Bravely greeting unknown forces

"They were not very fulfilling," said Gaudet, 35, who lives in Brookline.

In 2004, he was working in Grand Rapids, Mich., where he met Gita Pullapilly, a reporter at another TV station. They started dating. He told her about his dreams for making films. The next day she e-mailed him and proposed they start a production company. (He's since proposed to her, but that's jumping ahead in the story.)

For a few months, they were a couple in search of a film. But when Gaudet took Pullapilly to Bradley, Maine, at Christmas to meet his mother, an idea came to them, unbeckoned, and eventually took shape as their new documentary, "The Way We Get By." It revolves around Aron's mother Joan Gaudet, then 70, and two of her friends, and it's the story of how these senior citizens' lives have been transformed as volunteer "troop greeters" at Bangor International Airport. The documentary, which has been making the rounds of film festivals and picking up awards, will be screened this week at the Nantucket Film Festival.

Bangor is the easternmost major US airport and a stop for many planes carrying service personnel to and from Iraq and Afghanistan. The greeters are there to raise their spirits by welcoming them back or wishing them well, shaking hands, patting backs, chatting, joking, offering snacks, passing out cellphones. Sometimes they greet as many as seven flights a day, and Gaudet's mother is among an intrepid core group of greeters who show up at the airport day or night, sometimes seven days a week, sometimes staying there for 16 hours at a stretch.

Yet she never told her son much about it. All Aron knew was that his mother, a widow who had raised eight children and - last time he checked - was lonely and unmotivated, was now becoming harder and harder to reach. "One day I called and she wasn't home," Gaudet said. Soon, it seemed like she was never home.

When he finally caught up with her (she had switched to a cellphone), she casually mentioned that she had been at the airport, greeting troops. "I thought, well, that's good, she has something to do," Gaudet recalled. When he came home for Christmas, he and Gita went with her one night, just to keep her company. Very quickly, they knew they had found their film.

They were particularly captivated by a greeter named Bill Knight, who had shown up to greet a 2 a.m. flight though he had been diagnosed with cancer earlier in the day. "Talking with him was very emotional," said Gaudet. "He talked about his [late] wife. He talked about life. He talked about death. It was just really powerful, and both he and Gita were tearing up."

Eventually after about four years of filming with a pair of MiniDV camcorders, the story evolved from their original idea of a sweet, uncomplicated tale about a dedicated band of elderly volunteers to a more nuanced story focused on the lives of greeters Joan Gaudet, 75, Bill Knight, 87, and Jerry Mundy, 73. Broadly, it's about the universal struggles of growing old, and each of the characters was struggling in her or his own way.

Joan Gaudet, who takes 17 pills a day for various ailments, fights against her own despair as two of her grandchildren are deployed to Iraq. Knight, a career military man, battles loneliness and illness. "I've outlived my usefulness," he poignantly tells Pullapilly. "I have nothing to live for other than what I do for other people." Mundy lost a son years ago, yet spends his days greeting young men about the same age his son would have been.

It's played out against a backdrop of small acts of generosity and empathy, and small, fleeting dramas at Bangor's airport. A returning serviceman pets a dog there and confesses, emotionally, that he hasn't petted a dog in two years. A father returns to his young son and baby daughter. "She adores you, Dad," the little boy reassures him.

"A lot of the time you go out and everything hurts," says Joan Gaudet, who sometimes needs the aid of a walker. "But when you talk to the soldiers, you kind of forget."

Her son, who with Pullapilly, 31, was a filmmaker in residence at WGBH in 2007, says he's learned a lot from making the film, and not just about filmmaking. "Maybe it's a generational thing about this older generation," Aron Gaudet says, "but the dedication these people have just amazes me. It's been six years of getting calls at 3 in the morning, even in the winter, and they get up and they go there almost every day. And they're not getting paid. If 20- or 30-somethings had been doing it, I feel like the group would have disbanded long ago. It's such a commitment."

"The Way We Get By" will be screened at the Nantucket Film Festival June 19 at 3 p.m. and June 21 at 6 p.m. at the Starlight Theater on the island. www.nantucketfilmfestival.org. It will also be shown on "POV" on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, at 10 p.m. on PBS.

Reeling. Young filmmakers from the Real to Reel Digital Film School at RAW Art Works in Lynn will screen their latest work, including shorts and documentaries, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem on June 19. Afterward, the filmmakers will answer questions. Admission is free. 161 Essex St., Salem. 978-745-9500. www.pem.org/events