For three August nights, a film screen at ArtPort Kingston will become a window onto the region’s filmmaking community. The Keep It Local Film Festival, running August 20-22, brings together nearly two dozen shorts, experimental works, documentaries, animations, and one feature—all presented outdoors in Midtown Kingston.
Co-produced by ArtPort Kingston and filmmaker Jack Warren’s Cellar Door Cinema Club, the festival grew out of a summer series Warren began organizing with ArtPort in 2024. The earliest programs were assembled largely through Warren’s network of filmmakers. Opening the selection process to submissions brought an unexpectedly strong response.
“I was worried that the quality would go down and that I would have to send out a lot of rejections and ask my friends anyway,” Warren says. Instead, nearly all this year’s selections came through the open call. “The level of quality has been really, really high.”
The festival applies a generous definition of “local.” Filmmakers may live in the Hudson Valley, have previously lived here, feel connected to the region, or have shot their work here. Warren also casts a wide stylistic net, looking for fresh perspectives across narrative, documentary, animation, and experimental film.
Thursday’s program includes The Pratt in the Hat, Susan Hillary’s portrait of civil rights leader Frances Pratt; Nathan Meltz’s stop-motion animation The Golem Smashes All Walls; and Kathleen MacKenzie’s The First Circle, filmed along the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail. Warren singles out Angel Gates and Blake Pfeil’s All-American Ruins: Nevele Grand Hotel, an exploration of the abandoned Ellenville resort, as “a gorgeous meditation on living in an area filled with so many decaying old buildings.”
Friday features two shorts followed by Anna by the Window, a microbudget feature co-directed by Myles Flusser and James Hyland IV. The film follows an aimless young man wandering New York City while avoiding his girlfriend’s graduation party, his father’s phone calls, and a reunion with his estranged brother. Warren describes it as capturing the experience of a Hudson Valley teenager looking toward the city as an escape from the woods.
Saturday’s wide-ranging lineup places contemporary digital work alongside Peggy Cyphers’s Lucio Pozzi: Operatic Intermissions, shot on 16mm four decades ago. Other selections range from Cody Mae Victor’s family drama Turnskin to Tate Cozza’s supernatural tale The Forgotten Crate and Kevin Ralston’s comic mystery The Warmest Color Is Blue, whose tone Warren calls “so bizarre and hilarious.”
The screenings are structured as community gatherings. Doors open at 7pm for food, drinks, and conversation, with films beginning after sunset and filmmaker Q&As following each program. “We like to think of them as community nights as much as film screenings,” Warren says. “You can go see your neighbors sitting next to you—and maybe even see them up on screen.”
The Keep It Local Film Festival takes place August 20-22, 7-10:30pm, at ArtPort Kingston, 80 Smith Avenue. Admission is by donation. Artportkingston.org.
