As Queens World Film Festival prepares for its final weekend of the 2025 season, festival co-founder Katha Cato looks back on a remarkable year of attendance for the annual Queens event that “punches above its weight.”
The festival, now in its 15th year, has screened almost 2,000 films from 98 different nations since launching in 2011, including 274 films from Queens-based filmmakers.
This year’s festival features 125 different films from 17 different nations split into 31 separate screening blocks based on a number of unique themes and categories such as “Tough as Nails,” which celebrates women’s stories, and “Hot Mess,” which focusing on people who “got it together – or didn’t.”
The festival, which is currently taking place at the Museum of the Moving Image and the Zukor Theater at Kaufman Studios, boasts a central theme of “Connections: Missed, Made, and Yearned For,” which is visible throughout the 31 screening blocks between Nov. 5 and Nov. 16.
Cato, who founded the festival alongside her husband Donald Preston Cato, said the ongoing festival has seen unprecedented support, with six of the first 15 screening blocks at the festival completely sold out.
She believes that at least another four blocks will sell out before the end of the festival, which concludes on Sunday.
At a time when commercial movie theaters across the United States posted their worst October in 27 years, Queens World Film Festival continues to flourish and thrive.
“We are so moved and so gratified by the attendance,” Cato said. “It’s so beautiful to come around the corner of the Zukor Theater and see 50 or 60 people talking about what they just saw and another 30 people getting their tickets scanned to get into the theater.
“This is an excellent sign of health in the indie artist community, it’s huge.”
Cato added that the festival challenges audiences to engage with alternate visions created by artists who have come from a different background.
“Can you sit through a short film that expresses something that is diametrically opposed to your core values? And can we all survive that? Yes, we can,” she said.
Celebrating the First Amendment
Central to that belief has been a new feature for the 2025 festival which will see each of the 31 screening blocks open with a reading of the First Amendment.
Cato said the new feature aims to emphasize the importance of the First Amendment by highlighting that several filmmakers taking part at Queens World would not be able to make their films if the amendment did not exist.
She said a number filmmakers from other countries have shared stories about having their equipment seized or about how they were stopped when trying to leave their country because of the films they were making.
“Perhaps we’ve taken it for granted, especially young filmmakers and young audiences,” Cato said. “It’s just important to remind them… that this was the first mistake caught (by the first Congress).
“It now needs to be protected and remembered and honored and supported all the time.”
She said the reading of the First Amendment serves to remind filmmakers and audience members alike that alternate stories and ideas are protected.
“It’s just something that we’re doing to remind people how lucky we are, how incredible this is and how it’s not enjoyed equally around the world,” Cato said.
Connection as a central theme
Meanwhile, the 2025 festival’s central theme of connection is woven throughout the 31 screening blocks and strives to connect audiences with films and people with other people.
“So many people are yearning to be connected. So much has crumbled underneath our feet,” she said, referencing the Covid-19 pandemic. “The pandemic isolated us and and and really challenged some of our very tenuous connections to each other that we just took for granted.”
She added that it is an “honor” to give festival-goers 31 opportunities to connect with others who are like-minded or who share completely different ideas about the world.
Cato said Queens World has been an outsider film festival “punching above its weight” ever since it launched in 2011, adding that it is “remarkable” to be able to bring a collection of films together that might not make the grade at other festivals.
Diverse screening blocks
She said the festival’s unique block-by-block themes have allowed Queens World to pair completely different films with one another.
“We can match up some exceptional work,” Cato explained. “We’ve screened 30-second films, we’ve screened three-hour films. We have screened films that are award-winners in other countries, we have screened films that are very provocative.”
Cato also pointed to the diverse range of filmmakers that take part in the festival, noting that the screening blocks often place veteran filmmakers alongside artists making their filmmaking debut.
“Watching those two discover each other and understand that they are working with the same themes. It’s just transforming. We’re the luckiest people, the luckiest people.”
Aside from the yearly film festival, Queens World hosts extensive programming throughout the year, including pop-up film schools, mentoring programs, community screenings and The Listening Tour, a new initiative that brings people together to video tape their thoughts on Hope and Resilience.
Since launching in September 2021, the Listening Tour has produced over 60 segments, often focusing on subjects who are not usually asked to voice their opinion.
Cato said the programs pay dividend for the annual festival, pointing to one filmmaker at the 2025 festival who enrolled in a Queens World mentoring program when he was in the eighth grade. He has not been the first to do so, while the festival has also given several filmmakers their big-screen debut.
“It’s incredibly overwhelming,” Cato said. “My husband and I cry quite often during the festival.
“Being able to position young people so that when parents come to see the work, they see that they (their kids) are encouraged, they are supported. They see that, at least for today, their child is actually part of a community of like-minded people.”
