Sheffield DocFest 2024: One Night At Babes (by Angelo Madsen Minax) | Review
Babes Bar in Bethel, Vermont, epitomizes the 21st-century ideal of a diverse, inclusive community space where generations and identities blend seamlessly, as captured in the heartfelt documentary One Night At Babes.
A bar beloved by its longtime regulars as a new space of generational and identity diversity: this is no longer just an illusion or a dream imagined by Ken Loach, who brought together conservative English ageing folks and Syrian refugees in the bar The Old Oak in his eponymous film presented at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. This imaginary place truly exists, and it’s located in Vermont, USA. Babes Bar embodies this model, this ideal that every 21st-century society should strive for. It’s a community space where all generations, gender expressions, and sexualities can coexist, a place that belongs equally to everyone. Like a fable, a tale created to draw humanity towards an ideal, this place actually exists and serves as both setting and character in the short documentary One Night At Babes, which just celebrated its European premiere at Sheffield DocFest 2024.
Nestled next to a railway line in a former abandoned station in the heart of the small town of Bethel, Vermont, the bar’s veteran patrons—who have seen it all and whose histories are, in one way or another, tied to this bar—unexpectedly adapted to the purchase of their beloved bar by a young gay couple from Chicago in 2017, who aimed to “turn the lights on” both literally and figuratively.
In a generous ensemble film with strong local roots, director Angelo Madsen Minax pens a love letter to this small, unique Vermont community. With genuine affection for its subjects, the film paints a joyful collection of portraits of these men and women who frequent the bar, their bar. Supported by an editing style that uses a variety of footage, including off-camera excerpts and intertitles offering light-hearted and quirky anecdotes about the characters on screen, like “Nick believes that the film version of Lolita was an insult to the book,” the film celebrates the bar’s patrons with kindness and generosity, showing how the establishment is an integral part of their lives. Through small digressions, the film skillfully portrays the history of these people and their town. We learn that Bethel is a former factory town, a predominantly low-income, agricultural area that, like many small towns in Vermont, is relatively isolated from the outside world.
It becomes clear that when the bar was bought by two young, non-local gay men, there was initial resistance. However, the film documents the results of what could look like a social experiment, showing how time allowed everyone to find their place. The unspoken motto is clear: “come as you are.” Everyone eventually set aside their prejudices, sharing a single space where generations, identities, and genders now mix. A young queer person notes, “They thought they had a problem with queer until they started mingling out of necessity because this is where you come to share your being with the other people in the town.” The real experience of cohabitation and interaction dissipated prejudices born of ignorance, and the community solidified around respect for difference and inclusion. The new owners, Jesse and Owen, are appreciated for who they are: people with big hearts, listening to and serving their community.
While the film celebrates this outcome, it doesn’t paint a naive picture and shows the fragility of this utopia, aware of the remaining reservations and opposition, as well as the persistent discrimination against Black people, which seems even more entrenched than that against queer individuals.
The film succeeds with spontaneity, honesty, and generosity in capturing the soul of a local community, demonstrating that what unites us as humans is always stronger than our differences and prejudices. However, I regret that while the diversity of voices is palpable, it struggles to materialize visually beyond editing effects that bring different generations and sociological groups together on screen. I would have loved to be immersed in this unique place with direct cinema, to experience the diversity rather than have it narrated to me.
That said, these minor grievances do not detract from the tenderness of a film that is in the right place at the right time, capturing with generosity and sensitivity a local community that reminds us how fragile our prejudices can be in the face of our shared humanity.
One Night At Babes is producec by Caitlin Mae Burke, and is screening as part of the programme Shorts: Staying with the Trouble at Sheffield DocFest 2024. Explore our coverage of Sheffield DocFest 2024 here.
