A new Colorado film festival brings modern meaning to a historic barn

On the hillside behind the yellow barn at Yellow Barn Farm there’s a blackened, shattered forest. The tree remnants mark the Cal-Wood fire, which started Oct. 17, 2020, 6 miles due west of the farm and tore off in all directions, reaching the farm’s edge by that evening. Just two days prior, Azuraye Wycoff, who grew up on the farm, had packed all of her belongings and moved back from Boston at her mother’s insistence. As the story goes, Wycoff’s mother kept messaging her daughter, telling her that she needed to move home by Oct. 15.

“It is pretty typical for my mom,” Wycoff said. “Not so much having a specific date, but she gets really good intuitive hits that something is coming, and she can be pretty predictive. But she really clearly had a message about that timing.”

The Wycoffs had been trying to sell the Yellow Barn Farm for seven years before Azuraye moved back. Both daughters had moved away — Azuraye to Boston and her younger sister, Devon, to New Zealand. But a life-altering motorcycle crash in 2019 brought Devon home to Boulder County, while a mother’s premonition — and a bit of longing on her own part — brought Azuraye back. With all three women on the farm by the end of 2020, the sisters hatched a new plan. 

Yellow Barn Farm is hard to describe in a sentence, so here are three: It’s a regenerative farming site where they research soil restoration in partnership with Drylands Agroecology Research. It’s a small business collective, where a dozen businesses rent space to work on products, take meetings and sell batches of their goods. And it’s an event space for creative community workshops, classes and festivals, like the inaugural Yellow Barn Film Festival taking place Saturday.

The hoop house where some of the farm’s produce is grown throughout the year. The farm has partnered with Drylands Agroecology Research since 2020 to experiment with innovative regenerative agriculture techniques. (Photo by Devon Wycoff)

They tried to host art-centered projects during Azuraye’s first full year running the farm, but didn’t have a stable economic model. “We had such a beautiful concept, but the structure wasn’t there,” Azuraye said of a 2021 event. “We didn’t have the agreements in place, and feelings got hurt and bridges got burned.”

They have since stabilized their revenue — in large part through the fees that businesses pay to use the space — and learned how to write contracts. 

“Yes, the land’s important, the food is important, but if we don’t really allow people to express their ideas and share a different vision for a future, then you know, that’s kind of the glue I think that’s currently missing. But we’re going to create it,” Azuraye said. 

That glue is gathering people in the namesake yellow barn for events, like the Yellow Barn Film Festival.

Getting their hands dirty

The film festival is the brainchild of Devon and her longtime friend from film school, Katie McManus. Devon and McManus have crossed paths throughout the years since they graduated from the University of Colorado. Both moved to New York City at different points after graduation. Devon worked as a dresser in Broadway shows while McManus started her acting career. When the pandemic hit New York, McManus moved back to Colorado, where she’d grown up.

“It was like a 48-hour period of everything that I’d spent six years building in New York City — getting an agent, having a good apartment, finding a job, finally auditioning, getting my degree, working through debt — just gone, like that,” McManus said. 

She resumed life in Colorado, unsure when she’d get back to acting. In 2021, Devon called and asked if she could help with Yellow Barn Farm’s “Art and Eat” event, part of the farm’s first slate of cultural events. “It was the first time I felt inspired again,” McManus said.

Yellow Barn Farm partners with Stalk Market on a community compost program in Boulder County. The compost buckets are picked up by Stalk Market staff, and brought to Yellow Barn Farm, where the food scraps are fed to the pigs. (Photo by Devon Wycoff)

Late last week, McManus was at the farm to talk about the film festival. “Devon will say we had the idea last year. But I feel subconsciously this moment, this festival, and hopefully bigger, broader arts and culture programming here, has been building for years.” (In a separate interview, Devon did indeed say that the seed of the film festival was planted in November 2022.) 

That’s kind of a theme on the Yellow Barn Farm. All three women can tell you the dates of catalyzing events — the fire, the crash, the pandemic — but what those events set in motion had been building, in one way or another, for years. 

“I was in absolutely no position to move home,” Azuraye said, when asked about how she felt when her mom’s messages started coming through. Azuraye’s background is in international affairs and she had started a moving business in Boston that she wasn’t ready to walk away from.

But both experiences have proven useful with this new project. The entrepreneurial skills she learned running a business have translated into running farm operations, and the international diplomacy skills have helped her bring various interests together on this one plot of land. 

“We have so many different organizations that are operating here, and individuals, so a lot of what I do is basically a translation of: ‘What are you actually trying to say? What are your needs?’” Azuraye said. 

The film program

The one-day film festival will run from 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Saturday, and consists of five film blocks. The first block, titled “The Land and Us,” focuses on agricultural communities from around the world and features documentaries and narrative shorts. 

The second block is dedicated to Native filmmakers, the original stewards of the land, McManus and Devon explain. This year’s feature film, shown during the Native block, is “Fancy Dance,” written and directed by Erica Tremblay, starring Lily Gladstone of “Killers of the Flower Moon” fame. 

Gladstone is also featured in the festival’s centerpiece film, “Quantum Cowboys,” which Devon described as “a partially animated, partially live action, acid trip of a Western.”

“(Gladstone) is just dominating our festival this year and I’m not even mad about it,” McManus said. “The amount of stuff we saw that she was in, I was like maybe we should just make this the Lily Gladstone festival.”

The festival also has a block dedicated to Colorado filmmakers, and one segment that they call the “no rules” block, which features shorts that Devon and McManus chose without parameters.  

“It’s geared toward filmmakers who want something a little edgier,” Devon explained. “Some of these (shorts) are a little unhinged.”

Bringing it home

There is one short film in the agriculture block that McManus gets especially excited about called “The Possibilities of Regeneration.” The film is narrated by Lyla June Johnston, a Native scholar and speaker. It’s a quick, 6-minute animation that traces the roots of the modern regenerative agriculture movement back to Native practices from around North America. 

The Cal-Wood fire in 2020 burned over 10,000 acres and is the largest fire in Boulder County’s history. It reached the edge of the Yellow Barn Farm property, pictured here, but a shift in the wind caused the fire to change direction at the last second. (Photo provided by Azuraye Wycoff)

The film explains how regenerative agriculture is not just about working in tandem with nature, but also about bringing community together with common purpose. It’s easy to see how the Wycoffs have worked — and are still working — those ideals into their model for the Yellow Barn Farm. As Azuraye put it, they’re “looking for circularity.” Both in the agricultural systems, like planting silvopastures and using grazing animals to till the land, and in the economic systems, by asking how many times they can get a dollar to circulate through the farm’s microeconomy, Azuraye explained.

McManus walked around the back of the Makers’ Space and paused to pet a couple of oinking pigs that ran to the fence to greet her. We were standing right at the edge of the Cal-Wood fire’s path, the hillside ascending from the property line still remarkably barren. She followed my gaze toward the burnt tree trunks.

“Insurance can cover a certain amount of trees to be replanted, but it’s just kind of what happens,” McManus said, shrugging. “Nature is a cycle of creation and destruction.”