Lights, camera, action! The Woodstock Film Festival will be back for its 26th iteration from Oct. 15 to 19 at various venues in Woodstock, Rosendale, Kingston and Saugerties. And for a shindig that prides itself on being “fiercely independent,” promoting works by indie filmmakers from around the globe regardless of their commercial viability, this year’s fest seems more star-studded than ever before. It will feature new works by such celebrated directors as Noah Baumbach, Chloé Zhao, Yorgos Lanthimos, Richard Linklater, Rian Johnson, Gus Van Sant and Agnieszka Holland — not to mention the latest vehicles for a boatload of A-list actors as well, some of whom will be in town to chat after screenings or in panel discussions.
The hype machine is already in full force for several new releases, notably Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler, WFF’s 2025 Centerpiece Film; and the third installment in Johnson’s popular Knives Out mystery series starring Daniel Craig, Wake Up Dead Man. James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, a 2½-hour “serious” Oscar-bait epic starring Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring and Rami Malek as the Army psychologist determining his fitness to stand trial, got a massive ovation at its TIFF premiere. Actor Bradley Cooper established his directorial chops well enough with A Star Is Born, so there will doubtless be plenty of interest in his latest, starring Will Arnett and Laura Dern, Is This Thing On? And in the wake of the immense critical and awards success of Lanthimos’ The Favourite and Poor Things, buzz is inevitable for his “bonkers” new science fiction black comedy, Bugonia.
The Opening Night film for this year’s WFF is The Testament of Ann Lee, directed by Mona Fastvold (screenwriter for The Brutalist) and starring Amanda Seyfried as the founder of the 18th-century American religious movement known as the Shakers. Van Sant’s entry, Dead Man’s Wire, is the official Closing Night film, also history-based: Bill Skarsgård plays Tony Kiritsis, a wannabe real estate mogul in Indianapolis who achieved momentary fame in 1977 by holding a loan shark’s son hostage — all of it televised.
If there’s a running theme in this year’s WFF selections, it’s an emphasis on biographies, both in narrative feature and documentary form. Besides the Ann Lee portrait, Linklater’s Blue Moon is about Rodgers and Hart; Ryan White’s Come See Me in the Good Light is about recently deceased nonbinary poet Andrea Gibson; Ivy Meeropol’s Ask E. Jean is about the woman who won her rape and defamation cases against Donald Trump, E. Jean Carroll.
Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day is about a groundbreaking gay photographer of the 1970s; Isabel Castro’s Selena y Los Dinos is about the late Tejano singer Selena; Agnieszka Holland’s Franz is about Kafka; David Michôd’s Christy is about boxer Christy Martin; Robert Stone’s Starman is about NASA robotics engineer turned best-selling science fiction author Gentry Lee; and Jon Bowermaster’s The Keeper is about current Hudson Riverkeeper John Lipscomb.
There’s also Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher and the latest celebrity portrait from Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?): Man on the Run, about Paul McCartney. A panel of artists will accompany the screening of Laura Furcic’s documentary Restoring a Legacy: “The Struggle Against Terrorism” by Philip Guston.
Two major portraits of hard-hitting journalists are on the docket: Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) and Mark Obenhaus’ Cover-Up, about Seymour Hersh, and Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s Steal This Story, Please! about Amy Goodman. Goodman herself will be on hand for the Q&A, moderated by the playwright V, who was known as Eve Ensler back when she wrote The Vagina Monologues. Two segments of Rebecca Miller’s five-part documentary series Mr. Scorsese will also be screened.
Speaking of notable people, Saturday night will see the annual Maverick Awards ceremony take place at Assembly in Kingston. Jury award recipients have not yet been announced as of presstime, but we do know that this year’s Fiercely Independent Award will go to the abovementioned Ira Sachs, the Art of Activism Award to Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, and the Freedom of Expression Award to Laura Poitras. New this year will be the Laurent
Rejto Made in the Hudson Valley Award, named for the WFF co-founder and Hudson Valley Film Commission director who died this past July. For more on locally made films in the spotlight at WFF 2025, see our sidebar story.
As always, the festival also offers top-notch programs of short films and animations, not to mention provocative and enlightening panel discussions featuring an array of industry luminaries. Among this year’s guest speakers and moderators are Mark Duplass and Katie Aselton, Amanda Seyfried, Mariska Hargitay, Melissa Leo, Brad Dourif, Larry Fessenden, Rory Culkin, Michael O’Keefe, David Amram, Barbara Kopple, Tim Daly, Debra Granik and Tim Blake Nelson.
Finally, Woodstock’s musical legacy will be upheld by live performances accompanying a few of the screenings. Local musicians who portrayed the fictional Catriona Walsh Band in Don Scardino’s A Break in the Rain will play on Wednesday night at the Colony, where some scenes from the movie were shot. Also on Wednesday evening, at Assembly in Kingston, a special event dubbed “Honky Tonkin’ in Kingston” will bring Cindy Cashdollar, John Sebastian and DJ Pretty Good to give commentary and spin platters following a double feature of music documentaries: Al Markman’s Honky Tonk Wednesdays and Brandon Vestal’s Opryland USA: A Circle Broken.
Tickets for the 2025 Woodstock Film Festival are already on sale. To purchase or learn more about the full lineup, visit woodstockfilmfestival.org/2025-all-events. The Festival Box Office is located at 13 Rock City Road in Woodstock.
Hollywood-on-Hudson revisited
As mentioned in our coverage of the 2025 Woodstock Film Festival, a new award has been created in response to the recent passing of Laurent Rejto, who co-founded WFF with his ex-wife Meira Blaustein and then went on to found the Hudson Valley Film Commission. Rejto worked tirelessly to manifest his dream of the region becoming a mecca for independent film and video production.
The list of movies being screened at the festival this year that have local ties of one sort or another is impressive. We haven’t yet seen any announcement of the recipient of the inaugural Laurent Rejto Made in the Hudson Valley Award, but Rejto’s efforts over many years to forge connections between filmmakers and local resources were fruitful enough to yield a plethora of worthy candidates.
This year alone, according to the WFF press office, 10 films on the festival schedule “were produced or directed primarily in the region by filmmakers from the Hudson Valley’s burgeoning creative community.” For example, Don Scardino’s A Break in the Rain includes music club performance scenes that were shot at the Colony nightclub in Woodstock, with a cameo from the owner. Star Michael O’Keefe and producer Matt Bennett are both local folks. The musicians who played in the fictional band that appeared in the movie will perform at the world premiere on Wednesday night, Oct. 15, at the Colony.
Another local music venue, Assembly in Kingston, will host an event that same evening that will feature a talkback from two well-known area names: Dobro queen Cindy Cashdollar and Lovin’ Spoonful founder John Sebastian, both of whom were recruited by another local musician, Conor Kennedy, when he got inspired to organize an ongoing series of Honky Tonk Wednesdays held at the Kingston VFW. Now in its third year, the program is the subject of a new short documentary by Kingston-based director Al Markman, titled Honky Tonk Wednesdays. It’s getting its world premiere at WFF 2025, on a double bill with Opryland USA: A Circle Broken, directed by Brandon Vestal. DJ Pretty Good will also be on hand to spin classic country platters.
Another WFF entry this year that was mostly shot locally is Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Teenage Wasteland, getting its Hudson Valley premiere. It’s a documentary about a group of students at Middletown High School in Orange County in the 1990s who discovered a toxic waste dump nearby and proceeded to make their own documentary about it, titled Garbage, Gangsters and Greed. Also with an environmentalist theme, The Keeper, a profile of Hudson Riverkeeper John Lipscomb, was made by Jon Bowermaster, a resident of Stone Ridge in Ulster County.
Camp Tel Yehudah in Barryville in Sullivan County was the primary shooting site for Rachel Israel’s The Floaters, getting its New York premiere at WFF. It’s a comedy about an out-of-work musician who reluctantly accepts a summer job at the same summer camp that she attended as a girl. The film’s producers, siblings Becky, Lily and Shai Korman, were campers and later counselors at Tel Yehudah in their own childhoods, and their parents met there.
Other Hudson Valley and Catskills residents attached to feature-length movies screening at WFF 2025 include the following:
Beck E. Underwood, director of the animated feature The Lure of Ponies: A Spellbound Attic Mystery
Robert Stone, director of Starman, a documentary about NASA engineer/sci-fi author Gentry Lee
Julie Goldman, producer of Selena y Los Dinos, a documentary about the late Tejano singer Selena, directed by Isabel Castro
Actor Thomas Sadoski, one of the stars of Rich Newey’s dramedy Adult Children, about a dysfunctional group of half-siblings reunited by a family crisis
Rabab Haj Yahya, editor of Coexistence, My Ass! a documentary about Israeli stand-up comic and activist Noam Shuster Eliassi
The extensive lineup of short films also contains a number of Hudson Valley connections:
Phoenicia resident Jack Warren is the director of the horror short Blair’s Craft Projects
Wild Animals, directed by David B. Jacobs, was shot at the Comeau Property in Woodstock and stars local actor Larry Fessenden
The documentary Into the Dark, by Kingston-based director and Bard College film professor Fiona Otway, is about Tivoli-based photographer Pete Mauney
Among the panel discussions at WFF 2025 are two conversations with famous denizens of our neck of the woods. Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple will interview the 94-year-old “Renaissance Man of American Music,” legendary composer David Amram, who lives near Saugerties. And Larry Fessenden will interview cult film icon and longtime Woodstock-area resident Brad Dourif, whose roles over the decades have included Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Gríma Wormtongue in the movie versions of The Lord of the Rings, Doc Cochran in the Deadwood TV series and the voice of the malevolent doll Chucky in the Child’s Play movie franchise.
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