‘The Butterfly Queen’: Home-grown Vermont fantasy film hits the screen in Waterbury
March 10, 2023 | By Julia Tanier | Community News Service
Movie poster courtesy WalrusDice Productions
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 from WalrusDice Productions, “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 be shown in Waterbury this Sunday, March 12, at the Grange Hall Cultural Center.
The film’s website lists several festivals that have featured the film including Outreels Cincinnati 2022 and Reelout Queer Film Festival in Kingston, Ontario Canada. It also won Best Feature Film at the 2022 Chicago International Indie Film Fest, according to the film site that sizes it up saying: “It’s a bit punk, a lot queer and it will probably make you think about who your best friend really is.”
Two of the three lead characters in the story are gender-nonconforming including protagonist Casey, the non-binary sheep farmer/cartoonist. Kade Pintado, the actor who plays Casey, told the Brattleboro Reformer that the film represents queer, non-binary and trans individuals going through life like anyone else. “Queer people can have adventures, too,” Pintado said.
O’Connor Genereaux agrees. “It was really important for me to tell a story featuring queer characters but with a plot that doesn’t revolve around their queerness,” he says in his director’s statement. “The film’s characters had to be real people who happen to have queerness as a piece of their identities, and who also just happen to be living through this film.”
The story
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. Meanwhile, the Butterfly Queen wants the sketchbook too, and she’s clever, desperate, and she makes the rules.
The story examines childhood friendship, trust and, most importantly, magic. “This is a story about hope, magic and art. It’s about having to choose between your home, your friends and your childhood dreams,” O’Connor-Genereaux said.
In his director’s statement, O’Connor-Genereaux elaborates on the nuances of friendship that the film explores. “I wanted to make a movie about having a best friend. And I wanted to show how difficult that can be,” he said. “There are so many films where the fact of a friendship is a given, a constant. But that’s not how I experience friendship. For me it’s like any other kind of love: it can be hard, it takes continual work and if the friendship doesn’t keep growing then it dies.”
In telling the story, the young director said he wanted 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 High School 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. The film was funded in part by a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council. O’Connor-Genereaux said most of the $90,000 budget went into production aspects of the film. When he calculated what the voluntary support was worth in 2021, he said it would have pushed the cost to $750,000.
Without that donated time and effort, the filmmaker concluded that he couldn’t have afforded to complete the project. Quite the magical feat.
A childhood dream come true
After that childhood eye-opening visit to the drive-in, O-Connor-Genereaux 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.” That project was shot when O’Connor-Genereaux was 20, with $18,000 and a cast and crew of friends from Emerson College.
To Vermonters, O’Connor-Genereaux’s films might look familiar, with scenes featuring rusty, abandoned farm equipment, household objects and old children’s toys.
Art Director Seana Testa said that the key was to transform ordinary, everyday objects and materials. “If you are from Vermont and you know Vermont, you will be able to see what we started with (what we found just lying around, that people gave us for free) and how we used those materials to create an entire fantasy world,” Testa said.
Hand-carved armor, a castle made from sheet metal, underwater scenes achieved with fog and leaf-blowers: “Our fantasy world feels current and completely possible – like you could fall through a hole out in your field any day and find this reconstruction of the real world, but built to play by new rules,” Testa added.
O’Connor-Genereaux said he had a look and feel in mind throughout. “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.
Coming to town
The 76-minute Vermont-made fantasy film “The Butterfly Queen” made its Vermont debut in Brattleboro in February. It comes to the Grange Hall Cultural Center in Waterbury Center this Sunday, March 12, at 4 p.m.
The showing will be followed by a discussion with O’Connor-Genereaux, Testa and members of the filmmaking team who hope to share their process and provide some inspiration.
“I’m really proud of this film, of everything we managed to bring to life,” said O’Connor-Genereaux. “The goal with this Vermont tour is to show other young artists how substantial, meaningful projects can be produced within our state no matter their budget or rurality.”
Other upcoming screenings include this Saturday, March 11, at Main Street Landing in Burlington at 7 p.m. and Saturday, March 18, at the Savoy in Montpelier at 8 p.m. as well as dates in Brandon, Wells River and White River Junction.
Get tickets online. Details on screening dates and places, and more information about the film are on the film website.
Community News Service is a collaboration with the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.