MADAWASKA – An aged general store in Aroostook County would hardly seem to be the stuff award-winning documentaries are made of.

It helps that the store is Stan’s Groceries, the gathering place for the Madawaska lakes region. An added bonus is that “Stan’s – A Jewel in the Crown of Maine” was created by the video-production students of Brenda Nasberg Jepson, herself an international film award winner, at Caribou Tech Center.

The 30-minute film, which took first place in the New England High School Video Competition, will air on “Maine Independents,” at 10 tonight on the stations of Maine PBS.

Jepson has gone from Maine to London and back home to Maine again. An Augusta native, she received her degree in journalism from the University of Maine, then moved to England to learn documentary filmmaking from a BBC producer-director.

While in London, she owned her own film company and won numerous awards in the New York International Film Festival. But after 14 years, she found herself longing for a simpler life in Maine. She married Alan Jepson, the son of a potato farmer, and they settled into an old Swedish-built log home on Madawaska Lake five years ago.

Two years ago, at the age of 43 and after four years of trying, Jepson found out she was pregnant with a son.

Then, when she was 51/2 months pregnant, Jepson went into premature labor. Her husband rushed her 35 miles by car to the regional hospital in Edmundston, New Brunswick. But it was too late, as the couple lost their son.

That loss left Jepson with many questions: “If a healthy baby has been lost, what could happen next? What would disappear next? Who would be the next to go? Life suddenly felt as if it were being lived on shifting sands with a faulty foundation.”

By then, Jepson was teaching at Caribou Tech Center. She pondered how to break the news to her students. Then she remembered a quote from Sigmund Freud: “Work is the closest thing to sanity.”

“I thanked them for being there, for giving me a job, and I said that even though there might be times when I would seem a bit sad or preoccupied, our video production program would go on,” Jepson recalled.

Her attention then turned to preserving the scene which is Stan’s.

“If anything around seemed like it was likely to disappear, Stan’s Groceries was,” she said. “I felt the urge to capture it, to document the life there, before it was gone.”

At first, her class recorded the activities on polling day at Stan’s. Owner Stan Thomas had slung an old blue tarp around one of the restaurant booths in the store so that residents of Township 16 Range 4 could vote near home.

Then the students videotaped other scenes: Thomas feeding stray cats, a Saturday night of sing-alongs, regulars on the appeal of Stan’s.

“It’s the 10-cent cup of coffee that brings us here,” explained customer Gerry Nelson in the film. “That’s number one. Number two, it’s the intellectual center of T16 R4 and Stockholm. If this place weren’t here, someone would have to open their home so we could get together.”

A special part of the film was Stan’s 88-year-old father, Allen Thomas, known for his original poems and his spoon collection. He died two weeks after his segments were filmed, and the documentary is dedicated to him.

The premiere showing was held in front of 300 people at The Performing Arts Center in Caribou. So far, more than 400 copies of the video have been sold, netting more than $5,000 for the video program.

Jepson found that Stan’s had a therapeutic effect on her as well. She remembered the comment of a customer who drives the 50 miles round trip from Fort Fairfield, who said, “I come here when I’m depressed. It’s a lot cheaper than a psychotherapist.”

“I don’t know what Sigmund Freud would think of that comment, but I do know what that woman means,” Jepson concluded.