On a Wednesday night in Kingston, the VFW hall glows with the warm hum of neon beer signs and the shuffle of boots on linoleum. A live band leans into a Hank Williams number, steel guitar curling around the room as cowboy hats bob to the beat. Couples spin in the two-step—some gliding with the confidence of long practice, others stumbling through freshly learned steps, grinning through the awkwardness. The smell of cheap beer, the shimmer of pearl-snap shirts, the echo of laughter under the low ceiling: this is Honky Tonk Wednesdays, a weekly gathering that turns a veterans’ banquet hall into a country-western dance floor and, for a few hours, a small-town utopia.
Alex Markman’s documentary Honky Tonk Wednesdays is only 16 minutes long, but it has a way of making you feel like you’ve stumbled across a VHS tape left behind at a family reunion in the late ’80s. Grainy, intimate, and shot with a wedding light strapped to the camera, the film captures the sweaty charm of Kingston’s weekly country-western dance night at the VFW Hall on Route 9W just down the road from the Hudson Valley Mall.
The setup is simple: World-class musicians like Cindy Cashdollar and John Sebastian play country standards, locals and newcomers learn the two-step, and cheap beer flows freely. For 10 bucks, it’s part honky tonk, part community glue, part controlled chaos. The film will have its world premiere on October 15, the opening night of the Woodstock Film Festival at Assembly in Kingston, and the people who populate it—the musicians, the dancers, the eccentrics who’ve been here since the ’70s and the Brooklyn families who showed up last year—will be in the audience, watching themselves onscreen.
A Cheesy Message, Worth Repeating
Markman says he wasn’t sure what to expect the first time a friend dragged him to the VFW. He knew about the demographic churn in Kingston—new waves of arrivals colliding with old tensions—and he sensed the hunger for reconnection after the pandemic. But what he found was unexpected: “Recent New York City transplants and longtime locals all in one room having a fun time and going crazy for the music,” says Markman. “I thought that would be a good story to tell—what’s been going on here, and probably in pockets across the whole country.”
That’s the heart of the film: People with little in common outside the music sharing space, sweating through dances, setting aside differences for a few hours. “It’s a cheesy fucking message,” Markman admits. “But I feel like people need to be reminded that they’re not all that different from one another.”
Of course, no one thinks a dance night will heal the rifts of American politics. The film doesn’t pretend that red-blue polarization dissolves over a steel guitar lick. What it does is humbler and maybe more radical: It insists that sharing a room and a rhythm counts for something, that community gathering is a form of activism. And in its modest way, Honky Tonk Wednesdays shows what’s possible.
A Home Movie With a Pulse
Stylistically, the film owes more to Les Blank and D. A. Pennebaker than to slick contemporary docs. Markman wanted to avoid the over-polished Netflix look. Instead, he aimed for something that feels like it could have been taped over your cousin’s birthday party. “I wanted it to feel intimate, like you were watching a small take on a family affair,” he says.
The result is a film alive with quirks and eccentricities: a dancer explaining how long they’ve been in Kingston (10 years qualifies as “new”), a blacktop worker recalling the post-9/11 influx, an old hand anchoring his identity in the population numbers of the ’70s. Everyone positions themselves in the ongoing saga of who belongs and when they arrived. It’s funny and faintly absurd, but it also reveals the fragile pride and unease of a city in constant transition.
Connor Kennedy, Catalyst
If Markman is the observer, Connor Kennedy is the catalyst. The Woodstock-based guitarist, who has toured with Donald Fagen and serves as music director of Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble, launched Honky Tonk Wednesdays after visiting a weekly Honky Tonk gathering in Nashville. He wanted to bring that spirit of collective joy to the Hudson Valley.
Markman recalls their first meeting: “I went up to him and said, ‘Let me show up with a camera.’ And he was like, ‘I was hoping someone would show up and want to film this.’” From then on, Kennedy opened doors—literally and figuratively—alerting Markman to who might be there, smoothing introductions, and giving him room to earn the trust of the band and dancers.
The Man Behind the Camera
Markman himself is no stranger to storytelling. An award-winning filmmaker with an eye and ear for the idiosyncratic, his career has spanned commercials, music videos, and narrative features. An early Twin Shadow video—a parody of a banned Calvin Klein campaign—led to his first real commercial job with the fashion house. His debut feature Colby won Best Narrative Feature at the Light House International Film Festival, and his shorts have landed on The New Yorker and The Atlantic, racking up Vimeo Staff Picks along the way.
These days, he makes his living as a commercial director, but projects like Honky Tonk Wednesdays scratch a different itch: The chance to follow his curiosity into a room full of strangers and come back with something tender, funny, and true.
A Local Premiere, a Local Story
The Woodstock Film Festival could easily have tucked Markman’s film into a shorts block. Instead, they slotted it into opening night at Assembly, giving the people in the film the chance to see themselves reflected big on the screen. “A lot of times you go to a festival and get lost in the shuffle,” Markman says. “This one feels different. It’s going to play to the people who were in it.”
That feels right. Because Honky Tonk Wednesdays isn’t just about music or dance or even Kingston—it’s about the alchemy of being in a room together, with all the mess and joy that entails. Maybe that’s not a cure for what divides us. But as a reminder that we’re capable of moving to the same beat, if only for a song or two, it’s more than enough.
Honky Tonk Wednesdays will have its world premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival on October 15 at 7:30pm at Assembly in Kingston. The film is on a double-bill with the feature-length Opryland USA: Circle Broken, Brandon Vestal’s documentary about the Opryland theme park, closed in 1994. After the screenings, Cindy Cashdollar and John Sebastian will participate in a Q&A, followed by a two-steppin’ dance party with DJ Pretty Good.
