Marda Stoliar, 81, bakes in her Bend home July 14. She will be featured in an upcoming documentary, "Marda's Gift," that looks at how Stoliar changes lives by teaching people to bake.

When Dr. Ezdan Fluckiger first arrived in Bend for a baking class at Marda Stoliar’s home, he wasn’t sure if he was in the right place.

It was the day before Labor Day in 2013, and he was a day early and wanted to introduce himself to his new teacher.

Stoliar, who was in the process of dying her hair when the doctor knocked, took a while to answer. As Stoliar opened the door, her Beagle, Nana, jolted outside and into the street, and Fluckiger, thinking on his feet, followed in pursuit.

It seems like a silly start to the friendship that grew between the baker and the emergency room doctor from Torrington, Wyoming. Fluckiger dreamed of opening a bakery that would provide a career for his daughter, who has Down syndrome. Stoliar had devoted herself to changing people’s lives by teaching them how to bake.

“We love Marda,” Fluckiger said. “And Marda has really become a great friend. And she comes every Christmas, and every Easter here, helps us run the bakery. She’s become part of the family. And, what she taught me, what she enabled us to do with her skills, and her teaching has totally changed our lives.”

That relationship is the subject of a new documentary coming out in the spring of next year: “Marda’s Gift.”

Fluckiger had been interested in baking ever since he was a teenager, and as an adult it became a passion and a hobby. But, once his daughter, Eleanor, got closer to graduating from high school, Fluckiger wondered about her future. And his own.

Fluckiger was concerned about burning out as a physician and pictured himself running a bakery and taking on fewer shifts at the hospital. He also pictured himself working at his bakery after retiring from medicine.

That’s when Fluckiger Googled “how to start a bakery,” and stumbled on Stoliar’s website for her International School of Baking. Stoliar invites students from all over the world and from all walks of life into her home for an intensive course on how to bake fine breads and pastries, and to open their own bakeries.

Stoliar learned to bake in Italy and France while she visited Europe on business as a shoe designer. Over a period of many years, she learned the art of baking bread and making pastries and later decided to share her gift with others.

Stoliar and her husband, David, moved to Bend in 1972, and she opened her own bakery in town in the location that is now Toomie’s Thai Cuisine restaurant. Stoliar’s bakery in Bend was open from the late ‘70s to the mid ‘80s, but she had to close down because she briefly lost the use of her hands, and needed to have several surgeries in order to continue baking.

Now, at the age of 81, she continues to teach baking skills.

“Her class is very hands on,” Fluckiger said. “It’s like an apprenticeship. That’s how I describe it. There was never any condescension; there was just intent, intent and attention to detail, attention to what I was trying to ask or learn, and then helping you through with what I was learning.”

After four weeks living in Bend and learning under Stoliar, Fluckiger returned to Wyoming and started his baking business out of his home in between shifts at the hospital. He advertised his creations on Facebook and took orders from the community. Then, in the summer of 2015, Fluckiger opened his own bakery in a storefront in downtown Torrington, calling it “The Bread Doctor.”

“She made this possible,” Fluckiger said of Stoliar.

Fluckiger said his life has changed dramatically since meeting Stoliar, and that he wouldn’t be where he is today without her.

“And that really was all made possible by Marda’s willingness to share her knowledge, her generosity, her experience and her kind yet firm and exacting demand for quality,” he said.

Fluckiger, and his wife, Lisa, now consider Stoliar part of their family, and the feelings are mutual.

“The whole family is just phenomenal. And they treat me so well, that it is just embarrassing,” Stoliar said of her student and his family. “Such good friends, they could be my family. He (Fluckiger) calls sometimes just to say thank you, and he’ll say, ‘I just had to thank you for everything you’ve done for me,’ and then he hangs up.”

Looking back, Stoliar is proud of her student, and also of Fluckiger’s wife and daughter, who are both involved in the bakery business.

Both Fluckiger’s wife and daughter will be in the documentary, which was filmed in 2019. Stoliar wished the film’s executive director, Sheila Rittenberg, would have caught up with her earlier in her career.

“If they were going to make a movie,” Stoliar said, “they should have made it 10 years ago, when I looked better.”

Rittenberg and Stoliar met about 17 years ago. At the time, her husband, Dr. Dan Fohrman, was the couple’s physician, and would come home with stories about his two patients — stories that captured Rittenberg’s interest.

For many years, Rittenberg wanted to tell Stoliar’s story, and at one point thought of writing a book. Then, in 2017, she gravitated toward doing a documentary that focused on Stoliar’s relationship with Fluckiger, and began filming in 2019. Rittenberg said she chose to focus her documentary on Fluckiger because she was moved by his and his wife Lisa’s vision of a family bakery to give their daughter a life’s work.

“One person can make such a difference by doing what she loves, at any age,” Rittenberg said. “And Marda loves baking, and she loves teaching. And she does it in the old fashioned artisan way, teaching one student at a time.”

Ezdan Fluckiger, Rittenberg said, is emblematic of Stoliar’s ability to change people’s lives by doing what she loves.

“They want to do something different. They are bored, or they are frustrated, or they are unhappy,” Rittenberg said of Stoliar’s students. “They’ve been doctors, lawyers, postal delivery people, people from all walks of life, and they want to change, and she gives them the knowledge and the skills to take that leap. And Ezdan is a great example of that.”