Now in its fourth year, the festival opens Thursday with a Sundance-winning Filipino satire, closes a shorts block with an Oscar winner, and expands for the first time across the river to Catskill.
Opening a small regional film festival with a subtitled Filipino satire about class and colonialism is, by co-founder Sonia Marcela Freeman's own admission, "a little bit of a risky thing to do in a small community." But that’s what the Hudson Film Festival is doing Thursday night at Hudson Hall, when it opens with Filipiñana, Rafael Manuel's Sundance-winning debut feature about a teenage "tee girl" uncovering the rot beneath a posh Philippine country club.
The film won an award for Creative Vision at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Freeman and Hudson festival co-founder John Maybee saw it there and didn't hesitate. "We definitely wanted that movie the minute we saw it," Freeman says. "before it even went to other festivals, we knew. Before it won an award, we knew."
The pick reflects a confident bet the festival has always made, "We really feel like the city of Hudson and the surrounding region has very sophisticated film taste," Freeman says. "It's just a matter of bringing it to them." That instinct runs through the whole four-day lineup, with screenings Thursday through Sunday across five venues in Hudson and, for the first time, Catskill.
A handful of this year's selections share a satirical edge that Maybee insists wasn't a programming decision so much as something the festival noticed after the fact. Filipiñana is one; How to Divorce During the War, a Lithuanian black comedy screening Sunday, is another. "That was not in any way strategic for us in terms of programming," Maybee says. "It's funny that that happens—things that we weren't necessarily conscious of, then we realized that's really fitting right now." Both films, along with the rest of the lineup, are meant to do more than screen once and disappear; Maybee says the festival's real goal is sparking conversations that carry into its four nightly after-parties, where audiences and filmmakers end up in the same room.
The Festival’s instinct toward the unexpected is exemplified during the Saturday night's shorts showcase, "The Darker Side: Kisses, Crimes and Cults," a horror-and-thriller block that's new for the festival this year. It closes with a coup for a festival this size: Two People Exchanging Saliva, Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata's dystopian short about a society where kissing is outlawed, which won this year's Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film in a rare tie with The Singers. "The first short in that block won the Oscars this year," Freeman says. "It's so good." The same showcase includes The Seeing Eye Dog Who Saw Too Much, which Maybee describes as a Giallo-inspired satire. "Horror is hot right now, so it's a little harder to book than other things," Freeman says of genre film generally, "but I think we made up for it in this shorts block for sure."
Behind the marquee titles, the festival has also restructured how much room it gives to shorter work. Last year's lineup held ten short films; this year there are 18, split across four themed showcases—Connection and Desire, The Unexpected and Unpredictable, Growth and Courage, and the horror screening. Freeman says the expansion was a push to platform local filmmakers. "It's super hard to get a short played on the big screen," she says. This year's lineup includes five locally made shorts, plus Comparsa, a documentary by Hudson Valley filmmakers Vickie Curtis and Doug Anderson getting a Saturday afternoon spotlight slot at Time & Space Limited. "We're not here just to bring great international stuff," Freeman says. "Let's lift up our local artists as well."
The festival has always spread itself across Hudson's arts institutions rather than anchoring at one theater—Hudson Hall, Basilica Hudson, and Time & Space Limited all return this year. New this year is a crossing into Catskill, where the festival will screen a Friday-night showing of Spirited Away at the town's recently reopened Community Theater on Main Street, followed by a reception in the lobby and a late party at the Avalon Lounge.
It's a small expansion, but one both founders describe as a first step rather than a one-off. "Our intention from the beginning was for the main part of the festival to be in Hudson," Freeman says. "But also to be able to branch out into these other communities that are close by." She floats an old exhibition-era term, bicycling—physically shuttling a print from town to town for repeat screenings—as a rough model for what that could look like down the line, letting nearby towns catch films they missed in Hudson without everyone driving into the city. "Gas ain't cheap," she says.
The Hudson Film Festival runs Thursday, August 6 through Sunday, August 9. Tickets and the full schedule are available at hudsonfilmfestival.org.
