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Bess O’Brien is best known for making award-winning documentary films that take deep dives into difficult issues like addiction, hunger and homelessness.
With her latest film, she is taking a different approach: She is inviting audiences on a feel-good journey about resilience and joy.
“Every Day: Big and Small” is about the unsung ways that Vermonters show up for each other in good times and bad to create change. O’Brien introduces us to a writers group for people in recovery from substance use, a boisterous drag show at the Elks club in Rutland, a group of men talking about domestic violence, a horse farm for people with PTSD, a couple recovering from a recent flood, a military museum run by a 13-year-old boy, and girls who want to go into farming. These are among a series of cinematic vignettes that tell a larger story of how people cross divides and lift each other up.
“A lot of times we are told things about how people are acting or feeling that actually aren’t true,” O’Brien told me. People “are actually more generous and more open-hearted than we often assume.”
The inspiration for O’Brien’s new film was seeing what happened after the floods in 2023 and 2024 that ravaged some Vermont communities. “We all recognize that our neighbors came together to help each other. However, this happens every day, and we don’t even know it, and we don’t acknowledge it all the time,” she said.
O’Brien’s previous documentary films have raised awareness about vulnerable people and social justice. Her 2013 documentary, “The Hungry Heart,” about the prescription drug crisis in Vermont, sparked a statewide conversation about opioids.
O’Brien’s 2016 documentary, “All of Me,” focused on the lives of people with eating disorders, and in 2018 she directed “Coming Home,” about five people returning to their Vermont communities from prison. Her 2024 film, “Just Getting By,” was about Vermonters struggling with food and housing insecurity.
As she does with most of her films, O’Brien is embarking on a statewide tour with “Every Day: Big and Small.” Her goal is to spark a statewide conversation about the issues in the film.
Chronicling recovery and resilience has been a throughline in O’Brien’s work. In 2014 she co-founded Writers for Recovery to help people who are struggling with addiction. She is now expanding what recovery means.
Recovery is “what we do 55 times a day, just as human beings, because we’re depressed, or we’re bummed, or we’re angry at our kid, or we’re frustrated, or we can’t get our Google to work,” she said.
“It’s the old Vermont thing: You get stuck in the mud and somebody comes and pulls you out. That is recovery. That is somebody coming and helping you. So this film is really about all those small little things that human beings do every day that get us through life. Because if we didn’t have that, we’d be fricking in big trouble.”
