We’re honored to be screening Betting The Farm tonight as part of the Slow Money National Gathering in Boulder, CO. Slow Money is a great organization, devoted to inspiring a new kind of investment and entrepreneurship for the 21st century. The organization’s values seem perfectly aligned with a company like MOO Milk, which is founded on the idea that a sustainable price for farmers is a prerequisite for running a responsible company.

We’re grateful to be included in a great event, and we hope the Slow Money community will be excited to learn more about MOO farmers.

Meanwhile, back in Maine, we’ve got DVDs of the film for sale, and people near and far are buying it every day and learning more about this inspiring group of Maine dairy farmers. (The movie is also available on the iTunes store and on numerous other VOD platforms.) If you haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, buy it now, and then post a review of your own on iTunes, Amazon, or iMDB. We saved the best news for last: MOO Milk has added several more farms since we finished the film! They’re up to 12 Maine dairy farms. Check out the map on their website to see each one. Without fail, the first question at every screening of the movie is “How is MOO doing now?” I’m happy to write that as of today, they’re growing. But their continued success will depend on consumers in New England continuing to buy MOO Milk. Find a store near you with this handy store locator on the MOO Milk site.

Better yet, Whole Foods Market selected our film for its Do Something Reel Film Festival. It will be the film of the month for January, which means local Whole Foods stores across the country will be able to host screenings, and visitors to Whole Foods’ website can rent and watch our film.

After several years of shaping and refining this story, we’re filled with gratitude for all the friends and supporters who have helped us get here, and we’re excited to see the MOO Milk farmers’ story become available to the entire country.

After dozens of shows around the state, including a great evening at The Grand in Ellsworth last night, we’re holding the one-and-only Portland screening tonight at USM in Portland. Online ticket sales close at 3pm today, but tickets will be available at the door. ($10 each)

See you tonight!

Betting The Farm will screen for the first time in New York City next month, as part of the prestigious documentary festival DOC NYC! We are really excited to be a part of such an incredible lineup of films.

We’ll screen the film at 2pm on Nov. 11th at the IFC Center. Tickets are available right here.

In other news, we’ve added another screening to our Maine tour. Betting The Farm will screen at the Lincoln Theater in Damariscotta on Oct. 23rd at 7pm. For tickets, call 207-563-3424, and see our screenings page for the most up-to-date information on the Maine Tour.

Well! We really didn’t expect that. More than 500 people turned out for the Maine premiere of Betting The Farm at the Camden International Film Festival, so many that the festival had to open a second theater in order to accomodate everyone.

Better yet, we found out just yesterday that Betting The Farm won the CIFF Audience Award. Thank you to everyone who came out to see the film and voted for us. It would mean a lot at any festival, but we are especially honored to receive an audience award from our home crowd.

We are tremendously grateful to the CIFF team for working so hard to help us draw a big crowd for the screening. And it was an amazing feeling to watch the MOO Milk farmers get a well-deserved standing ovation from the crowd in the Camden Opera House. What a way to kick off the Maine tour.

Since Camden, we’ve already screened the film in Stonington, Rangeley, and Waterville, with many more Maine screenings to come. This week, the film will play in Presque Isle, Bryant Pond, Farmington, and Bar Harbor. The full list of screening dates and times is here. (Bangor and Lewiston residents, don’t worry. We’re going to announce screenings in your town very soon.)

For more great images of the festival, check out CIFF’s Flickr feed and the website of photographer Mehgan Brosnan.

This is our homecoming. It’s a big deal.

Before we spend all of tomorrow stressing out over preparations for the screening, though, it seems like time to pause and say thank you to all the people who’ve helped us get this far.

We are grateful on a daily basis for the amazing team that helped us make this film. This means you, Scott, Dallas, Mary, Lindsay, Joe, Colin, and many more.

We are grateful for the love and support of our families.

We owe a huge debt to the funders and festivals who’ve shown us support throughout this process. That means you, LEF Foundation, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Sundance Institute, Silverdocs, Thom Powers, and Ben Fowlie. Not to mention the family and friends that have thrown their hard-earned money our way to help us tell this story. Thank you.

We’re also hugely grateful to the organizations who’ve agreed to sponsor our Maine tour, which will enable us to show this film to communities all across the state of Maine: Bangor Savings Bank, Maine Farm Bureau, Maine Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association, Maine Farmland Trust, Natural Resources Council of Maine, and Sierra Club Maine.

Last but not least, we owe a huge debt to the farmers and families of Maine’s Own Organic Milk Company. The simple truth of making a documentary—particularly a verité film—is that it is a collaboration; without the trust and honesty of one’s subjects, it’s impossible to make a film like this. The people we met on this journey have inspired us with their hard work and know-how. Their perseverance in the face of difficulty, though, has been the greatest inspiration of all.

To befriend and follow a group of people who wouldn’t quit on a good idea simply because it wasn’t working yet was an inspiring (and frustrating, terrifying, exasperating, and exhausting) experience.

The biggest problems we all face are not easily fixed. They require not brilliant, bold, one-stroke solutions, but a painstaking, imperfect process of gradual improvement. That’s not an easy thing to do. It requires patience, a tolerance for adversity, and a willingness to adapt. Most of all, it takes hard work. In that way, not to mention many others, we’ve found the farmers of MOO Milk to be a model for the future. It’s been an honor to know them, and it is a thrill to tell their story to a Maine audience for the first time.

As close followers of our Facebook page will note, Betting The Farm will be the Opening Night Film of the 8th Annual Camden International Film Festival! We’re thrilled to be launching the film in our home state with the support of the festival that’s had our back for so long. (We were the winners of the inaugural Points North Pitch session two years ago, and CIFF has been a steadfast supporter of Maine filmmakers throughout its history.)

But that’s not all!

Immediately on the heels of our Maine premiere at CIFF, we are launching Betting The Farm: The Maine Tour, a screening tour of cities and towns around the state of Maine. So far, we’ve booked more than 20 screenings in 13 cities and towns around the state. All the details are on our Maine Tour screenings page.

Don’t see your hometown theater on the list?! Call them and ask them to book the film!

After years of work, we’re really excited to be able to bring this story to a Maine audience for the first time. It’s about time the story of the farmers of MOO Milk hit the big screen!

After more than two years of working on our film, the day finally arrived: last Friday, in Silver Spring, MD, we showed Betting The Farm to the public for the first time! Joined by two of the MOO Milk farmers, Vaughn & Laura Chase, as well as CEO Bill Eldridge, we screened the film to two sold out crowds as part of the 10th annual AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs documentary festival.

Press guru Adam Segal snapped this image as Betting The Farm screened in public for the first time.

Leading up to the festival, we received a number of excellent reviews from members of the press who got sneak previews of the film. PopMatters gave the film an 8 out of 10 rating. Ann Hornaday, of The Washington Post, wrote:

Filmmakers Cecily Pingree and Jason Mann capture their struggles with sensitivity and painterly beauty, including a Greek chorus of cows that observes the action with serene implacability.Washington Post, 6/15/2012

Since the festival, we’ve received a number of other mentions in industry recaps, including indieWire, Filmmaker Magazine, and NPR’s food blog, The Salt.

Vaughn & Laura Chase at the premiere of Betting The Farm, Silver Spring, MD

It was wonderful to have Vaughn and Laura in the audience to witness the reaction of a crowd of strangers to their story. And all three of our characters participated in a Q&A session after the film on Friday night. We even pulled a member of Congress—our mother / mother-in-law Chellie Pingree—out of the audience to field a question about the Farm Bill.

After their brief visit to DC, the Chases headed back to northern Maine and their farm, and we went home to plan the next round of festival appearances and screenings, as we work to bring the story of MOO Milk to audiences across the country. Stay tuned here, on Facebook, and on our Twitter feed for more information about that.

The filmmakers after the premiere of Betting The Farm.

For more, be sure to check out our Facebook page as well. And if you’re planning to attend Silverdocs this year, make sure to add our film to your festival schedule!

Betting The Farm will premiere at Silverdocs next month! We’re really excited to have our world premiere in the same lineup with so many of the best documentaries from around the world this year. Check out the full lineup at the Silverdocs site.

Screening details

World Premiere Screening

Additional screening