Recent Events
Q&A with director Luke Lorentzen and healthcare professionals from White Plains Hospital
Luke Lorentzen is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. His most recent film, A Still Small Voice (2023), follows a chaplain completing a year-long hospital residency. The film won the U.S. Documentary Best Director Award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, was listed as one of the best ten films of the year by The New [...]
Woodstock Film Festival Shorts Q&A Panel with filmmakers
Bill Plympton, widely known as the “King of Indie Animation,” is a two-time Academy Award®–nominated animator celebrated for his groundbreaking hand-drawn short films. He received Oscar® nominations for Your Face (1987) and Guard Dog (2005), and his shorts have been showcased on MTV and at festivals worldwide. In addition to filmmaking, Plympton spent many years as [...]
Q&A with director/producer Yvonne Russo and executive producer Simone Pero
Yvonne Russo is an award-winning director, producer, writer, and accomplished storyteller working in film, television, and animation. Her accolades include a Humanitas Award, a win for Outstanding Achievement in Producing from First Americans in the Arts, a recipient of both The Redford Center Grant and Nia Tero Foundation Grant, and serving as keynote speaker at [...]
Q&A with filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi moderated by journalist Emma Gometz
Ildikó Enyedi, award-winning and Oscar nominated director, started her career as a concept and media artist. Her first feature film, My Twentieth Century, won the Golden Camera for best debut in Cannes; Magic Hunter competed in Venice, followed by Tamas and Juli (Venice special screening) and Simon the Magician (Locarno, special prize). After a long absence, [...]
Q&A with Professor Hamid Dabashi moderated by JBFC founder Stephen Apkon
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority [...]
Community Panel Discussion with the Tourette Association of America and Medical Professionals
A Friendly Reminder: Some audience members at this screening may have Tourette Syndrome, a neurological condition that can involve involuntary vocal sounds, words, phrases, or body movements called tics. These behaviors are neither intentional nor disruptive by choice. They are a natural part of the condition. Thank you for your patience, understanding, and support in [...]
Book talk with author Bob Spitz
Bob Spitz is the award-winning author of the biographies Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child and The Beatles, both New York Times bestsellers, as well as seven other nonfiction books and a screenplay. He helped manage Bruce Springsteen and Elton John at crucial points in their careers. He’s written hundreds of major profiles of [...]
Q&A with Basement Tapes filmmakers moderated by Ethan Knecht
Ethan Knecht (Commuting) is a filmmaker, educator, and arts organizer whose work blends dark humor, absurd realism, and working-class tenderness. Drawing from his experience as a suburban father and assistant principal in a New York City high school, Knecht’s films explore the chaos and quiet beauty found in human systems, families, and institutions. He is [...]
Q&A with director Pete Ohs and actor Jeremy O. Harris
Pete Ohs, hailed by Indiewire as “a rising filmmaker well worth the attention,” works as a director, producer, writer, editor and cinematographer. He has produced and directed five feature films in the past five years. In 2025, he was at Sundance with OBEX, a fantasy adventure feature he produced, co-wrote, and shot. This was followed [...]
Q&A with director Jon Bowermaster and film subject John Lipscomb
Writer, filmmaker and adventurer, Jon Bowermaster is a six-time grantee of the National Geographic Expeditions Council. One of the Society’s ‘Ocean Heroes,’ his first assignment for National Geographic Magazine was documenting a 3,741 mile crossing of Antarctica by dogsled. Jon has written eleven books and produced/directed more than thirty documentary films. His feature documentaries include [...]
Robot Voices and Talking Machines: From Alphaville to Her
Before machines could talk in fact, they were already talking in fiction – on stage and in films. These dreams of talking machines not only preceded the real technologies they foresaw, like Siri and Alexa; they also shaped and constrained the technology as it developed. Performance historian Christopher Grobe and sound studies scholar Marit MacArthur [...]
Robot Voices and Talking Machines: From Alphaville to Her
Before machines could talk in fact, they were already talking in fiction – on stage and in films. These dreams of talking machines not only preceded the real technologies they foresaw, like Siri and Alexa; they also shaped and constrained the technology as it developed. Performance historian Christopher Grobe and sound studies scholar Marit MacArthur [...]
Q&A with journalist Amy Goodman and director Tia Lessin. Moderated by Ruth Baldwin
Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide.The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard honored Goodman with the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the first journalist to [...]
Introduction and Book Signing with writer and film programmer Ashley Clark
Ashley Clark is a writer, broadcaster, and film programmer. He has organized numerous film seasons at international venues including London’s BFI Southbank, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Reverse Shot, Sight & Sound, and Film Comment, and he is [...]
JFF Community discussion with Rabbi Brusso from Bet Torah, moderated by Elisabeth Schonfeld
Rabbi Brusso is senior rabbi of Bet Torah, where he has led a vibrant and dynamic congregation of approximately 650 families in Northern Westchester since 2009. In addition to pastoring, preaching, teaching and leading in the Bet Torah community, Rabbi Brusso is an officer of the the Rabbinical Assembly, a Senior Rabbinic Fellow of the [...]
Q&A with producer Danielle Varga
Danielle Varga is an award-winning nonfiction producer who has been working in documentary film for the past decade. Through her production company, Walking Productions, and collaborations, she focuses on bold and boundary pushing films. Her producing credits include Brett Story’s critically acclaimed The Hottest August (True/False 2019, Grasshopper Film, PBS Independent Lens), Todd Chandler’s Bulletproof [...]
Book Talk with writer and journalist David Margolick moderated by festival curator David Schwartz
David Margolick long reported on legal affairs for The New York Times, where he wrote the weekly “At the Bar” column and covered, among other stories, the trial of O. J. Simpson. He was then a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His many books include Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink; Strange Fruit: The Biography [...]
Q&A with writer and critic J. Hoberman moderated by festival curator David Schwartz
J. Hoberman was for over three decades a film and culture critic for The Village Voice. His previous books have explored the subculture of midnight movies, the rise and fall of Yiddish-language cinema, the international Communist avantgarde, SoHo performance art, and the underground filmmaker Jack Smith. His “found illusions” trilogy—which includes The Dream Life, Make [...]
Q&A with director Katharina Otto-Bernstein moderated by festival curator David Schwartz
A two-time Emmy nominated filmmaker, Katharina Otto-Bernstein most recently served as a producer of Joyland, winner of the Cannes Jury prize, the Independent Spirit Award and short-listed for the Academy Award in 2023 and Oh, Canada (Cannes 2024.) Nonfiction works include HBO documentaries Absolute Wilson, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, The Price of Everything and [...]
Q&A with director Gaylen Ross and actor Ben Shenkman moderated by festival curator David Schwartz
Gaylen Ross is an award-winning documentary director, writer, and producer with over 25 years of experiences, including Emmy-winning Blood Money: Switzerland’s Nazi Gold and multiple films that premiered at major international festivals like Berlin, Toronto, and Hamptons. Her notable works include Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis (theatrical releases in US, Israel, and France), Dealers Among [...]
Q&A with filmmaker Matthew Shear moderated by festival curator David Schwartz
Matthew Shear is a filmmaker and actor based in New York. He starred in Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America, alongside Greta Gerwig, as well as the limited series The Alienist, opposite Dakota Fanning and Daniel Brühl. His other credits include Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples, and The Boy [...]
Q&A with director Marisa Fox moderated by festival curator David Schwartz
Marisa Fox, A veteran print, broadcast (WNET, VH1, Fx) and digital journalist, has produced social impact campaigns for Hearst, earning American Society of Magazine Editors awards and nominations. She has written extensively on gender, genocide, sexual trauma and extremism (The Daily Beast, CNN, Ms., The New York Times, Elle, Health, The Forward and Ha’aretz, where [...]
Q&A with director Sergei Loznitsa
Sergei Loznitsa was born on September 5th 1964. He grew up in Kiev (Ukraine), and in 1987 graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic with a degree in Applied Mathematics. From 1987 to 1991, he worked as a scientist at the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics, specializing in artificial intelligence research. In 1997, Loznitsa graduated from the Russian [...]
Community discussion on immigration with Neighbors Link
Jeanette Gisbert joined Neighbors Link as Deputy Director in December 2024. She oversees Neighbors Link’s organizational strategy, program development, and fundraising to support the organization’s mission and long-term goals. Jeanette recently served as the Executive Director of Volunteer New York! She joined Volunteer New York! in 2008, where she began as a program coordinator. Eventually, [...]
Screening with live accompaniment followed by Q&A with actress Lili Taylor & artist David Michalek
Lili Taylor is a Golden Globe-winning and three-time Emmy-nominated actor known for her roles in classic indie films including Mystic Pizza and I Shot Andy Warhol, and more recently in television hits American Crime, Six Feet Under, and The X Files, among others. David Michalek is an American visual artist and director whose work is [...]
Virtual Q&A with Academy Award nominees director Clint Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso
Clint Bentley is a writer-director-producer whose debut directorial feature, Jockey(Sony Pictures Classics), premiered In Competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, where Clifton Collins Jr. was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Best Actor for his role. Bentley and his long-time collaborator Greg Kwedar co-wrote and produced the film which went on to enjoy further [...]
Q&A with director Gianfranco Rosi
Gianfranco Rosi was born to Italian parents in Asmara, Eritrea, and grew up in Eritrea, Rome, and Istanbul before moving to New York City where he studied film at NYU. His documentaries include Below Sea Level (08), El Sicario, Room 164 (10), Sacro GRA (13), and the Festival Official Selections Boatman (93), Fire at Sea [...]
Free members-only screening and Q&A with producer Nicolas Gonda on Feb. 11
Nicolas Gonda is a creative force whose work spans film, television, and immersive experiences, driven by a lifelong commitment to visionary storytelling on a global scale. He is the Co-Founder of Book of Shadows, the film and television company he leads with Academy Award–winning filmmaker Chloé Zhao, dedicated to developing and producing distinctive, world-class stories [...]
