“Cosmopolitan” is the word Woodstock Film Festival Executive Director Meira Blaustein is using to describe the 18th outing of the annual event set to run from October 11 through 15th in Kingston, Rhinebeck, Rosendale, Saugerties and Woodstock, its center.
Saturday, Sept. 23: The difficulties of working with film “create a sense of performance, of danger and the possibility of loss.”
Lumberyard purchased four buildings – part of a former lumberyard – on the Catskill Creek waterfront, and in November will begin construction of a 5,500-square-foot theater in the cinderblock shell of a former garage. The theater, whose construction is being funded in part by a $5 million loan from RSF Social Finance (in addition to an Empire State Development grant and other sources), will be used to preview shows created by resident artists in the summer, which will open in New York City during the fall.
Saturday, Sept. 23: The event at T.R. Gallo Waterfront Park will include screenings of clips from current films in progress, all of them about the city and its characters, including Kingston’s Model Train Club, recently deceased musician Pauline Oliveros, the emerging Midtown Arts District, local personality Uncle Willy, boxer Billy Costello and more.
In a poignant turn, Upstate Films in Rhinebeck had scheduled its sneak-peak viewing of Lucky, a new documentary about the beloved actor Harry Dean Stanton, well before the eccentric film-industry outsider passed away last week.
Friday-Saturday, Sept. 22-23: Lisa Channer, who grew up in New Paltz in the 1970s in a household that was a sort of hippie arts salon, experienced an epiphany in her mid-teens as a result of reading Isadora Duncan’s autobiography. It changed her path and her life. Now she’s portraying Duncan in Dancing on the Edge, a new drama by much-anthologized playwright Adam Kraar about the brief, stormy marriage of the “mother of modern dance” to Russian Imaginist poet Sergei Esenin in the early 1920s.
Mario Cantone, whose rapid-fire, over-the-top humor entertained audiences at the first Woodstock Comedy Festival, returns on Saturday, September 16, to headline this year’s event, the fifth annual comedy fundraiser for Family of Woodstock and the Polaris Project against human trafficking.
There’s more humor than horror in this one.
Arm-of-the-Sea Theater, which has been performing at Tina Chorvas Park for the last 15 years, would use some property it owns near the Mill Senior Housing Complex, also near the Esopus.
Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 16-17: Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart star in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo, cited by the American Film Institute as the country’s greatest mystery film. Screening the film classic with a live performance of Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score is the brainchild of film and television director Allen Coulter, known for his work on HBO’s The Sopranos.