Skip to content

FilmColumbia

For true film buff what can be more exciting than a film festival? The formula is clearly at work in Columbia County where the annual FilmColumbia festival is to open this weekend in Chatham.

It is the 19th year the festival has been staged and it has become the second most popular entertainment venue in the county, with 8,000 tickets sold annually for a selection of domestic and international features and documentaries, most of which have not yet opened commercially.

Organizers of the event promise to “provide a welcome break from the flood of superhero movies, sequels and remakes that clog our screens the rest of the year.”

The films are screened in the historic, community-owned and operated Crandell Theatre, one of the last single-screen facilities left in the Northeast. It was recently designated as a Historic Landmark. The festival’s other Chatham venue, the Morris Memorial, provides a space to show the work of local and regional filmmakers.

As in the past, most of the offerings have earned awards from larger film festivals around the world, such as Cannes, Venice, Telluride, New York, and Toronto.

The festival, which runs from Friday, October 19th, through Sunday, October 28th, kicks off with four films by Columbia County resident, Brian Cox, who, over the last 53 years, has acted in some 200 movies and television programs, including Braveheart, Rushmore, The Bourne Identity and Deadwood. He currently has eight more films in various stages of production and is starring in HBO’s series, Succession.

The festival will screen his movies, The Good Heart, The Escapist, The Carer and L.I.E.

The festival program was created by Executive Director Peter Biskind, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, Laurence Kardish, former senior curator for film and media at MoMA and festival director Calliope Nicholas.

For more information, please visit the link below.

Back
to
Top