What do a Siberian utopian society, an aging French shepherd and a rebellious hen have in common with Central Wisconsin? For Northcentral Technical College faculty member Jila Nikpay, they are the perfect catalysts to spark a community-wide conversation about our relationship with the land.
Now in its second year, the Film, Farm & Culture Fest returns to Wausau July 23 to Aug. 1 to trade Hollywood blockbusters for a curated slate of world-class, independent cinema. By bringing global perspectives to the Woodson History Center, the festival aims to reflect the region’s diverse, agricultural roots back onto the silver screen.
The festival has its roots in a 2022 screening of the film “Midnight Traveler,” a documentary chronicling the three-year journey of an Afghan family seeking asylum in Europe. Nikpay screened this film to coincide with the ongoing arrival of Afghan refugees who were resettled in the Wausau area in recent years.
“I wanted to create some discussion around the fact that they have migrated to Wausau and I was also a translator for them as well,” Nikpay said. “The cinema was full, the event was very moving for people to actually see a film ... about a filmmaker who escaped from Afghanistan because he had death threats on his life with his family.”
In addition to a packed screening, the event received enthusiasm and praise from NTC leadership. This success was the validation Nikpay needed to pursue a larger event that would bring more diverse perspectives and discussions to the area. A pilot program was greenlit and last year, the inaugural Film, Farm & Culture Fest was hosted by Northcentral Technical College at the Woodson History Center. The aim of the festival is to highlight the relationship between human culture and the land we live on.
“I wanted to relate it to the Wausau identity that is rooted in farming and also it’s somewhat diverse — we have Hmong population, Afghan population, Indian population and more,” Nikpay said. “We are a farming community, really, and so we should relate that so people are inspired by these stories that also happen in small towns and villages, but have strong stories made by filmmakers that are passionate about their work and bring excellence in craft and storytelling to their films. People can be inspired, it stimulates imagination and thoughts and can then help us to see our community in a new way.”
This years festival features six international films, shot across the globe in Europe, North America, the Middle East and South America. Each screening starts at 6 p.m. at the Woodson History Center with a brief introduction by Nikpay, and an open audience discussion moderated by Nikpay following the screening.
“It’s pretty lively and it’s a combination of seeing things in a new way and learning about new cultures and new issues, and then thinking about how they relate to other communities as well,” Nikpay said. “It’s a pretty interesting discussion; I enjoy them. It usually lasts half an hour.”
In programming this year’s films, Nikpay relied on a survey handed out to attendees last year. After each screening, audience members were encouraged to rank the film they just watched from 1 to 5.
“People rate the films and the average rating was 4.5 to 4.7 out of 5,” she said. “So it was pretty successful.”
Nikpay also took into account the post-screening discussions of those films and how successful they were at provoking thoughts among audience members. With those two gauges in mind, Nikpay was able to get a good sense of what type of films audiences would enjoy this year.
“All the films somehow explore contemporary issues with land, whether it’s introducing animals in a landscape that threaten herding sheep, greedy corporations trying to steal farmland, or just looking at an animal like a hen and seeing similarity with our lives,” Nikpay said.
For those who haven’t delved much into independent cinema, the festival presents an exciting opportunity to see what it’s all about. Independent films are produced outside the Hollywood system, freeing up filmmakers from corporate mandates or studio interference. This can lead to a clearer creative vision as well as greater artistic license and risk-taking.
“It opens the door to a new way of thinking because it’s very authentic,” Nikpay explained. “It’s kind of like going to get McDonald’s food versus somebody making a real meal for you and sitting down and eating it and talking about what ingredient came from where, how does it taste, like that analogy of farming in a way. So there’s a huge difference.”
The festival opens on Thursday, July 23 with a screening of the 2025 documentary, “Cutting Through Rocks.” Directed by Sara Khaki & Mohammadreza Eyni, the documentary follows Sara Shahverdi, the first female councilor in her Iranian village, who challenges tradition by teaching girls to ride motorcycles and fighting child marriage while facing doubts about her motives.
“It’s a very fascinating story and the filmmaker spent about eight years making this film and it was actually shown at Sundance Film Festival, which is top-tier festival, and also was nominated for an Oscar,” Nikpay said.
On Friday, July 24, the festival screens the “The Blue Trail,” directed by Gabriel Mascaro. This 2025 film is set in a world where the Brazilian government, in an effort to maximize economic productivity, orders elderly people to move to remote housing colonies. A 77-year-old woman refuses and embarks on a journey through the Amazon that will change her destiny forever.
“The filmmaker was inspired, from my understanding, by his grandmother and wanted to create a fresh way of looking at aging,” Nikpay said. “Since Wausau is also a somewhat aging community, I thought this would be a good film to inspire people. It also relates to the Amazon and how she goes through these landscapes, so it’s moving through a landscape, inspired by a landscape.”
The first weekend of the festival wraps up on Saturday, July 25 with the 2024 documentary “Abode of Dawn,” directed by Kristina Shtubert. This documentary follows its protagonists for nearly a decade, as they try to build a utopian society in the Siberian Taiga. Some of them are followers of a religious community whose leader sees himself as the Son of God.
“It’s a very intimate documentary, and a very, very strong story about this group of people who are following this self-claimed Messiah. Which I guess, after changes in the Soviet Union, there were a lot of people like that,” Nikpay said. “This story follows them and the film asks why is a utopian community almost impossible? They farm the land, they provide their own food, so it has to do with living a very simple farming life and trying to bring faith and hope and salvation together.”
The second week of the festival kicks off on Thursday, July 30 with the 2024 documentary “The Shepherd & The Bear,” directed by Max Keegan. Set high in the majestic French Pyrenees, this film explores a conflict provoked by the reintroduction of brown bears in the midst of a traditional shepherding community. The film follows an aging shepherd who struggles to find a successor as bears prey on his flock, and a teenage boy who becomes obsessed with tracking the bears.
“It’s about this aging shepherd who wants to teach his young daughter about shepherding, but there’s a lot of issues including the government had decided to release brown bears in the mountains, so it’s dangerous ... the fact that the bears are attacking the sheep and the shepherd is actually scared of them as well,” Nikpay said. “It shows contemporary ways the farming community could be handled all over the world. They have to deal with all these eco-activists as well.”
On Friday, July 31, the festival screens “Hen,” a 2025 film directed by György Pálfi. This film follows a hen who escapes a chicken farm and finds refuge in the courtyard of a crumbling restaurant. There, she discovers love, confronts the pecking order and fights to protect her eggs from a greedy owner. Her droll yet touching quest for motherhood mirrors the messy compromises and silent struggles of human lives.
“[Pálfi] basically feels that we as humans also have to go through hierarchies and fight for our freedom and it reflects his position in Hungary where he wasn’t able to make films for 16 years,” Nikpay said. “His films were banned, so he wanted to make a film that has no limitation, and a hen was perfect and he used like 16 different hens.”
The last film, screening Saturday, Aug. 1, is “Green is the New Red,” a 2024 film directed by Anna Recalde Miranda. This gripping, character-driven documentary investigates the murder of over 1,500 environmental defenders in Latin America since 2012, revealing how today’s violence is rooted in the legacy of Operation Condor — the Cold War-era “multinational of repression” that enabled mass disappearances, land grabs and impunity across the region.
“It’s about land grab, how basically big corporations backed by military dictatorships in South America and the United States have basically created an ecological disaster and also killed many people,” Nikpay said. “Many people disappeared so that these corporations can easily manipulate and use the land the way they want it.”
The Film, Farm & Culture Fest isn’t just about watching films, though; it’s also a place to learn how to make them. During the festival, Nikpay and her NTC colleague Jordan Innes will host filmmaking labs at NTC’s Studio 7. Innes will teach a Motion Graphics Lab from July 20-24. This lab will teach students how to use Adobe After Effects to create basic animation with text and shapes. Attendees will learn how to work with keyframes and properties to animate objects and export them to share.
“If somebody’s interested in editing, motion graphics is a really fun thing to learn and they definitely come in handy if they’re working in media or communication,” Nikpay said. “These labs are meant to give an idea about our video program, which is both technical and creative and invite people to perhaps continue with our program or come to our film festival and just be aware of NTC’s wonderful video program.”
On July 20, the festival welcomes Max Timm, director of education and outreach for the International Screenwriters’ Association, to teach a free, four-hour screenwriting workshop at NTC. The workshop will help writers develop a concept, build characters from the inside out and map their story’s structure using a proven professional framework, all before touching page one.
Nikpay’s Short Film Lab runs July 27-31 and instructs participants on the ins and outs of writing, shooting and editing a short film in five days. Participants learn collaboration and technical skills by rotating through cinematographer, gaffer, grip, sound and production assistant roles to make a movie. This workshop offers aspiring filmmakers an opportunity to make a short film using the Studio 7 facility, located on the NTC main campus in Wausau.
“These are labs that teach people in a week how to make a film and then if they want to go on and make more films they can, or if they’re working for a corporation and want to learn about storytelling, this is going to help them to learn how to do that,” Nikpay said. “What I’ve discovered is there’s a lot of creativity in rural areas or small towns, but unfortunately there’s not many places to get training and express your thoughts and ideas and learn how to present them professionally.”
As the festival continues to grow in future years, Nikpay hopes it can be a place to highlight local filmmakers. Starting this year she offered her graduating students the opportunity to submit short films to the festival, so long as they pertain to the festival’s theme.
“One of the things for future I’d like to do is screen short films by Wisconsin-based filmmakers for one of the screening nights as a new addition, but I want it to be a juried or audience choice competition to qualify for some sort of award, like a financial award, so the filmmaker can make another film,” she said. “That kind of support is rare in Wisconsin, I don’t know of any grants for individual artists to make films. So this is something I’m hoping I can work on and convince people who can help me to launch it.”
This year, the festival has seen increased support from the B.A. & Esther Greenheck Foundation and Community Foundation of North Central Wisconsin. For Nikpay, that show of support is a sign that the festival, and the art of filmmaking, has value in the community.
“It validates,” she said. “They see what we’ve done and validate what we’ve done. That encouragement, and the fact that they see a lot of application, that they want to see more of this activity, validates that it’s good for the community ... For a small community like this you have to do this step-by-step, and every little success helps for the next step.”
For more information on the Film, Farm & Culture Fest, or to purchase tickets, visit filmfarmculturefest.com.
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