Noah Baumbach is coming to Woodstock. The Marriage Story director’s latest, Jay Kelly, lands as the centerpiece of the 26th Woodstock Film Festival, running October 15-19 across Woodstock, Kingston, Saugerties, and Rosendale. It’s just one of the marquee titles in a lineup that pairs auteur firepower—Richard Linklater (Blue Moon), Nia DaCosta (Hedda), Yorgos Lanthimos (Bugonia), and Chloe Zhao (Hamnet)—with the scrappy indies and local productions that have defined the festival since its founding in 2000.
From the start, the festival has branded itself as “fiercely independent,” a tagline that’s less marketing slogan than operating principle. Launched by Meira Blaustein and the late Laurent Rejto, the festival was built to champion films that fall outside the mainstream pipeline, while also nurturing the Hudson Valley’s burgeoning production scene. Twenty-six years later, that DNA still shows: Ten of this year’s selections were made locally, and the fest is introducing the Laurent Rejto Made in the Hudson Valley Award to honor its co-founder’s legacy.
The festival’s programming spans 39 narrative features and 27 documentaries, with a slate that’s both international and intensely current. Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus premiere Cover-Up, an investigation into media and power. Morgan Neville brings Man on the Run. Ivy Meeropol profiles journalist E. Jean Carroll in Ask E. Jean, while Jesse Short Bull and David France screen Free Leonard Peltier with newly shot footage of the activist’s release from prison.
For something closer to home, Don Scardino’s A Break in the Rain—shot at the Colony in Woodstock—debuts with a live set from the Catriona Walsh Band. Other Hudson Valley-rooted films include Rachel Israel’s The Floaters, Beck Underwood’s attic-set mystery The Lure of Ponies, Robert Stone’s Starman, and Jon Bowermaster’s The Keeper.
The shorts lineup, 80-plus films strong and Academy Award–qualifying in three categories, offers its own high-voltage mix. Kate Bush contributes Little Shrew (Snowflake), Charlie Kaufman directs How to Shoot a Ghost, and Natalie Portman executive produces Carol & Joy, starring Carol Kane and her nonagenarian mother. Add in appearances from Maya Hawke, Rory Culkin, Mena Suvari, Kevin Smith, and Jessie Buckley, and the short form looks anything but small.
Panels remain a festival signature—intimate, discursive, sometimes unruly. This year Amanda Seyfried moderates a conversation with Mark Duplass and Katie Aselton about their creative marriage. Mariska Hargitay sits down with critic Thelma Adams. Brad Dourif, cult hero and voice of Chucky, talks shop with Larry Fessenden. Rory Culkin and Michael O’Keefe compare notes on indie survival, and composer David Amram riffs with Barbara Kopple. Panels on censorship, the future of film distribution, and documentary ethics round out the lineup.
Each year, WFF uses its awards to underline the values it holds dear. Ira Sachs receives the Fiercely Independent Award, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal collect the Art of Activism Award, and Laura Poitras is honored with the Freedom of Expression Award. The awards ceremony on October 19 at Assembly in Kingston also hands out jury prizes across narrative, documentary, and shorts
Back in 2000, when Blaustein and Rejto launched the festival, Woodstock was already synonymous with artistic counterculture, but the Hudson Valley was far from a film hub. Two decades later, production has become one of the region’s signature industries, and WFF helped pave the way. The festival’s ethos—serious about art, suspicious of gloss, allergic to condescension—has remained consistent. Over the years, it’s hosted premieres by Darren Aronofsky, Ang Lee, Barbara Kopple, and countless others, but the real draw has always been the collisions: filmmakers, locals, and cinephiles packed into a Rosendale Theatre screening, talking long after the credits roll.
At 26, the Woodstock Film Festival has survived the digital turn, the streaming glut, and the slow hollowing out of theatrical distribution. What it offers instead is something elemental: cinema as a live, communal experience. Baumbach, Linklater, Zhao, Poitras, and company will provide the films, but the audience—the Hudson Valley itself—remains the festival’s fiercest collaborator.
This article appears in October 2025.
