KEEPING IT REEL Newburyport Documentary Film Festival slides into 20th year “It started here.” Joanne Morris’ remark comes toward the end of two free-ranging hours of conversation on the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival. It’s a Monday afternoon in July at a sidewalk table outside The Screening Room, and Morris, the festival’s longtime executive director, and program director James Sullivan are talking about the event’s origins and growth and where it has landed in its banner 20th year. Invariably, moviegoers, filmmakers and film festival hosts enjoy talking about movies, especially moments that transported or moved them one way or another. “A big thing we do is talk about them,” Sullivan says. The festival, which welcomed more than 2,000 attendees last year, regularly hosts roundtable and other discussions with filmmakers. Last year, after the free showing of five shorts by students, the Young Emerging-Filmmakers Showcase, the new Port Vida restaurant hosted a dinner for the filmmakers. The students, including the winner of the $1,000 YES prize for best film, Xudong Liu, whose Boston documentary, “Gund Kwok,” about the first female troupe to perform the traditional Lion Dance, sat at a long table sharing impressions and ideas and toasting the evening. In addition, throughout the year, the festival’s version of a book club, the Watch Club, invites viewers to stream a film on their own, then join Sullivan and the film’s director online for a Q& A. On July 23, Watch Club watchers talked about “The Blues Society,” a Memphis Country Blues Festival documentary directed by Augusta Palmer, whose father was a musicologist and writer of the book “Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta.” At the 2017 festival, Sullivan emceed a Q& A after the screening of “True Conviction,” a powerful documentary by Jamie Meltzer about falsely accused and convicted people who were later exonerated, released from prison and then worked to free others in situations similar to theirs. The central figure in the documentary, Christopher Scott, was imprisoned for murder in Texas from Oct. 23, 1997, until Oct. 24, 2009. He was given a new trial and subsequently released seven years after the man who had committed the murder admitted to the crime. The festival brought Scott to Newburyport for the Q& A, and the audience was moved by his peaceful and positive demeanor. Setting the scene Back at the State Street table, Morris’ “It started here” thought resonates — like a pithy observation that begins a book. The “here” that Morris refers to has multiple meanings and the added significance that comes with reflecting on an approaching milestone, the Sept. 20-22 festival’s 20th anniversary. The Screening Room, where many of the 500-600 films have been shown, is physically right here. Moreover, her “here” points to a person, festival founder Michelle Fino, who, in a slice of serendipity, happens to amble past the table this very afternoon and, graciously, joins the conversation. She was here in the beginning. That was in 2004, along with Hailey Klein. They assembled and unrolled the do-it-yourself documentary film happening, with more than a little help from their friends. They called it the Northern Lights Documentary Film Festival. Fino recalls the early excitement that organizers felt, the festival being the first in Massachusetts to screen only documentaries. At its core, the attraction that Fino and others felt came from simply seeing movies, whether they were shown in a class, living room, art theater or megaplex. Especially those out-of-the-mainstream films not shown in traditional cinemas and on niche topics by independent filmmakers often working on a shoestring budget. Sullivan says that the past 20 years or so have been a golden age of documentary filmmaking. Digital technology and its relatively inexpensive cameras and other tools of the trade, along with shared learning, have democratized filmmaking. Still, the biggest challenge to hosting a film festival, if you are not a big, well-heeled operation and want it to last, is funding the endeavor and limiting expenses. Money comes from grants, ticket sales, program ads, individual contributions and sponsors. Festival volunteers, then, as now, carried the day. Fino remembers how Matt Bowen of Aloft Group Inc., a Newburyport advertising company, made the festival’s logo, brochures and posters and created a website, all for free. Fino also remembers a wildly successful recruiting effort one morning when she walked, on a lark, to Middle Street Foods and found among friends and acquaintances the needed festival help, the ticket takers, ushers and other volunteers. Comeback story The first year, 2004, the festival showed 28 films, including “Touching the Game: The Story of the Cape Cod Baseball League” and “Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed,” about New Yorker Shirley Chisholm’s campaign as the first Black woman to run for president. Multiple venues showed the festival’s feature-length and short films. Two places remain mainstays, the 99-seat Screening Room and 191-seat Firehouse Center for the Arts. Fino says that the festival was running out of energy after five or six years. They had no office, so they held meetings wherever they could, including a walk-in closet. Morris’ “here” also means this exact place along the sidewalk on State Street where a chance meeting revamped and reinvigorated the festival six years after it began. One day, in 2010, when the festival was on pause and uncertainty loomed over whether it would resume, Fino was walking her dog past The Port Tavern and saw Morris, who had been a festival volunteer in many capacities since 2005. Morris broached the idea of restarting the festival. Fino encouraged her to have at it, take the reins, and it turned out to be a fortuitous endeavor. “It survived because Joanne took it over,” Fino says. Morris has a background in operations, marketing, administration and film. She was a film major in college and got her master’s in filmmaking at Boston University. What she found she really liked, however, was the logistics of putting a film together, the inherent problem-solving that goes with it. “Oh, we need a car or lighting,” Morris says, ticking off common logistical asks. Here, there and everywhere On another level, the “here” that Morris refers to connects tangentially to the array of documentary films shown at the Newburyport festival. They include coastal and regional stories but also those from corners of the globe, diverse perspectives and wildly varying subjects enriching life and cultivating understanding in Newburyport. Sullivan and Morris take turns sitting at the table, periodically leaving for photo shoots inside and outside The Screening Room, then sit together, leave for more photos and return. Kristin Schaller, dressed as festival mascot Popcorn Patty in a bright red wig and popcorn box costume, poses with the principals outside the theater. Tourists and locals, including kids on school vacation, pad over the sidewalk. They slow and throw casual glances as the photographer aligns Popcorn Patty and the film festival organizers and snaps close-ups and photos from farther away, and at multiple angles. It’s a snapshot of a day in the life of Newburyport, a small city where film, music, theater, dance and literature add to its sense of place. Sullivan, back at the table, says that the festival has the advantage of being in a place that filmmakers like to visit. Some 75% of those whose works are festival selections come here for the weekend of films and discussions and dinners. They roam the city’s red-brick streets and alleys, covering the waterfront and inhaling the ocean air and history. “We put them up at the Essex Street Inn, right over there,” Sullivan says, pointing toward Market Square and south. The Federal-style buildings run in a row along State Street, their hipped roofs and symmetrical fronts a style that cannot be reproduced. “We are here for the long run,” says Sullivan, an Emerson College professor, author and culture junkie, a longtime arts and features writer for The Boston Globe. “Every year, the quality of the film goes up,” he says. “We have doubled down on this. We are only going to show the higher- quality films.” Pictures of truth Sullivan and the committee members who screen and select the festival movies from hundreds of submissions seek to bring the world to Newburyport, and its viewers to far-flung places they may never see. Of course, if there are good films close to home, they join the lineup. This year, the festival will show a David Abel film, “In the Whale,” about a Provincetown fisherman who was swallowed, briefly, by a whale. There will be a movie about female long-haul truck drivers. “We have a film about the explosion in Beirut,” Sullivan says. It is told through the lens of a film company that was making a feature film in Beirut in 2020 during the pandemic, and struggling to complete the movie, when a massive blast devastated the port, killing more than 200 people. The festival has shown films from Cuba and Eastern Europe. This year’s lineup will also include “Porcelain War,” about Ukrainian artisans and everyday life in the war-ravaged nation. Sometimes a film combines politics, distance a nd the strange ways in which events can lead to a movie — and change. “Letter From Masanjia,” Newburyport’s 2018 showcase film, a documentary thriller, tells about a handwritten letter that arrived between foam tombstones in a cheap Halloween kit bought at Kmart by a women in Oregon. The message came from a man named Sun Yi, in forced servitude because he was a practitioner of Falun Gong, an ultraconservative spiritual pursuit banned in China. Filmmaker Leon Lee learned about the letter and traveled to China with a hidden camera. Heart-pounding scenes ensue, and, ultimately, the letter and movie become a catalyst to free people from forced labor camps, according to Lee, who traveled to Newburyport for the festival. A random letter had an unimaginable impact. The story of the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival has grown thanks to both seemingly random good fortune but also planning and a setting that welcomes and enjoys independent filmmaking. It started here. By Terry Date