Local filmmaker’s short picked up online

The sun shining through the woods in David Rocchio’s short film “The Brothers” is one way to visualize the concept on which it’s based — that of “thin places.”

Rocchio says a “thin place” is an area where the spiritual and the earthly seem closer together than usual, and long after the moment passes, its memory often shines through in the mind, like sun filtering through tree leaves.

“The Brothers” depicts a story Rocchio heard from a man from Lyndonville while they were waiting to speak to the Vermont Public Utility Commission.

Now, it’s being distributed on Sofy.tv, an online channel that plays short films.

Rocchio, who founded Stowe Story Labs, still loves the story, though he shot the film in Stowe eight years ago.

When they were young in the 1930s, the man told Rocchio, he and his brother saw a group of boys rolling a tire up to a ski jump near the house where they lived in the summer.

The boys, bored, planned to roll themselves down the ski jump on the tire.

“He convinced the kids not to do it, because that would be a really bad idea. He had remembered this his whole life,” Rocchio said.

The man’s memory stuck with Rocchio, too, and when he was writing a short story for a contest, he decided to use that idea as inspiration, and later to turn it into a short film.

A friend told him three cardinal rules of short films — don’t shoot outside, don’t use kids, and don’t use animals.

“I decided to use this one because it’s outside, with kids, and I put my dog in it,” Rocchio laughed.

His son, Callum Rocchio, and Park Crist, now a student at Stowe High School, played the two main brothers.

The film is, for the most part, imbued with a Vermont childhood — the opening pushing, shoving dialogue between two young brothers, hanging out on a lazy summer day; the two groups of boys who don’t speak when they meet, but they all just start pushing the tire, no explanation needed.

It took about four days to shoot the four-minute film back in 2010, Rocchio said, but the post-production editing took almost two months.

Rocchio hopes the concept of thin places will resonate in the minds of viewers as “places on the earth where you feel close to the spiritual. It’s not just our ordinary lives. It’s more than that.”

To Rocchio, his passion for backcountry skiing makes the hobby a thin place for him.

“It’s this moment in your youth when you do something that’s going to stick with you forever, because it’s more than just life.”