By the time you read this, the silver anniversary of the Woodstock Film Festival will already be underway. The Opening Night Film, a documentary about a failed coup in Venezuela in 2020 titled Men of War (Billy Corben & Jen Gatien), will already be history. But there are still plenty of other opportunities to dip into the offerings of this year’s celebration of “Fiercely Independent” cinema, running through Sunday, October 20 at various venues in Woodstock, Rosendale, Kingston and Saugerties. You can see the entire schedule, with a link to order tickets, at woodstockfilmfestival.org. Some — especially narrative films featuring well-known actors or directors — will already be sold out, but it’s well worth your while to peruse the full lineup. Tickets can also be purchased in person at the Festival box office at 13 Rock City Road in Woodstock.
Spotlighted screenings this year include Centerpiece film Blitz (Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave), in which Saoirse Ronan plays a mother in World War II London who sends her son off to the country to be safe from bombardment — but the son has other ideas. It will be shown Saturday evening at the Woodstock Playhouse and Sunday evening at the Orpheum in Saugerties. The Closing Night featured film, at the Woodstock Playhouse, is A Real Pain by actor/director Jesse Eisenberg, in which a mismatched pair of cousins travel to Poland together to explore their Jewish roots.
But the WFF lineup, as always, is jam-packed with special events, world, national, East Coast and local premieres, talkbacks and panel discussions with various creatives, some of them household names. The maximum-glitz moment happens on Saturday night: the Maverick Awards bash at the Saugerties Performing Arts Factory. Besides awards in a variety of categories that have yet to be announced, this year’s recipients will include Paul Schrader (screenwriter for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, writer/director for American Gigolo, First Reformed) for the Honorary Maverick Award, producer Ira Deutchman for the Honorary Trailblazer Award and documentarians Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís (When the Mountains Tremble) with the inaugural Art of Activism Award.
Schrader’s latest feature, Oh, Canada, starring Richard Gere and Uma Thurman, will have a screening Saturday afternoon at the Playhouse, with the director present for a live discussion. The newest work from Yates and de Onís, Borderland, which exposes the border industrial complex built to capture, incarcerate and deport millions of immigrants from the US, screens Saturday morning at the Bearsville Theater and Sunday afternoon at the Orpheum. This year’s WFF lineup includes many other tantalizing new offerings from directors of note, among them Anora (Sean Baker, The Florida Project), Hard Truths (Mike Leigh, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, Mr. Turner), Los Frikis (Tyler Nilson & Michael Schwartz, The Peanut Butter Falcon), Nightbitch (Marielle Heller, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro). It goes without saying that the Festival is also fertile ground for discovering tomorrow’s great indie filmmakers as they emerge.
Woodstock being Woodstock, and stuck for better or worse with the aura of being a music town, movies about music and musicians have become a signature feature of WFF. Every year there’s at least one screening accompanied by a live performance. On Wednesday night at the Bearsville, Brendan Canning and Andrew Whiteman of the Canadian indie-rock band Broken Social Scene will play live following a showing of It’s All Gonna Break, Stephen Chung’s documentary about the Toronto music landscape of the 20-aughts. Al Olender, Flower Face and Matthew Danger Lippman will all perform during “A Feeling of Music,” a program of shorts at the Colony in Woodstock on Thursday evening. And after the screening of Jonathan McHugh’s documentary A Life in Rhythm: The Ray Conniff Story on Friday night at the Orpheum, orchestral musicians/singers from the Woodstock community and Bard College will perform a short set of Conniff arrangements.
Other music-themed movies in the 2024 WFF lineup include the aforementioned Los Frikis; The End (Joshua Oppenheimer), a post-apocalyptic musical starring Tilda Swinton; Hardcore Never Dies (Jim Taihuttu); Malcolm Washington’s new screen treatment of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, starring Samuel L. Jackson; Coastal, a documentary about Neil Young directed by Daryl Hannah; Paul Anka: His Way (John Maggio); Something Better Change (Scott Crawford), a doc about the political career of ex-DOA frontman Joe Keithley; and Viva Verdi! (Yvonne Russo), about a retirement home for opera singers.
Another time-honored focus of WFF is films shot in the Hudson Valley or by creatives based here. This year, most of the locally made product consists of short films, spread over several different shorts programs. But Turning (Marco Baratta), a narrative feature about a 25-year-old who doesn’t know what to do with his life and is marking time in a lonely house upstate, is having its New York premiere. And we’re especially excited to see the East Coast premiere of We Can Be Heroes (Carina Mia Wong & Alex Simmons), a documentary about Kingston’s own live-action role playing camp program, the Wayfinder Experience.
There’s always something for everyone — something entertaining and/or thought-provoking — at the Woodstock Film Festival. See you at the movies!
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