Fresh off a European sprint from the Monza paddock to the Venice Lido to the Madrid grid, I return to find Soho’s festival making its own argument for what independent cinema is worth – on considerably smaller means
I filed my last dispatch from the 83rd Venice Film Festival on a stopover between two Formula 1 assignments – coming off my stint at Monza, and headed next to Madrid – because some detours are worth the itinerary.
I was there when Lav Diaz, the Filipino auteur whose The Woman Who Left won Venice’s Golden Lion in 2016, returned this September to claim the Premio Brian for Makikiraan Po (Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors), a film set during the brutality of Spain’s 1617 colonization of the Philippines – an award given not for spectacle but for cinema that advances a humanist and secular vision of the world. I spent that stretch of the festival among friends: Diaz himself, his longtime collaborator Hazel Orencio, Ed Lejano of the QCinema International Film Festival, and Marija Krunic, President of the International Filmmaking Academy in Bologna – the kind of company that makes clear how small and interconnected the world of serious independent cinema actually is, even at a festival the size of Venice. Diaz, by his own admission, was surprised to receive the award. I wasn’t, having tracked his particular discipline of slow, unflinching cinema since long before Venice caught up to him.
I mention Venice not for color but for contrast. That festival operates with red-carpet infrastructure, a jury system decades in the refining, and a global press corps numbering in the thousands. The Soho International Film Festival, opening its seventeenth edition on October 7 in New York, operates with none of that scaffolding – a seven-day program under the nonprofit SOHO Creative Lab, evolved from a three-day event I remember covering when you knew half the credentialed press by first name because there weren’t enough of us to fill a second row. And yet, watched against what I just witnessed on the Lido, SIFFNYC’s 2026 slate – more than one hundred premieres, thirty-five of them world premieres – is making a version of the same argument Venice makes at ten times the budget: that cinema’s value isn’t measured by the size of the stage but by what the work asks of its audience.
The opening-night selection is the clearest evidence of that ambition. Jackrabbit marks the feature directorial debut of Ballard C. Boyd – a detail that matters more than the press notes let on. Boyd is an Emmy and Peabody Award winner who has directed more than two hundred segments for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, arriving at his first feature with a craftsman’s fluency in pacing, tone, and the mechanics of holding an audience – skills honed nightly under conditions far less forgiving than a festival premiere. Venice can afford to open with an established master; a festival like SIFFNYC proves something different by opening with a debut, betting its most valuable real estate on unproven feature instinct rather than a safer, known quantity.
Shot entirely on New York location, Jackrabbit follows an investigative journalist and a struggling actress forced into partnership when their mutual best friend disappears – a premise that, watched through the lens of someone who has spent a career straddling both trades, doubles as commentary on two professions this city keeps producing in surplus and rewarding in scarcity. Boyd and his cast – Kuhoo Verma, Taylor Ortega, Saamer Usmani, Soojeong Son, and Mark Gessner – are confirmed for Opening Night.
No film in this year’s program carries more unplanned weight than 3 Days Rising, Craig Cukrowski’s reimagining of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. It holds the final leading performance of Peter Greene, who died in December 2025 at sixty. Greene built a career on a particular kind of screen menace – the twitchy, dangerous energy that made him unforgettable as Zed in Pulp Fiction and gave The Mask its most memorable villain – and he both stars as Eric Usher and produced the picture himself.
The ensemble around him – Mickey Rourke, Ice-T, Frank Whaley, Paul Ben-Victor, Bo Dietl, Vincent Young, Kelly Monrow, Fredro Starr, and Sticky Fingaz – reads like a registry of actors who built careers on exactly the register Greene specialized in. Watching this lineup assemble around his last performance, after decades spent documenting how New York remembers its own, I find it hard not to read the film as the festival’s own quiet tribute to a strain of American character acting that studios have largely stopped bothering to cast – the kind of tribute Venice pays its auteurs with a lifetime Golden Lion; SIFFNYC pays with an ensemble willing to show up.
Elsewhere in special presentations, Academy Award nominee Harvey Keitel and Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham share the screen in director Louis Nero’s Milarepa, a post-apocalyptic coming-of-age story set in a world where nature has reclaimed the machinery of civilization, following a young girl’s journey into the magic arts after losing her father. Pairing two actors of this caliber on a festival stage – rather than inside a studio release calendar – is precisely the kind of programming that separates a festival still building its brand from one that has already earned the right to make such asks.
Juliette Lewis stars in Jesus Land, writer-director Saila Kariat’s adaptation of Julia Scheeres’ bestselling memoir, following a white teenage sister and her adopted Black brother whose bond is tested by racism, religious fundamentalism, and an abusive reform school – material Kariat has said draws on her own upbringing across India, Canada, and the United States. And writer-director Andrew Zappin’s The King of Black Goo, starring DJ Qualls alongside Kathleen Wilhoite, Harriet Sansom Harris, Margaret Cho, Michael McShane, and Matt Malloy, supplies the program’s necessary absurdist counterweight – a darkly comic study of a bitter, isolated man undergoing a personality-altering medical procedure in pursuit of love.
The most consequential decision in this year’s lineup isn’t a film at all. SIFFNYC’s partnership with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment to host a stop on the ‘Made in NY’ Filmmaker Listening Tour – an initiative led by Film Commissioner Rafael Espinal and Deputy Commissioner Kwame Amoaku – inserts municipal policy directly into festival programming. Venice has the Italian state and the Biennale’s institutional weight behind it; New York’s independent filmmakers get a listening session, and this year, at least, that session is being treated as newsworthy in its own right.
Espinal’s own framing leaves little ambiguity about what’s at stake: ‘Film and television production is back in New York City, but a strong industry also means making sure all filmmakers can afford to create and build their careers here.’ In seventeen years of watching this festival’s press cycle – and far longer covering how this city’s institutions treat its working creative class – I cannot recall an announcement that so plainly treated policy access as a headline alongside the premieres.
The parallel partnership with New York Women in Film and Television, presenting a curated slate of member-directed shorts, extends that same institutional logic – treating a professional network’s visibility as infrastructure worth programming around, not simply a courtesy slot.
The festival’s international selections this year hold up on technical merit rather than novelty alone. South Korea’s Karlovy Vary, a comedy-drama turning the chaos of independent filmmaking into its own subject, stars Lee Je-yeon, Oh Ji-ho, and Shin Ji-won – the singer and actress formerly known as Johyun of the K-pop group Berry Good – with its director crossing the Pacific for the New York premiere. Japanese filmmaker Toshio Sekine’s Shambhala Story, shot over a multi-year production spanning three countries, follows a Tibetan monk sent to Japan to continue his studies, starring Morning Tzu-Yi Mo and martial-arts actress Rina Takeda. And France’s The Gliwensbourg Chronicles, Emilie Tommasi’s World War I-era time-travel fantasy starring Arnaud Thery, Myriam Caucheteux, Romain Pirosa, Laurent Brebion, and Adil Jbilou, arrives already decorated on the international circuit for directing, acting, production design, costume design, and cinematography.
Somewhere in the stretch between Monza, Venice, and Madrid, I found myself thinking about what separates a festival that can crown a Golden Lion from one still building the room to hold it. What this year’s SIFFNYC slate ultimately argues, watched by someone who has tracked this festival from its three-day origins to its current seven-day footprint, is that scale was never the real currency – conviction was. Pairing a director’s first feature, a departed actor’s final testament, and a City Hall listening session inside a single week is a harder festival to build than one that simply books famous faces, and closer to what Venice does with its budget than the size of SIFFNYC’s operation would suggest. That is the argument worth making, on a Grand Prix grid or in Lower Manhattan. I intend to be in the room for it, as I have been for every edition before.