When our friends invited us up from New Haven to Middlebury, Vermont, it did’t take long to dash and buy our Amtrak tickets to the town’s new train stop on the Ethan Allen line (leaving from NYC). It was a stunning ride along the Hudson River for most of it as I read Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green’s’ deliciously wicked and smart book “Shy.”

Middlebury is a college town — just as lovely as you’d expect a Vermont college to be in the summer, with a smart and engaged population and lots of arts, leisure and foodie things to do, Plus, did I mention it was late August and the more civilized summer temperatures in this part of New England among lakes and mountains were summer comfortable.

It was an added bonus that it was also the week of the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival [MNFF] which celebrated the work of first and second-time filmmakers from around the world.. Just the ticket.

As much as we love streaming a lot of movies during the pandemic and re-emerging to see the occasional big studio film at the local Bow-tie Cinema, our tastes favored more cutting edge films from all around the world as well as off-beat documentaries — especially ones that didn’t deal with probing an mysterious murder from years ago. So to be in a stunning setting and join a posse of cinephiles hopscotching among the festival’s five venues, well, it seemed like the perfect to way to wrap up our first summer of co-vid freedom. (Relatively. that is. Everything’s relative now.)

The festival is taking place through Sunday, Aug. 28 and although we have tO leave before the very end —work beckons — we’d have at least a stretch of days to luxuriate of new films from very new filmmakers.

We dove in straight away with a trio of films, followed by a another trip, followed by the kick-off film “The Automat,” which not only featured Mel Brooks as one of the main interviewees but he also wrote the film’s end song. Fabulous. I hope it gets picked up by Netflix or some other streaming platform. The audience loved it and the q and a was even more illuminating. By day’s end we crashed at this cinematic overload.