Next week, from September 28 to October 2, the Woodstock Film Festival (WFF) is back in all its Fiercely Independent glory, and you won’t want to miss it. You’ll have your choice of some 48 feature films — including eight world premieres, seven US premieres, four East Coast premieres and 15 New York premieres — and more than twice as many shorts.
While a few of the films will also be streamable online, gone are the COVID days when this Festival was reduced to a split between online viewing and a few outdoor screenings. In fact, there will be no drive-in theaters participating this year, and Upstate Films’ involvement as a screening host will train the spotlight on its newly acquired Orpheum Theatre in Saugerties; there will be no showings at the Rhinebeck cinemas. The Rosendale Theatre is back after skipping 2021, however.
Most of the 2022 screenings will take place in Woodstock — at the Woodstock Playhouse, Bearsville Theater and Tinker Street Cinema, with a single show plus live performance at the Levon Helm Studios, short films at the Woodstock Community Center and panels at White Feather Farm, just outside of town on the Saugerties side of the line. Saturday night’s Maverick Awards ceremony will take place at UPAC in Kingston.
Besides the award-winners, celebrity attendees expected at the big show include Amanda Seyfried, Vera Farmiga, Marina Zenovich, Mary Stuart Masterson, Fran Kranz, Barbara Kopple and the Rock Academy. Lots of other big names will also be in town during the Festival to participate in audience talkbacks following the screenings.
This year’s awards recipients include several with longtime affiliations with WFF. The multitalented actor/director/screenwriter/producer/novelist Ethan Hawke (Dead Poets Society, Before Sunrise, Boyhood, First Reformed, The Last Movie Stars) is this year’s Maverick Award-winner. The Fiercely Independent Award honoree is Debra Granik, whose breakout movie, Down to the Bone (2004), was shot in Ulster County. We loved her 2018 feature Leave No Trace (https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2018/07/26/leave-no-trace-is-a-powerful-study-of-a-father-daughter-bond) and are intrigued by the news that her current project is an adaptation of Nickel and Dimed, a study of the gap between rich and poor by the recently deceased Barbara Ehrenreich.
The 2022 Trailblazer Award goes to Arianna Bocco, president of IFC Films, a leading distributor of indie works including Boyhood and The Death of Stalin. The Transcendent Talent Award will be conferred on actress/rapper Nora Lum, better-known as Awkwafina. You may know her from her TV show Nora from Queens or her comedy roles in movies such as Ocean’s 8, Crazy Rich Asians or Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, but Awkwafina proved her serious acting chops in 2019 by becoming the first person of Asian descent to win the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for The Farewell (https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2019/08/08/chinese-american-relearns-to-appreciate-her-roots-in-sublime-the-farewell).
WFF will honor the legacies of two of its longtime benefactors who died in the past couple of years by restyling two awards in their honor. The Best Documentary Feature Award is being renamed the Leon Gast Documentary Feature Award, after the Academy Award-winning director of When We Were Kings, while the Best Narrative Short Film Award is being renamed the Mark Braunstein Narrative Short Film Award, after the founder of Markertek.
Festival organizers are pointing our attention especially to the Opening and Closing Night Films: Joshua Caldwell’s Mending the Line, starring Brian Cox, Perry Mattfeld and Wes Studi, about a wounded veteran who takes up fly-fishing to alleviate his PTSD; and Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, starring Olivia Colman, Michael Ward and Colin Firth, which sounds a bit like an English equivalent of Cinema Paradiso. Designated Spotlight Films include Michael Grandage’s My Policeman, starring Harry Styles and Emma Corrin; Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, starring Charlbi Dean, Harris Dickinson and Woody Harrelson; and Rodrigo García’s Raymond & Ray, starring Ethan Hawke and Ewan McGregor. Newly added to the lineup is iMordecai, in which Judd Hirsch plays a Holocaust survivor challenged by modern electronic technology; it also stars Carol Kane and Sean Astin.
What else is special about WFF 2022? For one thing, this is the first year that short films that win at the Woodstock Film Festival in the categories of Best Short Narrative, Best Animated Short and Best Short Documentary will automatically be eligible to be nominated for an Academy Award in their respective categories. The programs of shorts are always worth checking out — as are the panel discussions.
Another highlight is a screening honoring the 30th anniversary of the release of Brother’s Keeper, Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger’s groundbreaking indie documentary about a rural community in upstate New York riven by a mysterious death. And WFF is presenting the world premiere of The Picture Taker, a documentary by Phil Bertelsen about Ernest Withers, a Black photographer who chronicled the Jim Crow era and Civil Rights Movement but was also a secret FBI informant. An exhibition of Withers’ photos is now on view at the Aaron Rezny Gallery in Kingston.
Programming at WFF tends to fall into loose categories — some deliberately organized, some accidental. HV1’s coverage last week focused on movies made in the Hudson Valley, which always get their time to shine at this Festival (https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2022/09/16/in-the-23rd-woodstock-film-festival-spotlight-locally-made-movies). Stories about music and musicians are a stalwart WFF tradition; this year’s Festival features six full-length music films, 12 cutting-edge music videos and a live performance by Clem Snide and the Avett Brothers accompanying the Thursday evening screening of The Ballad of Clem Snide at Levon Helm Studios. Also featured are a group of films by women directors and another exploring the LGBTQIA+ experience. Presumably unintentional clusters include paired films on the subjects of assisted suicide, Lyme disease and female skateboarders. If you’ve got a particular topic that fascinates you, you can probably find some movie treatments of it right here.
This year’s WFF crop is particularly rich in narrative films made in the UK, and Your Humble Correspondent will be viewing a few of them, possibly to review. I’m especially intrigued by the latest opus by director Stephen Frears, The Lost King, starring Sally Hawkins and Steve Coogan in a what-if story inspired by the recent exhumation of Richard III’s remains from under a car park; and also The Banshees of Inisherin, starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson and directed by the great playwright (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Cripple of Inishmaan, Hangmen), screenwriter and director (In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) Martin McDonagh. More on those after the Festival.
For complete ticket and program information, visit www.woodstockfilmfestival.org. You can download the “Schedule at a Glance” at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OKZduyQ9YBvImkBdpYqEpZtCbnDKJXfl/view.
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