The ninth annual Woodstock Film Festival this week will feature appearances by filmmaker Kevin Smith, ’60s troubadour Donovan and more than 120 films.
The festival runs Wednesday through Sunday at venues in Woodstock and nearby Kingston, Rosendale and Rhinebeck. Honorary awards will be presented to Smith, cinematographer Haskell Wexler and veteran writer-producer James Schamus, chief executive officer of Focus Features.
Festival director Meira Blaustein said 124 films will be screened this year, about half of them full-length features and documentaries. She said participants will be coming to this famous artists’ colony north of New York City from all over the world.
“This area is going to be buzzing with filmmakers,” she said.
Smith’s new movie, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” will be featured on closing night. Opening night will feature “Pride and Glory,” ”Happy-Go-Lucky” and “Flash of Genius.”
In a nod to Woodstock’s history and the eponymous 1969 concert, the festival routinely features music along with the movies. Donovan, best known for ’60s standards like “Mellow Yellow,” will perform and appear on a panel. Bela Fleck will perform in an opening-night concert with Abigail Washburn and The Sparrow Quartet.
For the first time, the festival is opening its awards ceremony to the public. The admission fee for the ceremony and after-party is $50.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More