As Hudson Valley One reported back in January, the operations two-thirds of the triumvirate who founded Upstate Films in 1972, Steve and DeDe Leiber, have decided to retire (https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2021/01/07/upstate-films-founders-steve-and-dede-leiber-step-down-after-48-years). Their third co-conspirator, Susan Goldman, stays on as board chair; but the not-for-profit organization needed a new executive director to get the place up and running again post-Covid. It cast a wide net for candidates, and came up with not one, but two who were keen on working together.
“We were just having dinner together and figured out we were both applying for the same job,” relates Jason Silverman. Rather than compete, he and Paul Sturtz decided to pitch themselves to the Upstate board as a team, since “Running an arthouse cinema is a difficult job, especially for small organizations.” Their approach prevailed, and both were hired, relocating to the mid-Hudson in November 2020 – Sturtz from Missouri and Silverman from New Mexico.
While building their film exhibition careers half a continent apart, the two had already worked together extensively. “Jason started coming to the festival I founded in 2004. He began giving intros and Q-and-As, then doing some writing and editing. Eventually he became a senior ringleader,” says Sturtz.
That annual festival, the True/False Film Fest, was established by Sturtz and David Wilson as an outgrowth of their highly regarded arthouse theater in Columbia, Missouri, the Ragtag Film Society. In indie film circles it quickly gained a reputation as the place to find out what was hot in the world of nonfiction cinema production; even the Los Angeles Times acknowledged True/False as “the most important documentary festival in America.” Sturtz ran the festival for 16 years, and also served on Columbia’s city council.
Silverman calls True/False “one of the best cultural events I’ve ever been to,” praising its “community spirit and visionary environment. A lot of people in the field go to True/False every year.” Over the years, that community spirit manifested in such forms as a film camp for local youth and the True Life Fund, which gives a cash award not to the producers or director, but to the real-life subjects of a new nonfiction film each year, in an effort to make real social change rather than simply observe and report on it.
For his part, Silverman’s main gig from 1996 to 2004 was as artistic director of the Taos Talking Picture Festival and from 2004 to 2020 as the director of the Cinematheque at the Center for Contemporary Arts, an affiliate of the Sundance Institute. He’s also a longtime staff member of the Telluride Film Festival, has curated cross-disciplinary arts presentations at numerous museums nationwide and written extensively about cinema.
Both men have directed documentaries themselves, Silverman notably having collaborated with Samba Gadjigo, biographer of Ousmane Sembène, the “father of African film,” to create the feature biopic Sembene! and to rescue and restore footage from Sembène’s storied career. Santa Fe conferred on him the Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and proclaimed “Jason Silverman Day” in 2019, while the University of Missouri gave Sturtz an honorary doctorate for his community revitalization work.
“We love movies, but our work in presenting movies to people is about more than just cinephilia. We share in the belief that movies can be a powerful way to connect people, to inspire people, to create conversations about important issues,” Silverman explains. One of their first acts upon taking the reins at Upstate Films was to update the organization’s mission statement to specify “connecting the Hudson Valley through transformative cinematic experiences.”
So, based on the new directors’ previous careers and their emphasis on community-building, it’s a reasonable expectation that this new incarnation of Upstate will show even more documentaries than it was already doing, often co-presented with other not-for-profits and social activists. Says Silverman, “After COVID and this moment of societal unease, movies can be a powerful way of bringing people together. We want to use the spaces and the films we love to do that work. Collaborations are a key part of that. Intensive and ongoing partnerships are going to be an essential part of what we do.”
What’s different under the new leadership
What else is going to be different under new leadership? Most significantly, Upstate has dropped its lease on Woodstock’s Tinker Street Cinema, after ten years as the Rhinebeck theater’s satellite location. “Attendance was low and shrinking over the years. Single-screen theaters are really difficult to run, financially. It was losing money each year. And it’s going to be a long road back after Covid before people feel confident to sit in a theater,” Silverman says, noting that the building’s owner is seeking a new tenant. “It’s a historic space and it deserves to be used.”
On the more hopeful side, Sturtz and Silverman are “in discussions” to purchase the Orpheum Theater in Saugerties, a three-screen vintage venue that has been on the market since late 2019. And Upstate has already invested in a state-of-the-art portable projection system with full-sized screen that will make the rounds of mid-Hudson communities this summer for a series called the Hudson Valley Picture Show – “all under the stars, all with music before the film,” says Sturtz. Four of the 21 screenings will take place at Opus 40; other destinations will include the Maverick, Bearsville and downtown Saugerties.
What about the mothership, Upstate Films’ original site in the Starr Building in Rhinebeck? When can we go to the movies again? “We’re reopening in June,” says Silverman. “We’ll be announcing the date shortly.”
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