The Berkshire International Film Festival's year-round programming brings four films to Great Barrington and Lenox between November 7 and 14.
The Berkshire International Film Festival wrapped its 20th edition in the spring, but its year-round programming picks up this month with four screenings, each paired with a guest or a panel. Three are at the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington and one is at the Tanglewood Learning Institute in Lenox.
Tom McCarthy's Spotlight, the Oscar-winning 2015 drama starring Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton and Rachel McAdams, follows the Boston Globe team that exposed the Catholic Church's cover-up of clergy sex abuse. The screening, at 3pm at the Triplex Cinema, comes ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Globe's first major report, which ran January 6, 2002. Afterward, Marty Baron, who edited the Globe during the investigation and was played in the film by Liev Schreiber, talks with Joshua Sherman of Berkshire Magazine. Baron later served as executive editor of the Washington Post until 2021. BIFF, 1761 Arts and the Triplex are hosting. Tickets and information are at thetriplex.org.
Actress Rachel Ward directs and stars in Rachel's Farm, a documentary about her own reckoning with conventional agriculture. Drought and the 2019 Black Summer bushfires push Ward to regenerate the land on the farm she runs with her husband, actor Bryan Brown, and to look for ways to restore farmland and the communities that depend on it. The 3pm screening at the Triplex is part of BIFF's Environmental Film Focus Series, underwritten by the Roaring Brook Family Foundation. Lauren Piotrowski, farm director at Roots Rising, the Pittsfield youth and food-justice organization, and BIFF programmer Lillian Lennox lead a Q&A, and light refreshments follow in the lobby. Tickets are $15, and free for REEL Friends, BIFF's supporter group.
BIFF's Social Club, the festival's young-professionals group, brings back Shattered Ice, which won the audience award for narrative feature at BIFF in 2025. The film follows a New England high school hockey player who struggles after the suicide of his best friend and teammate. Writer Jake Miskin drew on his own Massachusetts high school experience, and he and a producer funded the film through grassroots community fundraising. A reception with drinks and snacks starts at 5pm in the Triplex lobby, with the screening at 6pm. A panel follows, with Miskin; Matt Capeless, a Taconic High School gym teacher and Movember men's mental health advocate; Jake McNiece, co-owner of Rip City Academy and head strength coach at Atlantic Coast Academy; and Luke Fitzgerald, founder of the Love of T Foundation, which offers peer support in Berkshire County. Tickets are $15.
YUJA, directed by Lorna Tucker, is an intimate portrait of the pianist Yuja Wang, who plays by her own rules and reinvents herself constantly. The film combines performance, memory and reconstruction, and asks whether "the cost of greatness" was worth it. It screens at 7pm in the Linde Center for Music and Learning at the Tanglewood Learning Institute, 297 West Street in Lenox, as part of Cinematics, a partnership among the Institute, BIFF and the Triplex. Tickets are $20. During November and the first half of December, the Linde Center lobby is also a drop-off point for new, unwrapped toys for Toys for Tots.
