Rick is one of the founders of the Green Mountain Film Festival in Montpelier, and was Programming Director of the festival from 1999 to 2012. Each year he chose a diverse number of films, with special attention to foreign films, documentaries, and Vermont films.

He also organized post-film panel discussions and arranged for filmmaker appearances, including the actor/director Giancarlo Esposito, producer Christine Vachon and documentary makers Judith Helfand, Mirra Bank, Albert Maysles, Les Blank and Ralph Arlyck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Each year Rick interviewed a nationally-known film critic, a festival feature that started in 2002 with Phillip Lopate, and continued with Kenneth Turan, Molly Haskell, David Thomson, Gerald Peary, Godfrey Cheshire, Jeanine Basinger, Peter Rainer, and Matthew Hays. The critic Stuart Klawans, writing in The Nation, described the 2003 Green Mountain Film Festival as “a cinephile’s utopia: a festival organized and supported by an entire community of local moviegoers.” Matthew Hays, the Montreal-based film critic, called the 2006 festival “incredible … a mind-bendingly fascinating diet of movies.”