BETTENCOURT

Shortly after David Bettencourt basked in the glow of the wild success generated by his first documentary feature, You Must Be This Tall: The Story of Rocky Point Park, which played for several weeks at the Warwick Showcase (“We outgrossed Jodie Foster’s The Brave One), he began work on his next film.

With producing partner and screenwriter G. Wayne Miller they settled on a film about the Zambarano Hospital at Wallum Lake in Pascoag, which opened in 1905 as a treatment facility for tuberculosis patients. The results, On the Lake: Life and Love in a Distant Place, can be seen at 8 tonight at the Stadium Theatre in Woonsocket where their film will have its world premiere.

Having grown up in Burrillville, Bettencourt said he became interested in Zambarano, because, “I knew about the hospital, but not its history.”

Meanwhile Miller, a Providence Journal reporter who also lives in Burrillville, had become intrigued by the hospital’s past through a 12-part series he wrote in 2006 that focused on one of its patients. Miller, who has known Bettencourt since writing a 1993 series about Bettencourt’s senior year in high school, joined forces on the Zambarano story in October 2007. “We just jumped in and started researching as we went along,” Miller said, following a preview screening of the film at the Cable Car Cinema in Providence.

But as they did their research they found that the story they wanted to tell reached far beyond Wallum Lake. They discovered the town of Saranac Lake, N.Y., which became a mecca for TB patients. It was, said Bettencourt, “A whole town that was built on disease,” and, added Miller, “maybe the only town that was disappointed when the disease was cured.” They discovered that Colorado owed a great proportion of its population spurt in the early 20th century to TB patients who were looking for a cure in the clean, dry mountain air. They found that although tuberculosis has largely been eradicated in the United States, it is still the number two killer (after AIDS) in developing countries.

They dug up information from Zambarano’s records and from people who had worked there. When they opened a Web site at the end of 2007 asking people for their reminiscences, “the floodgates opened,” said Miller.

“We wanted to know who the first patient was,” said Bettencourt, who teaches documentary filmmaking at the University of Rhode Island, “and when we found him and old photos of the train station that brought patients to the sanatorium, the project started to steamroller. We started to wonder what it was like to be taken from your family and not know if you would ever seem them again.”

Their research took them to New York State, to Denver, to North Carolina and Massachusetts and Baltimore. They hunted down archival footage and photos at Zambarano, the National Library of Medicine, the National Jewish Hospital. They began interviewing former patients and family members of former patients and got access to their letters and photographs. “We scoured the earth,” said Miller.

What they’ve come away with is a film of great emotional power that will find interest far beyond the medical community to which they hope to sell DVD copies. Already they’ve had screenings at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health and Harvard College and have lined up a string of showings at medical colleges around the country to follow tonight’s official premiere. Along with the March 25 showing on Rhode Island’s PBS station, Channel 36, Bettencourt said the National Educational Telecommunications Association, which funnels programs for national PBS broadcast, has accepted the film. What Miller said they had “realized was a much bigger story” than just about Zambarano, turned out to be just that.

Bettencourt will not rest on his laurels, however. Already he has begun work on a film called It’s a Bash, about the Rhode Island punk rock band Neutral Nation. “It’s remarkable,” said the director. “They’ve been around 25 years and they are only famous here. Put them in a club in Providence and they will fill the place. Put them in a club in Worcester and they will draw maybe only six people.” In Bettencourt’s hands, however, Neutral Nation has the potential to become nationally famous.

— MICHAEL JANUSONIS