One of the things that the Woodstock Film Festival does best is to shine a spotlight on the upsurge of filmmaking activity in the Hudson Valley region. At WFF 2024 last month, a low-budget nonfiction film about the Kingston-based Wayfinder Experience became the surprise hit of the festival, packing the Orpheum and Bearsville Theaters with true believers and handily copping this year’s Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature. Directed by Emmy-winner Carina Mia Wong and Alex Simmons, We Can Be Heroes also won a Special Jury Award “for bravery and empathy” when it premiered at SWSX in March, and went on to be named Best Documentary Feature at the Nevada City Film Festival in June.
We Can Be Heroes depicts a group of tweens and teenagers preparing for and then participating in one of Wayfinder’s live-action roleplaying (LARP) camps in the summer of 2022, shortly after losing a couple of years’ worth of human connection at school due to the Covid pandemic. The scenario for this particular LARP, The Last Green, was an environmental disaster encroaching upon the borders of a fairyland whose bickering factions must learn to cooperate in order to save their shrinking world. Each camper chooses a fantasy character to portray and how they want to portray them. Along the way they learn improv skills and build self-esteem, while whacking one another with foam swords and pretending to die dramatically. “Come for the swords, stay for the people” is a longstanding Wayfinder motto.
The documentary’s point of view shifts among half a dozen youngsters, each a different flavor of “geeky,” to illustrate the value of the camp’s Adventure Game activities in helping kids feel valued as an integral part of a group pursuing a fictional common goal. There’s Dexter, for example: an awkward, bookish homeschooler who’s almost as terrified of ticks in the countryside setting of camp as he is of trying to chat up his crush remembered from a previous year’s Adventure Game. Abby, who chooses to use nonbinary pronouns, has recently been diagnosed with Superior Mesenteric Artery Syndrome (SMAS), a potentially fatal chronic obstruction of the duodenum that means having to attend camp while wearing a feeding tube.
Among the youngest campers is Eli a/k/a Cloud, a bumptious first-timer who is obsessed with winning and resistant to Wayfinder’s collaborative “Let us play!” ethos. He decides to roleplay the nemesis of the girl who has been chosen by acclamation to be the queen of the united Fae-folk, and doesn’t want to let it go in the interest of group enjoyment. The camp counselors’ gentle, non-judgmental approach to helping this oppositional child reinvent himself in the context of the game narrative is a real eye-opener as to what makes the Adventure Game special. Cloud eventually falls afoul of the camp’s safety policy of zero tolerance for violence or bullying, but it’s made clear that he’d be welcomed back once he matures enough to understand that “winning” isn’t a zero-sum game.
Since its founding in 2002, Wayfinder has been a place where youths who don’t necessarily fit in at school find “their people” and can try on new roles via improvisation of fantasy-world characters. While any kid is eligible to attend, and even the dullest “normie” can benefit from the culture of mutual respect that prevails here, a sizable percentage of participants identify as neurodivergent and/or LGBTQ. It’s a matter of self-selection. “Those whose names were never called when choosing sides for basketball,” in Janis Ian’s words, don’t go to sports camp, as a rule; but at Wayfinder they feel welcomed and appreciated. It’s no coincidence that many alumni go on to become involved in theater.
Some of them even come back, after completing their education, to become Wayfinder staff. That’s the case with Judson Packard, who first arrived as a camper in 2003 and now serves as program director and one of the four owners of the company. Judson makes several appearances in We Can Be Heroes, but consistently turns the attention back onto the campers themselves, whose decisions drive the narrative. “We provide a space that shifts and changes to meet the needs of the campers,” they say. “You put a sword in a kid’s hands, and it gives kids permission to do big physical things that you’re usually not allowed to do. You take on a new name, new clothing, a new personality. You get to be angry; you get to be sad. It’s a foundational experience for many people.”
The core of the Wayfinder Experience, the Adventure Game, has deep roots in the mid-Hudson Valley. In 1986, Howard Moody and Brian Paul Allison developed the model, drawing on the noncompetitive play activities championed by the New Games Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and founded a company called Adventure Game Theater (AGT). The earliest Adventure Games were hosted by the Center for Symbolic Studies at Stone Mountain Farm in Tillson and the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck. “That makes the Adventure Game older than Magic the Gathering and only two years younger than Dungeons and Dragons,” Judson observes. “I attended the first semester at Omega. Howard was my gym teacher at the Woodstock Day School.”
The Wayfinder Experience was created in 2002 by several enthusiastic AGT veterans, and by 2005, Judson recalls, Moody and Allison were ready to move on to other things, so AGT was “absorbed back into the company.” The model has since been adopted by other groups around the country, but Wayfinder can lay the best claim to being heir to the original concept. Besides summer sleepaway camps at various locations — currently at the Holmes Camp and Retreat Center in Putnam County — Wayfinder conducts day camps for younger children at Unison Arts and Learning Center in New Paltz, Woodstock Day School, High Meadow School in Stone Ridge and Zena Democratic School (formerly Sudbury School).
Expanding the programs offered in school districts throughout the region is one of Wayfinder’s goals for the next few years, Judson says, with an eye toward “shifting the costs away from campers and their families” and thereby reaching broader demographics. Afterschool programs have been hosted in the past in the Rondout Valley, Woodstock, New Paltz and Schenectady schools, and are currently operating in Kingston and Rhinebeck. Events can be tailored to the needs of children in Special Ed programs or made sensory-friendly for kids on the autism spectrum. “The program can do whatever we want it to,” says Judson. “I’ve run it out of a broom closet for one or two classrooms and had magical experiences.” More Literary Adventure events at libraries are in the works as well.
Wayfinder also organizes single-day roleplaying events during the off-season, which attract a lot of returning campers, along with workshops in maskmaking, costumery, prop-building, game design and scriptwriting. Sword Saturdays take place bi weekly at the High Meadow School, and there’s a weekly Bardic Circle around a campfire where kids can flex their poetic and musical chops. For those of us who dearly regret that nothing like Wayfinder existed when we were kids, or who attended long ago and now crave a refresher, there are even Adult Retreat adventure weekends now and then.
Wayfinder is now taking registrations for its Winter Adventure Game, running December 27 to 30, planning a horror-movie-themed Spring Game and firming up its summer camp schedule for 2025. You can find out much more at https://wayfinderexperience.com. For those daunted more by the camp fees than the prospect of battling monsters and evil mages, check out the link for financial aid from the Hero Fund.
As to where you can view We Can Be Heroes, it hasn’t yet been picked up by a distributor, cable channel or streaming platform. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Judson. “It’s on the festival tour until they figure out what to do next.” To check for updates, visit www.instagram.com/wecanbeheroesdoc or https://muck.tv/we-can-be-heroes.
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