The first couple of Queens cinema, Katha and Don Preston Cato, held the official kickoff of their 15th Queens World Film Festival in the Helen Marshal Cultural Center at Borough Hall on Oct. 15 with more than 40 filmmakers and their creative teams who networked and showcased their film posters.
This year’s theme is “Connections: Missed, Made, and Yearned For,” with screenings of 125 films from 17 nations, including 18 films from Queens alone from Nov. 5 to Nov. 16 at Kaufman Astoria Studios and the Museum of the Moving Image.
Katha Cato, the executive director of QWFF, kicked off the event by reading the First Amendment.
“It must be protected moment by moment, second by second, and I depend on this room to do that. This is not the time to put your cameras down,” she said. “This is not the time to stop talking to the people on the right or the left of your body and ask them how they are, ask them what they hope for.”
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards concurred during his welcoming remarks.
“I’m so excited about this festival kicking off, and I know this has been such a challenging time for this country, for our borough, and I think about all of the values that we celebrate through your films, thorough your stories, all of the values we celebrate that are under attack,” Richards said. “We’re not gonna cower in fear based on what we see the Trump administration doing, we’re gonna be proud to tell our stories in Queens County because this is a place where we can all tell our stories.”
Now in its 15th year, the Queens World Film Festival has screened nearly 2,000 films from 98 nations and built an international reputation for bold, independent programming and it consistently in the top 100 reviewed festivals on FilmFreeway.com and is a member of the Film Festival Alliance.
“Filmmakers are reaching higher and digging deeper than ever before, unveiling astonishing work that reflects the intensity and longing of our times,” QWFF Founding Artistic Director Don Preston Cato said. This year’s festival will have 22 films by Asian filmmakers or featuring Asian actors.
The Catos bestowed the annual “Spirit of Queens” award to IndieCollect’s Warrington Hudlin, the founder of the Black Filmmaker Foundation. The award-winning director, producer, metaverse pioneer, and media activist spoke to the crowd after accepting his award saying that Queens is the place for storytellers.
“If you’re a filmmaker, this is where you want to be,” Hudlin said. “This is the place for storytelling and you guys who are filmmakers in this festival, you’ve been anointed to tell your stories.”
Hannah Engelson directed, produced and shot “Grandma + Isabella,” a documentary short about a grandmother and her great granddaughter in the Rockaways. Engelson filmed them for over four years.
“The film begins in the morning and the little girl is 4 years old and it ends at night and she’s 8 years old,” Engelson said, adding she was raised by her grandmother and wanted to show that relationship in her film that is observational with no interviews, all candid.
Engelson wanted to convey the importance of caregiving as real work.
“What this grandmother does is a lot and I see that it’s a lot as someone who’s filmed her, as someone who was raised by my grandmother, it’s a lot,” Engelson said. “Being able to put it up on screen, it’s a way to recognize that and celebrate that work. That’s what films are good at.”
This will be her first time screening at the Queens World Film Festival.
“I specifically wanted to start screening in New York and I was specifically hoping for Queens so that the grandmother and her community could come to the screenings,” she said. “I’m so excited to be here.”
Additional reporting by Paul Frangipane.
