AN ARTIST RESPONDS TO WAR
Peter Schumann and The Bread & Puppet Theater
World Premiere In-Person Screening
Sunday, May 3 at 1pm
Highland Center For The Arts, Greensboro, VT
A Film by Robbie Leppzer
44 minutes • 2026 • 4K • Closed Captions
Sign up for emails here for info on the film’s release.
If you are interested in hosting a film screening in your community, click here.
AN ARTIST RESPONDS TO WAR provides an intimate look at Peter Schumann, the visionary founder of the Bread and Puppet Theater, whose work has spanned six decades. Bread and Puppet’s theater productions have brilliantly explored the question Peter has faced ever since he was a child experiencing the horrors of Nazi Germany.
HOW DOES AN ARTIST RESPOND TO WAR?
Over the last several years, as international norms have shattered and a genocide has been committed in Gaza in broad daylight in front of all our eyes, this question is perhaps more prescient than it ever has been before, making Peter Schumann and the Bread & Puppet Theater more critical than ever. At 91 years old – and still going strong, Peter continues his relentless work using paintings and epic scale performances to show audiences the true cost of war.
HOW HAS BREAD & PUPPET OPPOSED WAR SINCE ITS FOUNDING?
Bread & Puppet is an iconic theater group that has helped redefine political theater and public art in the U.S. for over 60 years. Their work has explored war and its carnage since its founding in New York City in the early-1960s.
In response to the Vietnam War, the Bread and Puppet Theater helped to revolutionize street protest by utilizing gigantic paper maché puppet performances in public - making them one of the defining art groups of the 1960s and one of the landmark theater groups in the world. In the 1970s, the theater moved to a 250-acre dairy farm in northern Vermont, a place where they could create massive spectacles, utilizing the wide-open landscape, attracting tens of thousands to join their boundary-breaking theater shows and collective community.
HOW THIS FILM TELLS BREAD & PUPPET’S STORY
Due to filmmaker Robbie Leppzer’s long-term relationship with Peter Schumann and the Bread & Puppet community, we’ve been able to create a film that tells Bread and Puppet’s story in an unprecedented manner. Cutting between originally shot footage and archival footage stretching back over 40 years, there’s never been a portrait of a theater or artistic group like this before.
AN ICON OF CULTURAL RESISTANCE
After a lifetime of witnessing war, Peter Schumann still uses all of his waking energy to plead with the world to end the madness of violence. After escaping the aerial bombing of his community growing up as a child in Nazi Germany, Peter devoted his entire adult life to use his art to protest the brutality of war across the globe from Vietnam to Central America to Iraq to Gaza.
In the turbulent times we are living through, icons of cultural resistance are more important than ever, and Peter Schumann and the Bread & Puppet Theater embody a spirit of creativity, resilience, and inspiration.
AN ARTIST RESPONDS TO WAR
World Premiere In-Person Screening
Sunday, May 3 at 1pm
Highland Center For The Arts, Greensboro, VT
Sign up for emails here for info on the film’s release.
If you are interested in hosting a film screening in your community, click here.
REVIEWS
“AN ARTIST RESPONDS TO WAR is a beautiful, heartrending film that meets this moment of global catastrophe and brutality. Robbie Leppzer documents the Bread & Puppet Theater’s story and that of Peter Schumann with the thoughtfulness of the great filmmaker he is.”
– Erin Axelman, Co-Director of the award-winning documentary ISRAELISM,
produced by Tikkun Olam Productions
“As a cinematographer myself, I fell in love with the beautiful and poignant images of artistic protest that Robbie Leppzer brings to viewers in the aptly titled AN ARTIST RESPONDS TO WAR. We must all ask ourselves how we can respond to war and genocide, and Peter Schumann and Bread & Puppet can help us answer that question. It is deeply touching how Peter and the Bread & Puppet Theater call upon moral outrage against brutality through their art. Please watch this beautiful film.”
– Sam Eilertsen, Co-Director of the award-winning documentary ISRAELISM,
produced by Tikkun Olam Productions
“Filmmaker Robbie Leppzer is the master chronicler of contemporary movements of protest and social change. His latest work, AN ARTIST RESPONDS TO WAR, focuses on the art of puppeteer/painter Peter Schumann, founder of the Bread and Puppet Theater, who describes himself as a “war child,” having grown up in Nazi Germany, and how this propelled him into a life of activism and opposition to war. The subject of his current work is the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as seen through the eyes of this artist. Leppzer has captured the haunting tragedy that Schumann expresses through his large-scale theater productions and paintings. Beautifully filmed and immaculately edited with deeply evocative music, he has managed to capture the power, emotion and outrage of the live performance. This is filmmaking of the very first order.”
– Sut Jhally, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Founder/Executive Director, Media Education Foundation
THE STORY OF THE FILMMAKER & THE FEATURE-LENGTH FILM PROJECT
Robbie Leppzer has been making documentary films for his entire career that chronicle people who stick their necks out to work for grassroots social change in the world. Robbie has produced award-wining and critically acclaimed short and feature-length documentaries, including for CNN International, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, HBO/Cinemax, PBS, CNN, Sundance Channel, HDNet, Link TV, Free Speech TV, Vermont PBS, National Public Radio, and Pacifica Radio.
AN ARTIST RESPONDS TO WAR is part of a larger feature-length film project – shot over nine years, which chronicles the full life story of Peter Schumann and the 63-year history of his iconic theater troupe entitled, BREAD & PUPPET: THE THEATER OF PETER SCHUMANN, that will be completed in 2027.
Help us finish the feature-length film!
DONATE to the Bread & Puppet Film Project.
To find out how you can help us finish our
feature-length film about Bread & Puppet, click here.
AN ARTIST RESPONDS TO WAR
Premiering Spring 2026
BREAD & PUPPET: THE THEATER OF PETER SCHUMANN
To be released in 2027
Sign up for emails here for info on both films.