democratized, now that so many people carry phones with high-resolution cameras, it’s still expensive to do it right, and when done right, it deserves expansive exhibition.

In keeping with the state’s rugged landscape, Vermont is kind of a tough place to be a filmmaker. It’s one of only a few states without a film commission that shepherds production companies to locations and doles out incentives to producers.

“We’re kind of a weird, disheveled scene here,” Doyle said.

But since 2020, the Vermont Production Collective has been building a community of people with filmmaking experience, with an eye toward making it easier for Vermont residents to get work on film shoots and to provide a resource for out-of-state production companies.

Carroll, who served as a local fixer for the producers of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” a sequel to the 1988 film, both of which were shot in Corinth, is a member of the nonprofit collective’s board.

“There’s a lot of people in Vermont, but there isn’t a centralized place that supports them,” he said of the film community.

One of the collective’s key elements is a private social media group that numbers 350 to 400 people with filmmaking expertise. It functions as a job board and support network. Carroll and others also have testified at the Statehouse to ask for greater support for filmmaking.

Vermont had a state-supported film commission from 1996 until 2010, when it was eliminated in budget cuts after the Great Recession. It had some notable early success in bringing Hollywood productions to Vermont, but couldn’t keep up with states offering more generous incentives. Vermont filmmakers often wondered what the point of the commission was, since it did relatively little to aid them until the hiring of Joe Bookchin as director in 2007.

As much as the collective might want the commission to return, I don’t see it happening. Better for the state to retain its scrappy, make-do character, which is what the collective is doing anyway.

Carroll is looking forward to seeing his film with an audience and to meeting more filmmakers. He called “Endlessly an Observer” “a very Vermont story.” Opton’s most notable work might still be her photographs of Chelsea residents made in the early 1970s and published as a book in 2021 under the title “Into the Light Cellar.” Carroll’s film shows Opton and DeWolfe leafing through prints of photographs.

“To be able to screen that in Vermont for a Vermont audience really means a lot,” he said.

Shakespeare in Tunbridge

The first performance I saw from the Chelsea Funnery, a yearly two-week Shakespeare camp, was of “Hamlet,” in 2010. Multiple campers played the tragic title figure, from 12-year-old girls to high school seniors. It was a revelatory experience to see how brilliantly young artists could perform Shakespeare.

The Funnery presents “Hamlet” again this year, at 6 p.m. Friday and 4 p.m. Saturday at Tunbridge Central School, or at Chelsea Public School in the event of rain. Admission is by donation.

Natural forces

AVA Gallery and Art Center opens a quartet of exhibitions, including a group show, with a reception from 5 to 7 Friday evening.

“Forces of Nature” features work by Deborah Pressman, Stephanie Roberts-Camello, Lia Rothstein and Marina Thompson, who met because they all work in encaustics, a painting medium that deploys wax, though this show includes other media.

Also opening: “Across the Road,” paintings and sculpture by Samuel Neustadt; “Of Earth and Astral Plane,” monotypes and collages by Erika Lawlor Schmidt; and “The Architecture of Dreams,” multi-media work by Axel Stohlberg.

The exhibitions are on view through Aug. 24. Admission is free, including to the reception Friday. For more information, go to avagallery.org.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.