Woodstock Film Festival Announces Slate For This Fall’s 22nd Edition

The Woodstock Film Festival has announced the slate for its 22nd edition, with 11 world premieres among the 43 features on the bill.

The festival will take place September 29 to October 3 in three Hudson Valley communities about two hours north of New York City. In-person screenings and events will be featured throughout the fest’s five days, but online options will also enable attendees to connect amid the ongoing challenges of Covid-19.

Panels, concerts and comedy sets along with film screenings are planned in Woodstock, Kingston and Saugerties. Neon chief Tom Quinn is slated to receive the festival’s Honorary Trailblazer Award, an honor announced in 2020 but postponed due to the pandemic.

The festival will kick off with Fanny: The Right to Rock, a documentary about a pathbreaking Filipina-American garage band, with a performance by some of the band’s members following the screening. Music is an annual touchstone for Woodstock’s lineup, given the heritage of the surrounding area. Among the 10 music-centric films on this year’s slate are documentaries about the Velvet Underground, Cuban scat singer, songwriter and tropical soul man Francisco Fellove and singers Alanis Morissette and Joe Cocker.

Among the 43 feature films, there are six U.S. premieres, seven East Coast premieres and seven New York premieres. (See the full lineups below.) More than 40% of the directors in the feature lineup are women, organizers noted.

Along with Quinn, attendees are scheduled to include actors Kelsey Grammer, Matt Dillon, Kelly Jenrette and Timothy Blake Nelson; and filmmakers Eliza Hittman, Roger Ross Williams, Ry Russo-Young, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chinn.

“In thinking of the scope of this year’s lineup, I see a clear reflection of the challenging world of the past year, where resilience has been a requirement for survival and a unifying force for people pulling together,” said Meira Blaustein, the festival’s executive director. “Filmmakers dive deeply into the myriad ways people face the unknowns and the unknowables, opening a window into new and uncharted discoveries. We are excited to be showing the work of these talented and dedicated filmmakers at this year’s festival.”

This year’s festival pays tribute to two recently deceased filmmakers: Academy-Award winning documentarian Leon Gast and Emmy-winning editor Lewis Erskine. Gast’s When We Were Kings and Stanley Nelson’s Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, which was edited by Erskine, will screen, with Nelson in attendance.