While his peers were outside backpacking and canoeing, Kieran Blunnie remembers spending a lot of his time as a teen in a tiny print shop in the basement of the art center at Camp Kieve in Nobleboro.
“I was the print shop guy,” said Blunnie, a filmmaker based in New York City.
The space that defined his time at camp and made him into a lifelong printer is the setting of Blunnie’s new 12-minute documentary, “Neo-Typesetters.”
“This is truly my love letter to the practice and that place,” Blunnie said.
The film begins on a dark day for the printing press, using archival footage of the New York Times transitioning away from typesetting to computer printing in 1978.
From there, viewers are introduced to two subjects keeping the profession and art of printing alive, including Howard Bliss, founder of the Kieve printing shop and Blunnie’s main inspiration for the film. Bliss, a Brunswick resident, died in October 2025 at the age of 94.
“There’s no one who is more charismatic and more passionate about [printing] than him,” Blunnie said of Bliss. “He built this space; he taught it for so many years. There is an entire generation of printers that exist entirely because of him.”
Young printers like Gabriella Amato, the second person featured in the film and a friend of Blunnie’s, who represents printing’s turn toward an art form rather than a necessary profession.
“These two polar opposite people have this common ground and shared knowledge that is so valuable,” Blunnie said.
Blunnie certainly didn’t expect “a little video” to have success on the festival circuit. So he was surprised when it raked up several awards — including best short documentary at the most recent New York Documentary Film Festival — and was selected for the 2025 Maine International Film Festival.
“One of the happiest days of my life was when I got word that it was going to be in the Maine International Film Festival,” Blunnie said. “It felt like such a full circle [moment], because this thing is about Maine, and it’s made its way at least a little bit into the Maine zeitgeist.”
“Neo-Typesetters” is streaming online on the PBS website and made its TV debut on New Hampshire PBS on Jan. 8.
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Katie Langley can be reached at klangley@metln.org.