Albany Film Festival Explores Storytelling Across Page, Screen
ALBANY, N.Y. (March 19, 2026) — From Oscar-nominated filmmakers to historians, musicians and cultural critics, this year’s Albany Film Festival will bring together artists and scholars whose work explores how stories move across mediums.
Presented by the New York State Writers Institute, the sixth annual festival returns March 28 to UAlbany’s Campus Center, offering a full day of screenings, conversations and live presentations. All events are free and open to the public.
Honoring hometown film pioneer
Oscar-nominated filmmaker and novelist John Sayles will headline the festival and receive the Ironweed Award for Exemplary Achievement in Film.
A Schenectady native, Sayles is a two-time Academy Award nominee for Best Original Screenplay for "Passion Fish" (1992) and "Lone Star" (1996), with additional films including "Return of the Secaucus 7" (1980), "Matewan" (1987) and "Eight Men Out" (1988). At the festival, he will discuss his career along with his new novel, Crucible.
An accomplished writer, his first published story, "I-80 Nebraska," won an O. Henry Award, and his novel Union Dues was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Crucible explores the life of industrialist Henry Ford.
Ironweed Awards will also be presented virtually to filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, whose documentary "Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project" earned a Primetime Emmy and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
Intersection of film, music and history
Among the featured participants is Nancy Newman, professor in UAlbany’s Department of Music and Theatre, whose research on the Anti-Rent Movement will be part of a multimedia presentation connecting history, music and film.
Newman will take part in an abridged presentation of “CALICO REBELLION: The Anti-Rent War and the Second American Revolution,” a documentary by director Victoria Kupchinetsky that examines the 19th-century tenant farmer uprising in New York’s Hudson-Mohawk and Catskill regions. The presentation will also feature musicians Marshall Coid and Meara McTague, highlighting how the movement’s legacy continues through storytelling and performance.
In the presentation, Newman serves as historical expert and musicologist, focusing on how protest songs and poetry helped fuel the movement and carry its message across communities.
“Songs were one of the ways people expressed solidarity and resistance,” Newman said. “They helped communicate ideas and gave people a shared language for the struggle they were living through.”
Her 2025 book, Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York, expands on that work by gathering more than 20 sets of lyrics and reconstructing their musical settings from historical sources.
Student films and important conversations
Additional festival highlights include a screening and discussion of "Death by Numbers" with Parkland, Fla., school shooting survivor Sam Fuentes. The Oscar-nominated short documentary explores questions of trauma, justice and survival in the years following the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
Festival attendees can also hear behind-the-scenes stories from "Forrest Gump" with photographer Phillip Caruso and join a discussion of media and politics with New York Times television critic James Poniewozik, author of Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America.
The festival will also feature its annual short film contest, with finalists screening across categories including animation, documentary, comedy, drama and experimental film. Awards, including Best Overall Film and the Brendan Fahy Bequette Student Short Film Award, will be announced during the closing ceremony.
Since its launch in 2019, the Albany Film Festival has grown into a signature event for the Writers Institute, emphasizing connections between literature, scholarship and cinema.
“We are proud that we’ve carved out our niche as the ‘bookish’ Albany Film Festival while nurturing a wonderful audience of filmmakers and film lovers,” said Paul Grondahl, Opalka Endowed Director of the NYS Writers Institute at UAlbany. “Our approach centers conversations and discussions while exploring the intersection of writing and filmmaking in all its forms.”
The Sixth Annual Albany Film Festival runs from 11 a.m. through 7 p.m. Saturday, March 28, UAlbany Campus Center and Campus Center West. All events are free and open to the public. No registration is required. More information is available at www.albanyfilmfestival.org.