Animal Farm Film Festival, Art Dye Park, American Fork, UT

Every Friday night, 7:00 p.m.

Art Dye Dog Park 

American Fork, Utah

Bring a chair. Bring a blanket.

I dreamed I was the travel author Bill Bryson, and I’d somehow wandered into a film screening at a dog park. Here is the dream—plus a bit extra.

By the time I arrived at Art Dye Dog Park, darkness had begun doing that thing it does in winter: arriving early, unannounced, with the brisk confidence of a person who owns the place. The dog park itself was behaving as dog parks always do—a low choir of panting, the occasional yelp of social negotiation, and at least one silky, winter-coated retriever moving with the buoyant expression of an animal who has never once suspected that history contains tragedy. 🥲

But the real congregation—humanity’s quieter, chair-based faction—had assembled outside the gates, in the parking lot, which is the natural habitat of modern American community. There were about twenty-ish cars scattered in loose rows.

I’d expected the usual inflatable screen, the kind that makes a parking lot pretend it’s an amphitheater. Instead, the “screen” was an older Dodge minivan with its sliding door open. In the doorway, filling the entire gap was a flat-panel TV.

In front of the van and between nearby cars, people sat on camping chairs and folding chairs. Hoodies, heavy jackets, and what I hoped were double layers.

The mood wasn’t “festival,” exactly. It was more like: We have agreed, briefly, to take something seriously, and cold be-damned we’ll enjoy ourselves. Arms folded. Chins resting in hands. Bodies leaned slightly forward. The posture of attention, not spectacle.

On the TV, a cartoon played: the 1954 version of Animal Farm. This was the Animal Farm Film Festival. No banners. No corporate sponsor beaming. Just cars, chairs, a screen, and a small gathering of people who had quietly reclaimed a corner of a utilitarian lot. They’d found an overlooked square of public space and decided it could still host ideas.

I asked the projectionist what the “festival” part involved.

"The premise," he said, "is that Animal Farm has already been living in several ideological states for decades. There’s Orwell’s original force—power reproducing itself regardless of who’s in charge, the revolution curdling into a new hierarchy that looks suspiciously like the old one. Then there are versions of the film that flatten the narrative into a more convenient moral, or push it into a tidy fable: this system bad, that system good." 

“Here what we are doing is attempting to make the ending the way Orwell might have wanted it,” he said, “or attempt to make whatever we feel like. People can feature their own final few minutes. The story’s meaning often hinges on what you choose to do with its final turn."

"The ending of the book Animal Farm pivots on a single hinge—the moment the pigs learn to walk. Change what comes next and you can conclude the story for better or for worse. It’s the cleanest point of divergence because it is the moment takeover becomes likeness. The new predation class—the exploiter class, the ruling elites, the dominant order—has secured power, and now begins to behave and look almost indistinguishable from the dominant order it overthrew."

"You begin exactly where the story is poised for its final turn: when the pigs rise, start walking, and become indistinguishable from the humans. Then the film submissions adds their new ending—two to five minutes. Long enough to make a claim. It's refreshing since people makes the point of discussing the ideas, about what their ending asserts."

At that point I looked around at the audience—people in their own zones—and it occurred to me that the parking lot itself fit the festival’s worldview. Communal without being centralized. A peaceful, slightly anarchical dog-park variety of public life. Everyone together, but not crowded; present without being pressed into uniformity.

There was talk. Something about it was moving: people sitting in a dim parking lot—no commercial branding, no performative hype—giving their attention to a screen glowing in the open door of a minivan, as if the van had become, temporarily, a lantern for ideas.

It didn’t feel like a drive-in movie. It felt like a small, intentional audience: observers rather than consumers. The kind of quiet gathering that seems increasingly rare, and therefore slightly radical, even when it’s happening next to painted parking lines and a trash can that has definitely seen things.

Anyway: if this sounds like your sort of improbable American beauty, it’s real, it’s local, and it’s recurring.

Every Friday night, 7:00 p.m.

Art Dye Dog Park, American Fork, UT

Bring a chair. Bring a blanket.