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Oscar‑nominated filmmakers and award‑winning writers highlight the 6th Annual Albany Film Festival.11 a.m. through 7 p.m. Saturday, March 28
UAlbany Campus Center
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY 12222.
All events are free and open to the public. No registration is required.
Oscar-nominated filmmaker and acclaimed novelist John Sayles headlines the event and will receive the Ironweed Award for Exemplary Achievement in Film.
Sayles, who grew up in Schenectady, is a two-time Academy Award nominee for Best Original Screenplay: “Passion Fish” in 1992 and “Lone Star” in 1996. His other films include the iconic 1980 drama “Return of the Secaucus 7,” “Matewan” (1987), and “Eight Men Out” (1988).
Ironweed Awards will also be presented (virtually) to filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, co-founders of Rada Studios. Their 2023 documentary, “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” won a Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking, and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. The film was also shortlisted for a Best Documentary Oscar.
Sayles (in-person), Brewster and Stephenson (via Zoom) will participate in earlier events at the festival.
Another festival favorite returns in 2026: the Short Film Contest. Finalists will screen their films – in categories for animated, comedy, drama, experimental, documentary, and horror.
Winners in those categories, along with Best Overall Film and the Brendan Fahy Bequette Student Short Film Award -- underwritten by Brendan’s parents, Senator Pat Fahy and Wayne Bequette -- will be announced at the Ironweed Award ceremony at the close of the festival.
Along with the Sayles and Brewster/Stephenson events, other featured conversations include:
---- Dylan and Springsteen: Biographies and Biopics
With music biographers Elijah Wald, author of Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, the book that inspired the 2024 Oscar‑nominated film “A Complete Unknown,” and
Warren Zanes, bestselling author of Deliver Me from Nowhere, the basis for the recent Springsteen biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.” Zanes’s previous bestseller was Petty: The Biography (2015), one of Rolling Stone's 10 Best Music Books of the Year.
---- On the Set of “Forrest Gump”
With Phillip Caruso, known in Hollywood as “Still Phil,” one of the most sought-after still photographers in the film and television industries. His many iconic images include the “Forrest Gump” movie poster of Tom Hanks as Gump waiting on a bench for a bus. Caruso received the Society of Camera Operators Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.
---- Discussion of “Trump and Television”
James Poniewozik, New York Times chief TV critic, will revisit his 2019 book, Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America, named a “Notable or Best Book of the Year” in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, Slate and NPR.
---- Kareema Bee: Film screening and discussion of “The Self-Love Act”
Kareema Bee is a two-time Emmy-nominated writer, producer, on-camera talent, and digital content creator who graduated from the University at Albany (B.A., English, 2009). Her newest project is “The Self-Love Act” (2024-present), a docuseries that follows her personal journey to rediscover self-love through dialogue with others.
---- Film screening and discussion of “Death by Numbers”
With Sam Fuentes, a poet, activist and survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary in 2025.
---- Film screening and discussion of “The Truck”
Director and screenwriter Liz Rao will discuss the film short (executive produced by Spike Lee) about a Chinese-American teen and her Iranian-American boyfriend on a frantic search for the “morning after” pill in rural Tennessee in post-Roe v. Wade America.
---- “Calico Rebellion” - The Anti-Rent War and the Second American Revolution
A multi-media presentation with director Victoria Kupchinetsky, producer Misha Gutkin, author Nancy Newman, and featured musicians.
---- Film screening and discussion of “We Were the Scenery”
With Christopher Radcliff, the director of the Oscar-nominated short documentary.
---- Short Film Finalists screened throughout the day, with awards presented at 6 p.m.
COMPLETE SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
All venues are located at the University at Albany, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany NY 12222.
Events subject to change.
Event details, maps, free parking locations, and more information available at www.albanyfilmfestival.org/
---- Screening of short film finalists
11 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Republic Records Music Hall (Campus Center West Auditorium) and Campus Center West Boardroom
Screenings of the finalists’ films will take place throughout the event.
The short film award winners, including a prize for Best Student Short Film and Best Overall Short Film, will be announced at the closing ceremony beginning at 6 p.m. in Republic Records Music Hall (Campus Center West Auditorium)
---- “The Anti-Rent Wars: A Multimedia Presentation”
11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
USA | 2024 | 70 min
With director Victoria Kupchinetsky, producer Misha Gutkin, author and UAlbany Professor Nancy Newman, and featured musicians
An award-winning documentary that brings to life one of New York’s most dramatic but often overlooked chapters of history. The farmers’ uprising in the Catskill Mountains 180 years ago changed the course of American history. Today it lives on through direct descendants of those rebellious farmers, through their stories, songs, and eerie costumes preserved since the 1840s.
---- "Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project"
Virtual Q&A: 11 a.m. – noon, Campus Center West Multi-Purpose Room
With filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson
Filmmaker Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, founders of Rada Studios, will discuss their 2006 documentary, winner of a Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking, and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. The film was also shortlisted for a Best Documentary Oscar.
---- “Dylan and Springsteen: Biographies and Biopics”
11:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Elijah Wald is the author of Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (2015), the book that inspired the blockbuster movie, “A Complete Unknown” (2024). Warren Zanes, writer and notable rock musician, is the bestselling author of Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska (2023), the basis of the 2025 film, “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.”
Zanes’s previous bestseller was Petty: The Biography (2015), one of Rolling Stone's 10 Best Music Books of the Year.
---- Film screening and discussion of “The Self-Love Act”
12:15 a.m. – 1:15 p.m., Campus Center West Multi-Purpose Room
USA | 2024 | 20 min
With director and UAlbany alum Kareema Bee
In this series hosted by Kareema Bee, a Black woman and artist explores her journey through self-love in dialogue with others, supported by The Big We Foundation. Kareema Bee is a two-time Emmy-nominated writer, producer, on-camera talent, and digital content creator who graduated from the University at Albany (B.A., English, 2009).
---- Discussion of Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America
12:45 – 1:45 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
James Poniewozik, chief TV critic for the New York Times, will revisit his acclaimed and bestselling 2019 book, Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America. "It’s also the best book yet written about the bride-of-Frankenstein mating of American politics and American pop culture," said Tom Carson in Bookforum.
---- Joel Perez: Film screening and discussion of “Villa Encanto”
1 – 2:00 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
USA | 2025 | 16 min
Joel Perez, Broadway and off-Broadway actor, is the director and co-writer of “Villa Encanto” (2025), a short film about a teenager’s experiences in a Puerto Rican summer resort in the Catskills in the 1950s. Featuring Lin-Manuel Miranda as executive producer, the film celebrates a vanished world known as “Las Villas” and the “Latin Borscht Belt.”
---- Film screening and discussion: “We Were the Scenery”
1:45 – 2:45 p.m., Campus Center West Multi-Purpose Room
USA | 2025 | 15 min
Christopher Radcliff is the director of the Oscar-nominated short documentary, “We Were the Scenery” (2025), based on the experiences of writer Cathy Linh Che’s parents, two Vietnam War refugees who, while living in a refugee camp in the Philippines, were utilized as background extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” — effectively placing them at the margins of their own story.
---- Discussion of Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star
2:15 – 3:15 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Mayukh Sen is the author of Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star (2025), a biography of the leading actress of the American film industry’s Golden Age in the 1930s and ‘40s. Born in Bombay, Oberon hid her Indian origins throughout her career to escape racism in the film industry. A finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, Love, Queenie was named a Best Book of 2025 by Publishers Weekly and Booklist.
---- John Sayles: Discussion about his film career and new novel Crucible
2:30 – 3:30 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
John Sayles, legendary independent filmmaker, is the author of Crucible (2026), a novel about Henry Ford, the ruthless, power-mad “tech bro” or his generation. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks called it, “A sprawling, mural-like novel that engages with the process, the spirit and especially the conflicts of breakneck industrial progress ... [with] a dynamic vision of American history.”
Sayles, who grew up in Schenectady, is a celebrated pioneer of indie cinema. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay— for “Passion Fish” (1992) and “Lone Star” (1996); and once for the National Book Award—for the novel, Union Dues (1977).
---- Film screening and discussion: “The Truck”
3:15 – 4:15 p.m., Campus Center West Multi-Purpose Room
USA | 2024 | 14 min
Liz Rao is the writer-director of “The Truck” (2024), an award-winning short film about a Chinese-American teen and her Iranian-American boyfriend on a frantic search for the “morning after” pill in rural Tennessee in post-Roe v. Wade America. Spike Lee and Joan Chen executive produced this film, longlisted for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short. Spike Lee said, “’The Truck’ is an urgent, gripping look at teen love and the freedom to choose in this America right now. Liz Rao brings her unique vision as a screenwriter and director who is unafraid to provoke, and dares to speak truth to power, and does it in high style.”
---- Phillip Caruso: “On the Set of ‘Forrest Gump’”
3:45 – 4:45 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Phillip Caruso, known in Hollywood as “Still Phil,” is one of the most sought-after still photographers in the film and television industries. His many iconic images include the “Forrest Gump” movie poster of Tom Hanks as Gump waiting on a bench for a bus.
Caruso received the Society of Camera Operators Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.
---- “Death by Numbers” with writer Sam Fuentes
4 – 5:15 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
USA | 2024 | 33 min
Screening and discussion with writer and school shooting survivor Sam Fuentes
Four years after being shot with an AR-15 in her high school in Parkland, Florida, Sam Fuentes reckons with existential questions of hatred and justice as she prepares to confront her shooter. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary in 2025.
---- Film screening and discussion of “Tahlequah the Whale: A Dance of Grief"
4:30 – 5:30 p.m., Campus Center West Multi-Purpose Room
USA | 2023 | 15 min
Daniel Kreizberg is the writer-director of the acclaimed animated short, “Tahlequah the Whale: A Dance Of Grief." A nonfiction recreation of an incredible true story, the film follows Tahlequah, a mother orca, as she carries and continues to care for her newborn baby daughter after her sudden death.
The late primate scientist Jane Goodall said, "How beautiful, how sad, and what a powerful message." This is Kreizberg’s first film.
---- Presentation of the Ironweed Awards and Short Film Awards
6 p.m.
Republic Records Music Hall (Campus Center West Auditorium)
Ironweed Award recipients:
John Sayles, Joe Brewster, and Michèle Stephenson
Short Film Award categories: – Animated / Comedy / Drama / Documentary / Experimental / Horror / Brendan Fahy Bequette Student Short Film Award / and Best Overall.
About the Albany Film Festival
Francis Ford Coppola launched our first Albany Film Festival with a preview event in Fall 2019. Coppola received the first Ironweed Award for Exemplary Achievement in Film and talked with Writers Institute founder William Kennedy about his director's cut of “The Cotton Club.” Kennedy wrote the original script of that film.
The NYS Writers Institute would like to thank our sponsors who made the Albany Film Festival possible:
Presenting sponsors:
The Opalka Endowed Directorship
Times Union
Supporting sponsors:
The Brendan Fahy Bequette Fund, per Patricia Fahy & Wayne Bequette
The Lee Thaw Charitable Trust, Richard J. Miller Jr., Trustee
NYS Writers Institute Classic Film Series Endowment
The Swyer Family Foundation
The Towne Law Firm, P.C.
University Auxiliary Services
Friend:
Laurie Bank and Stuart Freyer
Brown & Weinraub
Skip Casano and Bella Pipas
Clover Pond Vineyard
Community Care Physicians
Hank Greenberg, Greenberg Traurig, LLP
Paul and Mary Grondahl
David and Lauren Hayes
Mr. and Mrs. Daniel J. Hogarty Jr.
Michael and Mary Keegan
William Kennedy
Betsy Lopez
Steve McKee Foundation
Thomas O. Maggs, PhD
Paula Mosher
Annette Nanes
Dan O'ConnellHerb and Cynthia Shultz
Scott & Lucie Schuster
Dr. Bob Wishnoff and Dr. Eva Joseph
https://www.albanyfilmfestival.org/
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Event Venue
University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, United States
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