2nd Annual Vacationland Film Festival (August 21st - 24th, 2025)

Conveniently located just a block away from where I live here in Maine, the 2^nd Annual Vacationland Film Festival at City Theater in Biddeford was really fun to attend this past weekend. I enjoyed a Maine-centric program that included many excellent short films, documentaries, and feature films with creators and/or subjects related to various aspects of the state, from arts & media to commerce to the environment. The organizers hosted an impressive gathering of filmmakers to participate in post-screening Q&A sessions with the audience as well, so I was glad to watch seven sets of films total that were presented during the festival. Since I’ve been focusing a bit more on my other blog (popsublime.blogspot.com) throughout the past several months, I’ll share some thoughts here about five of the Vacationland films that have lingered in my mind the most since seeing them in the festival over the weekend.

The selection on Saturday night, Artfully United, was the best-attended film that I saw in the festival, and it was also one of the films that was most enthusiastically received by the audience. The documentary was produced by Chris Walters (who lives in the Augusta suburb of Hallowell here in Maine), and it’s now seeing similarly warm receptions at other film festivals worldwide. The movie showcases the public art career and family life of Los Angeles artist Mike Norice, specifically his ongoing mural tour, which places full-scale inspirational messages (Love, Hope, Believe, Forgiveness, We Are One, etc.) on the sides of buildings in neighborhoods all around Los Angeles. In addition to murals, Norice also paints portraits (I loved seeing his colorful rendering of Prince in the background during a couple of scenes in the film), along with designing bejeweled sneakers, hats, and other fashion items for the likes of Elton John, Mariah Carey, Tom Cruise, and Madonna. Memories from Norice’s childhood in the Watts neighborhood of south L.A. are counterbalanced with sequential in-progress depictions as he paints his murals, all of which feature a boy figure that he calls Powerful Paul since his messages are meant to be particularly empowering for the children growing up in those neighborhoods. Norice’s father was imprisoned for a robbery in Texas when Mike was young; much of the movie traces the efforts of his older sister Carmelle, who’s now a medical doctor, to get their aging father with dementia compassionately released from his prison sentence. During the post-screening Q&A, I asked Norice if his mural tour was inspired by any other similar public art projects, and he responded that he was striving to emphasize just the message and remove himself from the limelight on his mural tour, in spite of admiring similar urban art projects by artists such as Banksy. His mural tour has received many accolades from public officials and government offices throughout the state of California, so he plans to widen the reach of his mural tour by taking it to other cities and states over the coming years. The film Artfully United should go a good length of the distance toward making that happen.

Another documentary that I anticipated watching in the festival this past Friday afternoon was In Danger of Being Discovered, first released 15 years ago back in 2011. With their specialized lens trained on numerous bands from Portsmouth, New Hampshire (just across the bridge from Kittery on Maine’s southern border), the filmmakers Mark A. Dole and Michael Venn interviewed many local acts that came close to gaining national exposure during the compact-disc revolution and live music boom of the 1990s. The film’s interviewees claim that Portsmouth came close to being hailed as “the next Seattle” and was a promising birthplace for up-and-coming musicians in a wide array of genres, from rock to hip-hop to jazz fusion. Oftentimes, they had sound-alike counterparts who found a national audience just before they did, so rather than hearing songs by Portsmouth-based bands like Scissorfight or Fly Spinach Fly or Groovechild played on radio stations countrywide, the fan-bases went to Dave Matthews Band, Green Day, and Marcy Playground. Members of the band Thanks to Gravity recall submitting one of their songs as a contender for the soundtrack to Gus Van Sant’s movie Good Will Hunting, a spot that was ultimately given to the Portland, Oregon band The Dandy Warhols instead. One female record executive who worked for I.R.S. Records (the label that was home to The Go-Go’s and R.E.M., among other well-known bands) remarks how she actively scouted for talent in Portsmouth and elsewhere along the New Hampshire seacoast because of how impressed she was by the innovative bands who were playing live and selling their self-produced albums there at the time. Counteracting that trend, a member of the band The Queers quirkily comments that the “sissification” of downtown Portsmouth forced the active live music scene in the city to lose its rebellious spirit over time.

On Saturday morning of the festival, I was one of a handful of people who attended the Youth Films program, which opened with a two-minute short film titled April in Maine by Willem Holden Watkinson, a young filmmaker and skateboarder from neighboring Kennebunk who died unexpectedly in November of 2024 at age 19. Will’s family and friends were also in attendance, and his mother shared an artist’s statement about the short films that Will had made during his lifetime. April in Maine was filmed out in the woods, with two of Will’s friends sitting next to him on a tree that had fallen across a creek-bed. Accompanied by a gentle classical score, the camera follows an empty Fanta bottle down the stream as is floats along, gets stuck & set free again by Will, then drifts over to a quiet pool away from the guys who are seated on the log. With the knowledge that Will had passed away before having the chance to fully actualize his promise as a young filmmaker, seeing the short takes on a more profound level of metaphorical meaning, and everybody who attended the screening was clearly very moved by watching Will’s film up on the big screen of City Theater together.

Tom Bell’s short documentary Salt Marsh, featured in a film shorts program on arts, media & culture in Maine this past Saturday afternoon, follows the work of local Maine artist Mitchell Rasor, who crafts natural watercolors on large parchment paper that he unscrolls into the water of the Spears Farm Estuary Preserve in nearby Yarmouth, even in the snowy Maine wintertime, using phragmites as paintbrushes and dark dirt or loam from the marsh itself as a kind of charcoal-like paint. Bell’s aerial drone footage of Rasor at work in the estuary expertly captures the uniquely shifting landscape of the tidal pool and its connection to Rasor’s artistic process. His completed grey-toned images are both strikingly beautiful and haunting, created entirely from the marshlands and a consummate reflection of them at once. The documentary contains clips from the 1971 film SWAMP by environmental artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, whose landscape-based work had inspired Mitchell Rasor’s own watercolors. Also, the ethereal original score for the film was composed by Lee Ranaldo, one of the founders of the rock band Sonic Youth. I remember owning several solo CDs recorded by Mitchell Rasor himself during the 1990s Boston music scene; he'd formerly been the bassist for the Rochester, New York-based band Absolute Grey, who released several independent albums and singles from 1984 to 1987. Having gone to college at Oberlin in Ohio and then graduate school at Harvard, Rasor currently works as an architect here in Maine as well.

Finally, I very much enjoyed watching Carl Smith’s short film Whisper: A Sailing Adventure, which was included in the festival’s Sunday afternoon closing program titled Our Beautiful Maine, featuring four short films that examined different facets of the environment here. Whisper is the name of Smith’s Allied Seabreeze 35 sailing vessel as well, which he shares with his partner Erin on their summer adventures along Maine’s famously jagged coastline. I think just about anybody would be envious of how peaceful and undisturbed their coastal journeys seem to be, as they have a dinner of tossed salad and toasted bread in the galley of their boat. Those sailing journeys are an extension of the ones that Carl Smith took with his family as a child, so we see many vintage flashback images from those days, too. The highlights of the ocean footage, of course, are the spectacular views of Maine’s coastal vistas themselves, dotted with the many small inhabited and uninhabited islands covered with pine trees that proliferate along the state’s stunning shoreline. The song choices for this three-part, 14-minute short, including the lilting “Sweet Heat Lightning” by the South African-born, Colorado-based singer-songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov, are also perfectly suited to Smith’s superb scenery of Maine.