Inwood Film Festival – Inwood Art Works

The Inwood Film Festival celebrates and showcases the Inwood community through the moving image, presenting independent films made in the neighborhood or by Inwood-based filmmakers.

Although it feels like we just put the 2024 Film Festival behind us, it’s already time to start thinking about next year’s event! Submissions are now open for the 2025 Inwood Film Festival, to be held next May, are now open for short or feature-length films made in Inwood or its surrounding community (Washington Heights, Spuyten Duyvil, Kingbridge, and Riverdale) or those made by current or past Inwood community filmmakers.

Previous Film Festivals

Our 2023 Film Festival hit its post-pandemic stride at Columbia University’s Campbell Sports Center in Inwood, with over 1100 attendees and 27 films, including 17 world premieres. Building on the Festival’s ongoing success we added a new category for Web Series, which promises to be a fun and creative new outlet for locals to tell their stories for our future film festivals.

Although the 2022 festival was technically our 5th annual event, we stayed busy during the two years of pandemic downtime by creating our Quarantine Film Festival. It was a chance for New Yorkers to express their creativity, celebrate their city, exercise their resilience, and have some fun during the dark days of lockdown (which for a time made the city itself resemble the set of a post-apocalyptic movie).

The 2019 festival, our 4th annual event, took place over three March days with a packed program that included 33 short and feature films in nine screenings, plus two seminars hosted by industry professionals.

A special Opening Night Benefit featured a screening of Love, Gilda produced and directed by Inwood resident Lisa D’Apolito, followed by an interview with D’Apolito and original Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel by WNYC’s Brian Lehrer.

Congratulations to the winners in each of the six award categories!

Looking back to the 2016-2018 Film Festivals

The Inwood Film Festival program was bigger than ever in 2018, and included 24 short and feature films shown in nine screenings. It kicked off with a benefit event on Thursday, March 15, with a special presentation featuring: A History of “Hollywood” in Inwood, IFF Select Shorts, and a Filmmaker Interview with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer (see the full 2018 Film Festival program and the winners).

The inaugural festival in 2016 attracted over 50 submissions of short independent films and in 2017 we doubled the number screening programs to six, showing a total of 22 selected films over two days to full houses, adding a special matinee screening to satisfy demand (see the full 2017 Film Festival program and the winners).

Over half the films we screened in 2017 were made by women or minorities, both traditionally under-represented demographics in the film industry. We also expanded our submissions from just short films to include feature films and student films. The result was a festival that truly embodied our vision to foster a vibrant multicultural community nourished by local connectivity.

Many local films that debuted at the festival have since gone on to become official selections at national and international film festivals, and one of 2017’s winners, Hunting in Wartime, aired on PBS.