The “centerpiece film” is Flee, a documentary about the adult life of a child refugee from Afghanistan, directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen.
This year’s selection is the East Coast premiere of the fiction feature Violet, directed by Rye resident Justine Bateman and starring Olivia Munn as a woman trying to break free of crippling self-doubt. While a screening/concert combo is traditionally the first event of the Festival, the designated “opening night film,” for reasons that remain obscure to this writer, is always shown on the second night, typically Thursday. The accompanying concert at the Bearsville on Wednesday, September 29 will include two original Fanny members, guitarist (and longtime Woodstocker) June Millington and drummer Brie Darling, with Gail Anne Dorsey filling in for Jean Millington and a guest spot, presumably on harmonica, from John Sebastian.
This year’s kickoff film is Fanny: The Right to Rock, a documentary directed by Bobbi Jo Hart about the pioneering 1970s “womyn’s music” band Fanny. Since one ironclad hallmark of this Festival is ongoing celebration of Woodstock’s status as a music town, it’s only right that live concerts will be back again in 2021. Among the celebrities coming to town to participate in panels or post-screening talkbacks are actors Kelsey Grammer, Matt Dillon, Tim Blake Nelson, Kelly Jenrette, David Gallo and Greg DePaul, filmmakers Stanley Nelson, Ry Russo-Young, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chinn, musician Kara DioGuardi, polar explorer Will Steger and scientist Peter B. Eliza Hittman, director of Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Beach Rats, will receive the Fiercely Independent Award. The Trailblazer Award will go to Tom Quinn, CEO/founder of Neon, the distribution company that brought Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite to America. This year’s Maverick Award is going to Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams ( Music by Prudence, God Loves Uganda, The Apollo, High on the Hog, Cassandro).
(The Rosendale Theatre is temporarily bowing out, as it awaits installation of an upgraded ventilation system.) Screenings and panels may be attended live or streamed - which means a much broader potential audience for WFF this year, and likely into the future.Īwards will be handed out in person on Saturday evening, October 2 at the Woodstock Playhouse. Happily, the Festival will be more genuinely festive when it returns for its 22nd year, running from September 29 to October 3, with events in Woodstock (Playhouse, Bearsville Theater, Tinker Street Cinema, Community Center, Colony, Cucina), Kingston (Blueprint) and Saugerties (Orpheum Theatre, White Feather Farm). Most of the 100+ movies it presented in 2020 were streamed online (as were the panel discussions), but about 30 films could be seen on a big screen - in one of three local drive-in theaters.
Like every other arts organization or venue that depends on the physical gathering of an audience in a common space, the Woodstock Film Festival was forced to reinvent itself last year.