John Waters
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Attendance at the 2025 Vermont International Film Festival jumped 26 percent over last year’s record-setting mark, Vermont International Film Foundation executive director Steve MacQueen said Friday.
The 10-day event, which ended on Sunday, October 26, counted 9,065 admissions, more than any since 2013, which is as far back as the festival’s computerized records go, and most certainly an all-time record, MacQueen said. The festival was much shorter during most of its 40-year history.
Thirty-eight of this year’s 77 programs sold out. Early tallies show a $55,000 profit, a number not entirely representative of the event’s success because VTIFF members were allowed to see some films without paying extra. The nonprofit has 517 members, nearly double the number it had a year ago.
Festival headliner John Waters proved to be as entertaining as expected. The campy 79-year-old film director provided live narration during a screening of his 1974 cult classic Female Trouble. Tickets to that event sold out within an hour of going on sale to the public. “He was incredibly funny,” MacQueen said. The question-and-answer session that followed provided a serendipitous moment that delighted Waters, MacQueen continued.
While narrating the film, Waters commented that a famous scene in which the teenage Dawn Davenport, played by Divine, throws a tantrum because her parents didn’t get her the “cha-cha” heels she requested for Christmas, was filmed in someone’s basement, though he didn’t remember whose. During the Q and A, MacQueen said, a man in the back of the theater raised his hand and told Waters, “That was my parents’ basement.”
“And then he dropped a couple of names,” MacQueen said, “and John Waters was like, Oh, my God, that’s right. Those are the guys.” The audience member, a child at the time, had been ordered out of the house during filming and had watched the flurry of activity from across the street, he told Waters. The two later exchanged contact information, and Waters couldn’t stop talking about the coincidence, MacQueen said: “When I took him back to the hotel, that was all he was talking about. When I picked him up at four in the morning to go to the airport, that was the first thing” he talked about.
While Waters’ appearance certainly boosted festival attendance, MacQueen also attributes this year’s success to the work he and his staff have done in the past year to expand the Vermont International Film Foundation’s offerings in the wake of the closing of Merrill’s Roxy Cinemas, Burlington’s last commercial theater. Those efforts, he said, have expanded the VTIFF audience.
The festival, the foundation’s flagship event, featured 80 films from 40 countries during its 10-day run. “For me,” MacQueen said, “as the person putting the calendar together, a big highlight is that every movie that I said I was going to show, I showed at the time I said I was going to show it, in the place I said I was going to show it.” Executing Plan B, a nearly inevitable occurrence with so many films running for so many days, was never required.
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