In Bluebird, like a quieter, humbler The Sweet Hereafter, a school bus tragedy has reverberations all up and down the fault lines of a small, snowbound town, beginning with bus driver Lesley (Amy Morton) and her logger husband (John Slattery). Writer-director Lance Edmands lives in Brooklyn and went to NYU, but he grew up in Kennebunk, in southern Maine, and to make Bluebird traveled north to Millinocket, an old paper-mill town struggling to move forward. Over email, I asked him about the allure of the place—and time—Bluebird takes him back to. Bluebird, Edmands’s first commercial feature after work as an editor (Tiny Furniture) and an award-winning Maine-set student film Vacationland, opens February 27.
