Before her death, one that would be immortalized in a new documentary by filmmaker Sandra Luckow, writer Cai Emmons introduced Luckow to the Country Fair in Eugene, Oregon, an Eden of tie-dye and hippie vibes.
When it came time to edit the footage of a psilocybin trip Emmons took during her last few months alive, Luckow thought back to the Country Fair for inspiration.
In a rare exploration of animation for the seasoned documentarian, swirling splashes of purple, pink, and green spilled beyond that scene and onto the edges of the documentary’s official poster. When I met Luckow at a screening of her documentary Vanishing Friday evening at Dwight soccer pub The Cannon — part of the debut weekend for New Haven’s new Lighthouse Film Festival — her shirt looked just as trippy as the poster. Turns out, she’d bought it to match.
In the doc, Luckow follows Emmons’ last six months with bulbar-onset amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) before choosing physician-assisted death, an option made possible by the state of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act.
The death itself happens within the first few minutes of the film. With the heaviest part out of the way, the movie rewinds to months before and blossoms into a raucous adventure reflecting on life itself. More than anything, the movie illustrates the gorgeous, weird, funny romance between Emmons and her husband Paul Caladrino. It’s exactly the kind of thought-provoking film the Lighthouse Film Festival aims to put on New Haven’s radar.
This weekend was the premiere run for the festival, a concept that “spawned from a couple people from another film festival,” according to director Katherine Kowalczyk. That other festival was NHDocs, which closed its final run in late 2024 as it got harder and harder to find a solid venue to screen at. The Lighthouse Film Festival picked up where NHDocs left off, making use of pop-up venues around the area. Besides The Cannon, the festival hit the New Haven Museum, the Sandbox at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, and Best Video in Hamden. According to Executive Director Tony Sudol, the new Lighthouse Film Festival is meant to fill the gap NHDocs left, but with its own twist.
For example, the new festival’s selections aren’t limited to “docs.” Their mission is to tell the truth in whatever way they can, even if that means using fiction to get there.
The festival ran from June 5 through 8, celebrating student films with the same vigor and respect as the professional ones. What’s more important than the means of delivery is the goal of getting New Haven’s eyes on curated films that, in Sudol’s words, “entertain but make you think.”
A small group of protesters outside the soccer-pub-turned-movie-theater disagreed with Friday night’s film choice, but they echoed Sudol’s same message. They had come from Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide (PAMAS), a group arguing that laws like Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act presented a danger to disabled and otherwise marginalized people. They warned that without good insurance and societal privileges, people would get pressured toward medical-assisted suicide for economic reasons — a prediction that, according to Vanishing’s filmmaker Sandra Luckow, “the statistics don’t hold up.”
When I asked the group what their goal for the evening was, protester Joan Cavanagh said it was “just to get people to think while watching the film.”
Cavanagh went on to state that the documentary’s depiction of medical-assisted suicide has “no real basis in reality for those who are underprivileged and marginalized in society.” She said she had deep sympathy for the film’s subject, writer Cai Emmons, but also pointed out that Emmons was white and “well-to-do” and that her “idealized” experience of Oregon’s Death with Dignity process should not be taken as a representative one.
All three of the protesters from PAMAS made sure to note that Luckow was gracious with them. They didn’t need to tell me; Luckow herself was the one who first informed me all about their cause and even asked to take a picture with the group. Although she disagreed with the protesters, she seemed very interested in their presence and what movies like hers meant to them.
The Bow Tie Criterion in New Haven might be gone forever, along with the decade-old NHDocs Film Festival that called it home, but the Lighthouse Film Festival is a welcome arrival for lovers of the weird and wonderful. Those in attendance Friday night didn’t just get a chance to see a funny, philosophical film — they also got to see protestors outside, plates of hot, delicious grub inside, and the director herself, tie-dye and all.
