The Stony Brook Film Festival, produced by the Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University, has been delivering a regular slate of high-quality independent cinematic experiences for Long Islanders every summer since 1996, and is set to begin its newest season on Thursday, July 20.
According to Film Festival Coordinator Kent Marks, 2023 will mark the 28th year that Stony Brook University has been hosting the prestigious event.
The Festival is the brainchild of the Staller Center’s director, Alan Inkles, who originally founded the event as a means to make use of the facility during the summer break, Marks said.
“It's always hard to know what to do with the university during the summer,” he said. “We used to have international theater groups come in here and that was very successful, but Alan one summer decided to do a film festival instead. We have a huge theater that holds a thousand people with a 40-foot screen, so it seemed like the perfect thing to do.”
The Director of the Center did his homework, and after attending Sundance a few times, decided what would work well for the Long Island region and their audience. In figuring out what might work best for the audience here, Inkles took the busy lives of Long Islanders into consideration. Rather than having films running from 10:00 a.m. to midnight and having multiple films running at the same time – as was the case with Sundance – it was decided instead to cater the Festival to the schedules of local residents to ensure that they would be able to enjoy the event to its fullest.
“Long Island people are doing things during the day, and the night is the best time for them to go see a film, and they should be able to go see all of the films that we show,” Marks said. “So we show all of our films once in our main stage theater, and we show two films a night, one at 7:00 p.m. at one at 9:30 p.m. So you could literally come to all of our films at night and still work (or play) during the day.”
This year's Festival begins on Thursday, July 20th, and it runs through Saturday, July 29th. And as for the types of movies and the genres that the Festival runs, Marks said that its tagline – which he admitted was a “tad hokey,” but nonetheless accurate – is " We look for the best films that we can find."
“Our audience is a fairly diverse group, so they're willing to try different things out. So we're looking for the best of everything,” he said. "Saying that, we probably gear more towards dramas and we definitely look for a lot of independent films, both domestic and foreign. Basically, we're looking for films that our audience cannot easily see, or can possibly never see anywhere else.”
Regardless of the film and its genre, Marks said, the Festival does uphold a high bar in terms of quality, and that's a bar that they will never see fit to lower.
“It's always a little bit of a battle as far as which films get into the festival,” he said. “We always have far more films submitted to us than we could ever accept. Currently, we get approximately 2,000 submissions every year.”
Of those 2,000 or so submissions, Marks noted that they go through the arduous task of parsing that number down to about 37 films that they show each Festival; this requires that he, and the staller staff and board, watch a great many films leading up to the event’s opening night in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.
“I spend several months every year watching a lot of films, honing it down to the films that we're really going to consider,” he said. “As far as the criteria I use to select films, we have a 40-foot screen and our theater is geared towards live shows, with a very good sound system. So the film has to look really good on a big screen, and it has to sound really good. Plus, Alan is from a theater background, so the acting has to be really good. I'm all about story, so the story has to be really good. So that's just some of our criteria right there.”
The 2023 festival will be highlighting a number of interesting features, Marks said, and almost all films include a question-and-answer session with filmmakers, and the Festival includes a number of independent films that he's particularly excited about.
“One film is a Canadian feature entitled ‘I Like Movies,’ and it's just hilarious. It's about a young teenage misanthrope cinephile going to NYU and she needs to grow up quickly. It's by a first-time director and it's just brilliant,” he said. “There's another independent film called ‘Friends from Home,’ and the filmmakers literally traveled from the east coast to the west coast during the pandemic and filmed their conversations along the way. It’s very funny in a very unusual way.”
“On Wednesday the 26th we have a really good double header, starting with ‘Radioactive,’ a documentary about housewives from Three Mile Island,” Marks continued. “Later that night we have an independent Serbian movie called ‘Where the Road Leads,’ and it's really just an amazing movie by a first-time director.”
Like most forms of in-person entertainment, the Festival struggled during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic; however, Marks noted that they rolled with the punches and successfully adopted a virtual model where they screened films online until they were finally able to return to in-person showings.
The Festival resumed with in-person showings the following year while instituting new Covid policies and limiting attendance, all while offering an online component for those who were leery of venturing out at the time.
Marks said that he feels a great deal of personal satisfaction coordinating and setting up the Festival every year, exposing Long Islanders to a variety of fine cinema that they ordinarily might never have been able to experience on their own. In doing so, the entire team at the Festival hopes that their audience, and new Festival-goers, will give it a shot. Try a film they'd never see anywhere else, or give a different style a shot. The Festival is so affordable, and it's really the best deal on Long Island all year-round: For only $100 per pass, passholders can see 36 films, which works out to less than $4 per film and only $10 per day. A truly unbeatable price.
“It's very fulfilling. When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them that I watch movies, and that's not entirely untrue,” Marks said. “It's really amazing, because we've built trust with our audience. We might show a movie that they never would watch on their own, but we're not going to show them a bad movie. I have many people coming up to me telling me that they're still thinking about a movie they saw at the Festival. And I love that experience, to see people broadening their perspectives and opening their minds.”
To find out more about the Stony Brook Film Festival, view the full schedule of film showings, and to purchase tickets, please visit https://