First Nantucket, then the world!

After Nantucket, the 64-year-old director will embark on a lengthy summer of local screenings—what Craven calls “The Peter and John Cape & Islands Barnstorming Tour”—with plans to show the film in every town on Cape Cod as well as on Martha’s Vineyard. Later events will be held in Boston, Hartford, and in various communities in Vermont. The tour features dates at traditional theaters as well as unconventional film venues, including bars and churches. Craven says his goal for the tour is simple: to reach as many New Englanders as possible.

Photo Courtesy of: Willow O’Feral

“As a director, my place has always been New England,” Craven says, “and the goal has always been to make New England narratives and to distribute them very intensively throughout the region. I hope audiences support this idea that our own movies made in our own place can be just as good movies and can stimulate us in every way that a movie made in California can.”

Set on Nantucket, Peter and John-—which Craven wrote, directed, and produced—involves a relationship between two brothers that grows stormy when one of them receives an unexpected inheritance—and both take an interest in a mysterious young woman. The film is based on French author Guy de Maupassant’s 19th-century novel, Pierre et Jean, a book widely credited with changing the course of narrative fiction due to its rich psychological characterizations. In addition, the French novel and Craven’s film both take place in scenic seaside communities.

Craven and his crew shot the film in April and May of 2014, with a majority of the scenes filmed on Almanack Farm in the village of Polpis. Craven produced the film through the Movies from Marlboro Project, a program he created at Marlboro College in Vermont where he has taught film studies since 1998. In the program, students who attend colleges and universities across the country can study at Marlboro for a film-intensive semester. The four-month program includes classes and workshops as well as pre-production and production work on a feature film.