Northwest Film Forum

Peter Dunning is a rugged individualist in the extreme, a hard-drinking loner and former artist who has burned bridges with his wives and children and whose only company, even on harsh winter nights, are the sheep, cows, and pigs he tends on his Vermont farm. Peter is also one of the most complicated, sympathetic documentary subjects to come along in some time, a product of the 1960s counterculture whose poetic idealism has since soured. For all his candor, he slips into drunken self-destructive habits, cursing the splendors of a pastoral landscape that he has spent decades nurturing.

Imbued with an aching tenderness, Tony Stone’s documentary is both haunting and heartbreaking, a mosaic of its singular subject’s transitory memories and reflections—however funny, tragic, or angry they may be.

 “Films are sometimes about creating a reason to go somewhere and learn. There's a lot to learn from Peter and he saw our appreciation…The complexities of Peter are all rich and deep. We were his outlet for his thoughts, memories, ideas and prose.  Because he’s a performative person by nature, merely existing with an unresponsive audience of only his land and his animals was driving him mad. I think Peter may have missed his calling as an actor.  Our most significant job was really just to be editors of Peter’s material. Sometimes we would see the specialness in something Peter would miss, which would then spawn a new action that Peter would reveal.” -Director Tony Stone 

“A consistently lively and surprising film. Powerfully sad but very funny, too.” — Noel Murray, The A.V. Club

“A beautiful documentary with a rueful, cantankerous yet hugely charismatic figure at its center, rendered with a texture as rich as the soil through his fingers.” —Scott Tobias, Variety

 “Entertaining and heartbreaking.” —Noel Murray, Indiewire