Early each summer Annie Dugan ’00 and Janaki Fisher-Merritt ’99 welcome film lovers to a festival far from the glitz of Sundance and Venice—exactly how they like it.
Under a sky that seems close enough to touch, in the open farm country of Wrenshall, Minnesota, sits a big red barn that once housed hay, horses, and cows. Now, it’s a movie house.
Since 2004, over one weekend every summer, Annie Dugan ’00 and Janaki Fisher-Merritt ’99 have opened the barn doors wide and invited people inside to the Free Range Film Festival.
“What is a Free Range film?” they assume you want to know. Their answer, posted on the festival’s FAQ page, is: “any film, video or kinescope nurtured without the use of pesticides, growth hormones or a distribution deal from a fancy-pants Hollywood studio.” Or, as Dugan puts it more succinctly, films that “would never show up on [your] YouTube feed.”
The crop of films shown at their latest festival, held June 24–25, opened with a bite-sized animated music video from Italy and concluded with a feature-length tale by an American filmmaker shot across Iceland’s dreamy landscape about seeking human connection as the world ends. Among the 11 other films included this year were a documentary short centered on one woman’s passion for telenovelas; a poetic visual and sound piece generated out of a collaboration between an artist and her computer code; and a preview of a documentary-in-progress chronicling a curious art heist in Duluth, Minnesota.
The barn is the heart of the Free Range Film Festival. Dugan, a curator and art history instructor at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth and the University of Wisconsin–Superior, and Fisher-Merritt, an organic farmer, are its soul. Perhaps it was kismet that brought this inventive couple together with the barn, a stately but outmoded agricultural structure hand built of wood in 1916.
In 2002, Dugan and Fisher-Merritt were looking for their first house. They needed it to be near the farm that Fisher-Merritt’s parents started in 1988, and where he grew up and wanted to do his lifework. (He and Dugan bought the farm from his parents in 2010, and moved there two years later. They then sold their first house to Dugan’s parents). They found a house a mile down the road, which came with five outbuildings. One of which, as Dugan describes, was “this gorgeous old barn. The family who we bought the place from had kept up the barn, even though they hadn’t had animals in there for the past 10 years. We felt like we had to be stewards of it, too.” Their stewardship began with cleaning it out, unglamorous work that found them removing “a bunch of old hay and dead pigeons,” according to Fisher-Merritt.
Once they cleared the muck, Dugan says she discovered a “belly of a whale,” while Fisher-Merritt describes “a cathedral” inside the barn’s main space: a soaring, second-story hayloft, with a 30-foot-high pitched roof constructed of ribbed planks. They stretched a length of Tyvek across the hayloft, rigged up a sound system, and with a borrowed projector started throwing movie-watching parties. “When we first bought the place, there was this huge feeling of stress,” says Fisher-Merritt, “because there are all these buildings to take care of. And so, instead of a source of stress and worry, we turned the barn into a source of entertainment and fun. It had a purpose.”
During a road trip to the Fargo Film Festival in January 2004, Fisher-Merritt and Dugan, together with three friends, hatched the idea of expanding the purpose of the barn and launching their own film festival. Six months, 200 hopeful film submissions, some advertising posters, and one press release later, they were surprised to welcome more than 300 people over the inaugural film festival weekend: friends, family, and curiosity seekers who came to see what a bunch of spirited 20- and 30-year-olds had brought into being. “It felt like we got to be a part of all this pent-up creativity,” says Fisher-Merritt of the films on DVD and VHS that poured into a P.O. box they set up in a time before streaming.
Eighteen years later, the Free Range Film Festival has become a destination for filmmakers who want to show their work and audience members, always around 300, many of whom have become regulars. It’s no wonder. Festival attendees arrive on a summer evening to live music from a local band. People gather in knots on the lawn in front of the barn. Some buy dinner from a food truck stationed nearby, others fill up on popcorn, candy, and soda at the concession stand inside the barn. There’s art to see. Dugan curates exhibitions alongside the films. Most recently, she showed her father-in-law’s wooden sculptures, displayed in a raw concrete gallery space in the barn’s basement.
The films begin nightly at 7:00 p.m. and are shown in one of three places: in the whale’s belly, on the ground floor between old feeding troughs, or in a small lean-to attached to the barn’s right flank, its door standing open to the sweet-smelling air.
Dugan likes to step outside during the screening of the final film, as the festival comes to a close. “Everything has been taken care of, and I don’t have to worry about what needs to happen,” she says. “I just walk across the lawn and look back to see the light coming out of the barn.”
Learn more at freerangefilm.com.
