23rd Annual FilmColumbia Festival
Oct. 20 – 29
For a complete list of films and events, plus ticketing information, visit HERE
Crandell Theatre
48 Main St.
Chatham, NY 12037
FilmColumbia, celebrating its 23rd year, returns to the Crandell Theatre in Chatham, NY, this October with a fresh selection of the year’s best domestic and international features, documentaries and shorts. Since its inception, the festival has screened more than 600 films; 102 have gone on to receive Academy Award nominations and 25 have won. Curated by Co-Executive and Co-Artistic Directors Peter Biskind and Laurence Kardish, FilmColumbia showcases standouts from the festival circuit that have not yet opened commercially. They will be shown in the area for the first time.
This year FilmColumbia is packed with home-grown talent, featuring many films by Columbia County-based filmmakers and live Q+As and events with notable area residents Ruth Reichl, James Schamus, Al Roker, Stephen Lang, Scott Cohen and Walton Goggins. “We tried to show as much good local talent this year as possible,” says Kardish. “We recognize their strength in our community and celebrate the abundance of talent in our region—proving how essential it is to keep our historic single-screen cinema open and refreshed so they may continue to show their works in a place that is welcoming, and well, ideal.”
Other film highlights, in addition to the popular “Sneak Preview” during closing weekend, include the area premiere of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli’s latest animated masterpiece, The Boy and the Heron, and the ghost story, All of Us Strangers, starring Claire Foy, Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. A haunting and heartbreaking tale of love and loss, director Andrew Haigh’s film caused a sensation at the Telluride Film Festival in late August. The breakout debut comedy The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, from writer, director, and star Joanna Arnow, puts millennial neuroticism and angst into high relief. Biskind calls it “a droll, raw, sardonic, cheekily resonant, and very, very funny debut feature…about the intellectual and sexual satisfactions of masochism.” Arnow’s onscreen partner in humiliation is played “with ferocious understatement” by Chatham’s own Scott Cohen (The Gilmore Girls, Billions). Both Arnow and Cohen will be on hand for a Q+A following the screening on Friday, October 27.
During FC23’s opening weekend, Christine Vachon and Pam Koffler, visionary producers and founders of Killer Films, will be honored for their pioneering body of work. Regular collaborators with director Todd Haynes, beginning with his first film, Vachon and Koffler have been leading forces in independent cinema for thirty five years. David Canfield, in his recent Vanity Fair profile of Vachon, says the producer’s first Oscar nomination is finally in sight. According to Crandell Board Member and award-winning filmmaker James Schamus, “It is no understatement to say that the history of American independent cinema would simply not exist in its currently recognizable form without the work of Killer Films producers Christine Vachon and Pam Koffler.”
On Saturday, October 21, the festival will screen three films produced by Killer Films: Camp (2003) at 11 am, I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) at 1 pm, and May December, the latest from Haynes, at 3 pm. Schamus will lead a Q+A with the producers directly following the last screening.
Vachon and Koffler will be recognized at the annual FilmColumbia Kick-Off Partyfrom 6 – 8 pm, hosted at the Spencertown, NY, home of Jack Shear, president of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and Crandell Theatre benefactor. The event is catered by Bimi’s Canteen, a popular new addition to Chatham’s Main Street.
The Children’s International Shorts Program, the annual free Saturday screening of animated and live-action shorts shown during the festival’s closing weekend, will celebrate its 20th anniversary this year. Curator Patti Greaney of Giraldi Media has chosen a crowd-pleasing selection of audience favorites from past years.
FilmColumbia is curated by Co-Executive and Co-Artistic Directors Peter Biskind and Laurence Kardish. Biskind is a nationally recognized film historian, cultural critic and best-selling author. Kardish is senior curator emeritus for film and media at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The festival is run by longtime Festival Director Calliope Nicholas, who is also co-director at Millay Arts in Austerlitz, NY.
To purchase tickets to the Kick-Off Party honoring Killer Films, which includes admission to the Killer Films screenings and Q+A, visit the 2023 Festival Kick-Off Party event page.
For the full schedule of films and events, visit the FilmColumbia Schedule online.
All other FilmColumbia tickets, including All-Film Passes, go on sale to Crandell Theatre members on October 7 at 9 am and to the general public on October 14 at 9 am. For more information and ticket pricing visit FilmColumbia Ticket Info.
About the Crandell
The Crandell Theatre in Chatham, NY, is one of a few community-based, nonprofit theaters in the United States devoted to film and one of fewer than one hundred single-screen movie theaters nationally. Since 2010, Crandell Theatre, Inc., has raised more than $1 million to purchase the historic theater and make needed repairs. The current Crandell board is engaged in a multi-million-dollar campaign to renovate and restore the area’s oldest, largest, single-screen theater and enhance the moviegoing experience for generations to come. For more information, visit crandelltheatre.org,or call 518-392-3445.