The 12th annual Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival next month will feature appearances by Jane Fonda, Addison County native Anais Mitchell, composer Mason Daring, and the strongest lineup in the history of the MNFF, according to its organizers.

MIDDLEBURY — While two-time Academy Award-winning actress and activist Jane Fonda (see related story) will understandably grab many of the headlines at this year’s Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival (MNFF), the five-day extravaganza (Aug. 26-30) will boast several other luminaries and a crop of 120 submitted and curated films that festival organizers have dubbed the best ever in the event’s 12-year history.

“We’ve always tried to bring stories to life or to light for our audiences where they could make the statement, ‘I’ve never seen that before; I learned something,’” MNFF Co-founder and Interim Producer Lloyd Komesar said. “This year, there’s a bumper crop of films that seem like revelations.”

Komesar, MNFF Artistic Director Jay Craven and Andy Mitchell — the festival’s newly hired managing producer — recently gave the Independent a sneak preview of MNFF12’s impressive coming attractions.

It will all kick off at an already sold-out opening night that will celebrate legendary local artist Anaïs Mitchell, responsible for the incomparable “Hadestown.” It’s a genre-defying musical that blends modern American folk music with New Orleans-inspired jazz in a show that follows two intertwined love stories between the young dreamers Orpheus and Eurydice, alongside King Hades and his wife Persephone.

For those who were lucky enough to have scored a ticket, the screening of “Hadestown: The Musical” will be held in Middlebury College’s Dana Auditorium on Wednesday, Aug. 26, and will be followed by a Q&A with Addison County native Mitchell, moderated by MNFF Artistic Director Jay Craven.

“I couldn’t be happier that Tony and Grammy winner Anaïs Mitchell will join us for our opening night at MNFF12, which will pay tribute to her extraordinary imagination and success as the creator of ‘Hadestown,’ which has exceeded all expectations — with all ages — and is now touring worldwide,” Craven said.

Other MNFF12 honorees will include Ross McElwee, a celebrated documentary filmmaker whose works include the quirky “Sherman’s March,” described as a “a meditation on the possibility of romantic love in the South during an era of nuclear weapons proliferation.”

McElwee’s most recent film is titled “Remake,” which uses footage from multiple earlier films in his work to tell an autobiographical story that includes the loss of his son (to an accidental heroin overdose in 2016, at the age of 27) and his reflections on movie making.

This year’s festival will screen “Sherman’s March” and “Remake,” followed by a Q&A with McElwee after “Sherman’s March.”

Craven said McElwee in “Remake” evokes the emotionally trying subject of his son’s death with “his usual sense of irony and direct investigation” that are true to his filmmaking style.

Aspiring film-score composers will be thrilled to learn that Mason Daring — who has composed the scores for 17 of director John Sayles’s films — is also one of this year’s MNFF honorees. In all, he’s written scores for more than 70 films.

He also composed music for TV programs “Frontline” and “Nova.”

“He’s a very accomplished guy,” Komesar said.

In addition to taking a bow for his musical credits, Daring will be at MNFF12 for the screening of a film in which he appears. It’s called “Marblehead Morning: Daring & Stahl, 50 years in Harmony.” Mason Daring and Jeanie Stahl spent 50 years as both a New England folk duo and as independent artists.

MNFF12 will also screen the 1994 John Sayles film “The Secret of Roan Inish,” for which Daring wrote the score. And Daring has agreed to conduct a film scoring master class during MNFF12, Komesar noted.

TOM HANKS MOVIE

Hollywood producer Allyn Stewart will also be in Middlebury for MNFF12, which will screen her film “Sully,” starring Tom Hanks, about U.S. Airways pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s 2009 emergency landing in the Hudson River.

Craven and Komesar have reached out to filmmaker John Wilson, whose latest offering, “The History of Concrete,” sees Wilson use insights he gleaned from a Hallmark movie writing workshop to pitch a documentary about concrete.

Kirtsen Johnson, a highly regarded cinematographer and director for independent documentary, will also appear at MNFF12. The festival will showcase two documentaries she directed: “Dick Johnson is Dead” and “Cameraperson.”

“She’s all about observation and has quite a sense of humor,” Komesar said of Johnson’s filmmaking style.

She will co-lead a workshop on documentary cinematography with Andy Mitchell — a four-time Emmy Award-winning director, cinematographer, producer and writer in his own right.

“I’ve looked up to her for a while because she has a creative way of telling a story,” Mitchell said. “Both of her movies that we’re screening are slightly autobiographical — using only the footage that she shot. She’s barely even in (“Cameraperson”), but you get a beautiful picture of her, her life and her story.

“I’m thrilled to be working with her on this,” Mitchell added. “(Johnson) is a huge ‘get,’ from a camera person’s point of views.”

Festival organizers have recruited these industry VIPs to primarily pass along their insights to the next generation of filmmakers.

“We’re not interested in celebrating celebrity for celebrity’s sake; we’ve never done that,” Komesar said. Their participation “is offering something substantive to our audiences as well as for the filmmakers who are attending.”

And it’s clear that the aspiring filmmakers who made the cut for MNFF12 have the right stuff, according Craven, who raised the bar for inclusion in this year’s festival.

A team of MNFF screeners passes along to Craven film submissions that they rate an eight (or better) on a scale of 1 to 10.

“This year I probably accepted 40% or so of the films that were passed on to me… It either means we’re being more selective, or I’m being more difficult. I really placed a higher standard on what I was interested in programming,” he said.

This year’s festival drew 566 film submissions — just 19 fewer than the all-time record of 585 set at MNFF10.

Craven and his team whittled the entries down to 90 features and shorts that will be screened at five Middlebury venues during MNFF12: Town Hall Theater, the Marquis Theater, and three locations on the Middlebury College campus: Dana Auditorium, Twilight Hall and the Axinn Center.

The total number of films shown will be 120, when one counts the additional 30 curated films.

“We’re not as selective as Harvard, but it ain’t easy to get in,” Komesar said with a smile.

Look for more details about MNFF12 — including ticket prices, scheduling and breaking news — at middfilmfest.org and at addisonindependent.com.

Other attractions await at MNFF12

But to whet your appetite, here are some film titles highlighted by Craven, Komesar and Mitchell:

• “Dick Johnson is Dead.” As her father nears the end of his life, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson stages his death in inventive and comical ways to help them both face the inevitable.
• “Cameraperson.” Exposing her role behind the camera, Kirsten Johnson reaches into the vast trove of footage she has shot over decades around the world. What emerges is a visually bold memoir and a revelatory interrogation of the power of the camera.
• “threeASFOUR: FULL CIRCLE.” Avant-garde NYC fashion designers Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser and Adi Gil create “couture-on-the-street” designs in a radical collaborative act shaped by war, identity, and hope.
• “Space Cowboy.” Joe Jennings, a pioneer of skydiving cinematography, looks back on creating iconic moments in film and television, while he tries to turn a dreamlike vision into reality.
• “I Follow Rivers.” A determined kayaker turned mother defies expectations and confronts her past, to run Iceland’s Aldeyjarfoss waterfall, her last unfinished goal.
• “The Butcheress of Trois-Pistole.” In a Quebec town, butcher Renée LeBlanc-Paulin has made a radical choice: to work exclusively with whole local carcasses, which she and her team cut every week in her vibrant downtown butcher shop. Around her, a network of committed women — chef, breeder, slaughterhouse manager, institutional cook — help her to keep alive the collective effort to build a viable model, through the very real pitfalls of raising, slaughtering, processing and distributing local meat.
• “Give Me the Ball.” Tennis icon Billie Jean King transformed sports and society. Through archives and intimate interviews with King and her inner circle, we see how she prioritized changing the world over self-preservation.
• “Diamond Diplomacy.” Explores 150-plus years of shared history between the United States and Japan through the mutual love of baseball, anchored by the stories of two former players: Japan’s Masanori “Mashi” Murakami and the USA’s Warren Cromartie.
• “Best Day Ever.” Follows adaptive mountain bikers Greg Durso and Allie Bianchi as they tackle the daily challenges of disability — and find joy, connection, and belonging in Vermont’s mountain biking community.
• “Prickly Mountain and My Design/Build Life.” In the late ’60s and ’70s, a group of architects landed in Vermont with big ideas and a simple plan: to stop just designing buildings and start making them, too. Drawing from Bauhaus ideals but rejecting the rigidity of academia, they built by hand, embraced mistakes, and turned architecture into a wild, creative experiment.
• “My NDA.” Three people bound by non-disclosure agreements face extreme personal risk to expose how a simple intellectual property contract is weaponized to silence, manipulate and control.
• “Nuisance Bear.” A polar bear’s traditional migration path leads it into populated areas, sparking conflict between human interests and wild nature as the animal struggles to survive in a changing world.
• “Billy Preston: That’s The Way God Planned It.”  Follows the story and challenging life of legendary musician and genius keyboardist Billy Preston.