Albany Film Festival Returns to Campus on March 28
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By Lillian Magurno | March 10, 2026
The Albany Film Festival is returning to the University at Albany for its sixth year, bringing a full day of movies and conversations. The event will take place from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Saturday, March 28, in the Campus Center and Campus Center West. All events are free.
Hosted by the New York State Writers Institute, the festival offers a full day of events capped off with an awards ceremony.
One of the most popular traditions of the festival returns this year: the Short Film Contest, showcasing films 25 minutes or less in categories including Animated, Comedy, Drama, Experimental, Documentary and Horror. The shorts will be screened throughout the day, and awards — including Best Student Short Film — will be presented during the closing ceremony at 6 p.m.
Highlights of the day:
Sam Fuentes, a poet, activist and survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, will discuss her Academy Award-nominated documentary “Death By Numbers.”
Oscar-nominated filmmaker and acclaimed novelist John Sayles will discuss his films and books and will also receive the Ironweed Award for Exemplary Achievement in Film. Sayles, who grew up in Schenectady, is a two-time Academy Award nominee for Best Original Screenplay: “Passion Fish” (1992), “Lone Star” (1996) and “Eight Men Out” (1988).
The two recent music biography films, “A Complete Unknown” (2025) starring Timothee Chalamet and “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” (2025) starring Jeremy Allen White, were inspired by books about Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. The authors of those books, Elijah Wald and Warren Zanes, will discuss the book-to-film experience. “A Complete Unknown” will be screened at 7 p.m. Friday, March 20, at Page Hall on the Downtown Campus.
Photographers will enjoy the discussion with movie still photographer Phillip Caruso. He photographed movies such as “Forrest Gump,” “Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure” and several Martin Scorsese films.
Other events include the following:
A film screening and discussion of “The Truck,” an award-winning short film about a Chinese-American teen and her Iranian-American boyfriend on a frantic search for the “morning-after” pill in rural Tennessee in post-Roe v. Wade America.
A film screening and discussion of “Tahlequah The Whale: A Dance of Grief,” an animated short about an incredible true story. The film follows Tahlequah, a mother orca, as she carries and continues to care for her newborn baby daughter after her sudden death.
Film screening and discussion of “We Were the Scenery,” based on the experiences of writer Cathy Linh Che’s parents, Vietnam War refugees who, while living in a refugee camp in the Philippines, were utilized as background extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie “Apocalypse Now” — effectively placing them at the margins of their own story.
Discussion of “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America,” with author James Poniewozik, chief TV critic for the New York Times.
Film screening and discussion of “Villa Encanto,” a short film about a teenager’s experiences in a Puerto Rican summer resort in the Catskills in the 1950s.
Film screening and discussion of “The Self-Love Act” with director and UAlbany graduate Kareema Bee, a two-time Emmy nominee. In her short film, Bee finds out her African ancestry in an unexpected way, which catapults her into an exploration of her roots and how it extends to her community, only to find what she's been searching for may have been there all along.
See the full schedule at https://www.albanyfilmfestival.org/.
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