Changemaker Spotlight: Nick Callanan
Founder of the Maine Outdoor Film Festival
Sun setting over Portland’s Eastern Promenade as Maine Outdoor Film Festival event-goers settle in for an evening screening. PHOTO: LOUISA DONELSON
By Amy Paradysz
Picture an early fall evening at sunset, the sun dipping behind the trees as film lovers position their lawn chairs in front of an inflatable movie screen, some unpacking sandwiches and others ordering rice bowls from a food truck while catching up with neighbors. Nearby, two Ugandan youth soccer teams are in the final minutes of their game, having repositioned their goals to avoid sending balls toward the movie screen.
Nick with his nephew at the flagship festival on the Eastern Prom in Portland in 2023. PHOTO: LOUISA DONELSON
Neighbors walking their dogs along trails here at North Deering Park notice what’s happening and settle down on the grass just as Maine Outdoor Film Festival (MOFF) founder Nick Callanan introduces a short film. It’s a piece about the Portland Youth Corps, which gives urban teens exposure to conservation careers through caretaking in Portland parks, like North Deering, the newest public green space in the city. After the film, a few Corps members and the filmmaker, Funkhouse Media, stand for hearty applause.
For the next two hours, the audience goes on a nine-film journey: To an attempted rescue on Mount Washington in 1982 that changed not only the course of two climbers’ lives but those of the rescue crew—and the future of prosthetics. To a South Dallas skatepark that doubles as a resilience hub in one of the city’s poorest communities. To Colorado, where a farm family makes the hard decision to discard practices passed down through the generations and try something new to save the land.
Folding up her chair and walking to her car, Anna Ginn of the Portland Parks Conservancy, says, “First of all, how nice to sit outside in one of our parks! Wasn’t it fun seeing the little players leave and other people come in? There were Scouts here who had worked on the trails. I love all of that. And, then I loved the variety of films. I thought they’d all be skiing and mountain climbing. But they were about cities, too, and farming and all sorts of other adventures.”
Over a dozen years of bringing outdoor adventure and conservation films to audiences across the state, MOFF has come to represent something deeper and more nuanced than most people anticipate when they hear “outdoor films.”
“You can make a ski movie with no narrative other than four days in the pow and letting it rip—and those are great,” Callanan says. “But for people to actually connect with a story, there needs to be more to it than that. We’re looking for films that move us, that show something new or bring us someplace new.”
Selects Tour screening under the stars at Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park. PHOTO: LOUISA DONELSON
“I think I got the record for being at the most films,” says Susan Morris of Portland. As the honorary consul for Canada in Maine, she appreciates the international nature of the festival. The 25 feature films and 80 shorts that MOFF selected in 2024 were produced in 11 countries, including at least a half dozen made in Canada. About 1,600 tickets were sold, with a noteworthy number of people coming from film cities like New York and Los Angeles and from outdoorsy hubs in Vermont, Alaska, Colorado and Utah.
“Film is a visceral experience, and these films help me to greater appreciate this planet on which we live,” Morris says. “Some feature extreme sports. Others speak to the power of being outside— the quiet healing power and the calm of nature. And I was so impressed by the number of films this year that were about women, featured women and were directed or made by women.”
As she points out, the protagonists are not just the typical outdoor adventure types you’d picture in, let’s say, a Warren Miller ski film. They include children and seniors, people of color, and people who are indigenous, queer, poor, differently abled, and emotionally vulnerable.
“When you tell a story and make it relevant for people, there’s deeper engagement and a deeper return,” says Tuck O’Brien, president of the Sebago chapter of Trout Unlimited, a national organization dedicated to conserving coldwater fisheries. “There’s hope and optimism as well as an awareness of the challenges. Teaching people to love those rivers is the best way to get them interested in saving them.”
And if they’ve never visited, a film can take them there.
Callahan presents to students at the Salt Institute at Maine College of Art and Design during the 2023 Maine Filmmaker showcase. PHOTO: AMBER VEILLEUX
Maine rivers are, in a way, the headwaters of MOFF. Callanan, while working as a river guide in The Forks in 2002, started a independent zine called No Umbrella: A Reader for River People. With one other part-timer, he published 39 issues over five years.
“It was a great amalgamation of whitewater, rock climbing and mountain biking content,” he says. “We even had stories from Kennebec log drives that an old timer would type on a typewriter and mail to me.”
When the recession hit in 2007, the zine folded, and Callanan moved to Portland. “I started doing subscription-based video content—like trying to be a YouTuber before that was a thing,” he says. “My old advertisers started asking us to make videos for them, and that’s how the video agency was born.”
Harkening back to the zine days, the video agency was named No Umbrella Media. In 2012, Callanan and his No Umbrella team put some films together to connect with his former zine audience. They called it the Maine Outdoor Film Festival and brought it to the Forks that summer.
“We had whole bunch of river guides show up, and it was super fun,” he says. “The next year, we did it again and started to get calls from venue owners across the state. We had our own screen and projector, and people loved the idea of outdoor movies shown outside.”
A moonlit Selects Tour screening at Camden Public Library Amphitheatre in August 2024. PHOTOS: LOUISA DONELSON
By 2014, MOFF was bringing screenings all over Vacationland. There were a couple years when MOFF brought at least one screening to all 16 Maine counties.
Callanan and his wife Louisa Donelson had a dream of hosting what he calls a “proper film festival”—in the spirit of Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, Red Rock Film Festival in Utah, or the Canadian event known simply as “Banff.” They began lining up theaters and sponsors—but that was 2020. Hosting only outdoor screenings, which MOFF did for its first three years of the “flagship” festival in Portland, limited the audience. In 2023, the MOFF team—the Callanans, staff from No Umbrella and a growing gaggle of volunteers—hosted a five-day festival that included indoor matinees across the city of Portland, and word spread like wildfire in the film, outdoor adventure and conservation circles.
Maine Outdoor Film Festival founder Nick Callanan presenting the Emerging Maine Filmmaker Award to Santiago Tijerina, director of “Courts of Belonging,” which shows how street soccer unites Portland’s East Bayside diverse neighborhood. PHOTO COURTESY OF MADELINE HARRIS
By 2024, Mainers who had grown to know and love MOFF were joined by a growing number of film tourists at Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Space Gallery, Maine Studio Works, State Theatre, The Salt Institute and—for evenings under the stars—the Eastern Promenade.
“We had panels with filmmakers and outdoor industry folks,” Callanan says. “For the past two years we’ve held a Maine filmmaker showcase, showing a lot of impressive Maine work even if it’s not outdoors-focused.”
Each year, after the flagship festival, MOFF takes the show on the road for a 10-week Selects Tour hitting about 18 venues from Skowhegan to Bethel. Each screening is uniquely curated from the pool of 80 short films accepted into the festival and licensed for the year. Since its inception, MOFF has raised $10,000 for Teens to Trails to help Maine middle and high school students achieve life-changing outdoor experiences. Meanwhile, MOFF has licensed more than 500 films, which has supported the work of hundreds of independent filmmakers.
“It’s labor of love to pull this together,” Callanan says. “At the beginning, we had this idea and just did it. I think that’s a wicked Maine attitude, and a lot of the filmmakers have that attitude, too. Some of these self-funded films will make your heart pound and your jaw drop. A film can make you feel and change the way you think about something. What we do is find those films and create venues for those emotional connections.”
From its early days of bringing outdoor and conservation films to people already rooted in outdoor lifestyles, MOFF has evolved to bring the outdoors to anyone willing to sit outdoors—or in a theater or other venue—and go on a visceral adventure with the filmmaker.
“The more you understand about getting into the outdoors, the more you want to protect it,” says Geoffrey Leighton, co-president of Maine Film Association. “From that perspective I think MOFF creates a new generation of what I call ‘outsiders’—people who wouldn’t necessarily be long-distance hikers but who care about outdoor spaces.”
And caring is the first step toward protecting.
To catch the next MOFF event: maineoutdoorfilmfestival.com
Spotlight on Maine’s Environmental Changemakers
Over a dozen years of bringing outdoor adventure and conservation films to audiences across the state, MOFF has come to represent something deeper than most people anticipate when they hear “outdoor films.”