Honorary Chair Emeritus:

Elmer Bernstein - feature film composer (1922-2004)
2004 would have been Elmer Bernstein's 53rd anniversary as a feature film composer. His name will always be synonymous with creativity, versatility and longevity. He wrote music for over 200 major film and television scores and was nominated fourteen times for an Academy Award® for such films as Far From Heaven, The Age of Innocence, To Kill A Mockingbird, and The Magnificent Seven, among others. He was awarded the Oscar for best film score for Thoroughly Modern Millie. Click here for Elmer's complete filmography.

Advisory Board Members:

Eamonn Bowles - President, Magnolia Pictures
Eamonn Bowles is president of Magnolia Pictures (Food Inc, Humpday, The Answer Man, The Great Buck Howard, Jesus Camp, The World's Fastest Indian, Nine Lives, Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, A League of Ordinary Gentlemen, Ong Bak, Bukowski: Born Into This, Capturing The Friedmans, Read My Lips, and Control Room).

In addition to his distribution duties for Magnolia Pictures, Eamonn is a member of rock 'n' roll band 'The Martinets'. Check out their second album, "New Stories for Men." Visit  www.magpictures.com for more.

Ellen Chenoweth - Casting Director
Select films include Gran Torino, Doubt, Burn After Reading, Michael Clayton, Burn After Reading, Good Night and Good Luck, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Analyze That, The Man Who Wasn't There, Meet the Parents, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Analyze This, The Horse Whisperer, Affliction, Lolita, Wag the Dog, Bridges of Madison County, Nobody's Fool, Bugsy, Six Degrees of Separation, A Bronx Tale, Terms of Endearment...

Griffin Dunne - Director, Producer, Actor
Griffin Dunne is a director (The Accidental Husband, Fierce People, Addicted to Love, Practical Magic, Lisa Picard is Famous); producer (Baby It's You, Running On Empty, After Hours, Fierce People, Game 6); and actor (The Great Buck Howard, Marie and Bruce, American Werewolf in London, After Hours, Game 6). As a screenwriter, he co-wrote Spin (Dreamworks) and with co-writer Adam Brooks, the Academy Award® nominated short, Duke of Groove.

Martha Frankel - Entertainment Journalist
Martha Frankel has been writing about film and pop culture for over two decades. She has interviewed everyone from Robert DeNiro, Sean Penn, Leonardo Di Caprio and Elizabeth Taylor to Lee Attwater, Floyd Patterson, Roman Polanski, and Anne Rice, for magazines as diverse as The New Yorker, Fashions of the New York Times, Cosmopolitan, the original Details, and Hollywood Life. She received a NYFFA Award in creative nonfiction, was the 1997 Philip Morris Fellow at The MacDowell Colony, and the 2003 Artist-in-Residence at SUNY Ulster. Her memoir, HATS & EYEGLASSES: A Family Love Affair With Gambling (Tarcher/Penguin) was published in 2008.

Ethan Hawke - Actor, Director
Ethan's film credits as an actor include Brooklyn's Finest, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Taking Lives, Assault on Precinct 13, Training Day (Academy Award® nominated for Best Supporting Actor), Tape, Waking Life, Snow Falling on Cedars, Hamlet, Great Expectations, The Newton Boys, Gattaca, Before Sunset, Before Sunrise, Reality Bites, Floundering, White Fang, and Dead Poets Society. As a feature film director, his credits include Chelsea Walls and The Hottest State.

Stephen Hays - Founder, 120dB Films
Stephen is the founder of 120dB Films, a financial services company specializing in gap, finishing and bridge loans to the independent film industry. He was co-founder and General Partner of Seneca Capital, a $2.5 billion New York-based hedge fund specializing in arbitrage, distressed securities and event-driven investing (1996-2003), where he remains a partner and advisor. Prior to that, he was a Managing Director at Furman Selz, a New York-based investment bank where his focus was proprietary risk arbitrage and special situation investing (1987-1995). Stephen's first position on Wall Street was at Laterman and Co., an arbitrage-focused hedge fund (1985-87). He graduated from Kenyon College in 1983 and gained a Masters in Accounting and Finance at the London School of Economics in 1985. Stephen recently executive produced Motherhood, Good, Jack & Jill vs. The World, and Savage Grace.

Sabine Hoffman - Editor
Credits include three films by Rebecca Miller (Personal Velocity, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee), Alice Wu’s Saving Face, Rodney Evans’ Brother to Brother, two films by Morgan J. Freeman (Hurricane Streets and Desert Blue), The Day the Ponies Come Back, and Harlem Aria. Documentary credits include Last Party 2000, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Katja Esson’s Academy Award® nominated short Ferry Tales. Most recently, she worked on Off the Black, starring Nick Nolte, and Hound Dog, starring Dakota Fanning and Robin Wright Penn.  Sabine founded the Editing Award for feature and documentary narratives at the Woodstock Film Festival in 2004.

Gill Holland - Producer and Partner, The Group Entertainment
Gill has worked on over fifty films. Nominated for the Spirit Award for Producer of the Year 1998, Gill produced Sundance-winning Hurricane Streets, the FOX sitcom Greg the Bunny, Sundance faves Spring Forward and Loggerheads, Emmy-nominated Dear Jesse, and Spirit Award winner SweetLand. He produced three volumes of cineBLAST!, the short film video compilations. His music label sonaBLAST! Records' first releases from Mark Geary both hit top 40 in Ireland. He is renovating Louisville’s first LEED certified platinum green building.

Michael Lang - Producer, Promoter
As the founder of Woodstock Ventures, Michael is best known as the producer and promoter of the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival (1969, 1994 & 1999). In addition to his core business of event production and music management he is currently working on the production of a film based on the novel The Master and Margurita by Mikeal Bulgakov. Other film credits include Bottle Rocket, the debut film of director Wes Anderson and actors Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson. His autobiographical book THE ROAD TO WOODSTOCK was published in 2009 by Ecco.

Jeremiah Newton - NYU Industry Liaison
As Film and Television Industry Liaison for the largest film school in America, New York University’s Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television, Mr. Newton created The Directors Series that takes place twice a week involving the latest Hollywood, independent, documentary and foreign feature films. Mr. Newton also administrates the Mentor Program, which finds industry, mentors for film and television students. His writing credits include work on I Shot Andy Warhol.

Annie Nocenti - Screenwriter, Editor
Annie Nocenti is a screenwriter, journalist, and the former editor of Scenario, a screenwriting magazine.

She is an editor-at-large at Stop Smiling magazine (stopsmilingonline.com). Her feature script Patriotville was produced in 2009.

Ron Nyswaner - Screenwriter, Director
Ron Nyswaner is currently working on Hamlet to be directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) His screenplays include Soldier's Girl (Peabody Award), Philadelphia (Academy Award® nomination) and The Painted Veil, starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton.  His first book, Blue Days, Black Nights: A Memoir, was nominated for a Lambda Literary award.

Sarah Plant - Composer, Musician, Associate Music Director
Sarah Plant was Associate Music Director, arranger, and flutist for Ang Lee's Academy Award® nominated Eat Drink Man Woman. Feature and documentary credits include Shoot George, Juliette of the Herbs (PBS), Entwined, Spotted Puppets (Canal+), Brothers and Others: The Impact of 9/11 on Arabs and Muslims in America (CBC, Hallmark, Swiss TV), Guillermo Gomez-Peña (PBS), Going Organic (PBS), For Love of Julian and Bravo Profiles: Julie Taymor (Bravo). Scores include American Museum of Natural History biodiversity films, museum art installations and a commission for Bill T. Jones Dance Company. Her work has been performed at the Kennedy Center, BAM, Carnegie Recital Hall, and the Spoleto Festival.

Bill Plympton - Animator
Bill Plympton's animated films include his latest feature Idiots & Angels, Hair High, which won the Gold Jury Prize at the Fant-Asia festival in Montreal, and the short film Guard Dog, which won the Best Short Prize at Anima Mundi and a special prize at the Hiroshima Animation Festival. Past projects include Mutant Aliens, I Married a Strange Person, and The Tune. His short films have been seen widely around the country, highlighting many animation festivals, and on DVD in the Plymptoons and Mondo Plympton collections.

Bingham Ray - IFC Films
Bingham Ray is a distributor and producer for Kimmel Entertainment. He is the former president of United Artists (Bowling for Columbine, Assassination Tango, Nicholas Nickleby, City of Ghosts). As co-founder of October Films, he distributed independent films such as Secrets & Lies, Breaking The Waves, and The Apostle.

Peter Saraf - Producer
Peter's most recent production credits include Sunshine Cleaning, Away We Go, and the 2006 Academy Award® winning Little Miss Sunshine. Peter also produced Liev Schreiber's enchanting adaptation of Everything Is Illuminated and executive produced Spike Jonze's critically acclaimed Adaptation, starring Nicholas Cage. In 2004, with Marc Turtletaub, Peter formed Big Beach Films, a New York-based production company that finances and produces independent films. Other producer credits include The Truth About Charlie, Mandela, Ulee's Gold, Courage and Pain, Into the Rope and Storefront Hitchcock.

Steve Savage - President & Co-Founder, New Video, Docurama
Steve is president and co-founder of New Video, a New York based DVD company. New Video has released a catalog of over 1,500 titles under The History Channel, A&E, NBC and IFC imprints. Since 1999, New Video has distributed a catalog of over 100 independent and classic documentaries under their Docurama label. For preschoolers the company offers a series of classic children¹s books on DVD under the Scholastic brand. Visit Docurama or New Video for more info.

Liev Schreiber - Actor, Director
Liev Schreiber has quickly established himself as one of the most versatile actors of his generation through his ability to effortlessly play roles ranging from classical Shakespearean to contemporary film. Among his film credits are, most recently, Taking Woodstock, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Painted Veil, The Manchurian Candidate, The Sum of All Fears, Kate & Leopold, Spring Forward, The Hurricane, and A Walk on the Moon. He made his directorial debut with Everything is Illuminated in 2005.

John Sloss - Attorney, Producer, Cinetic Media
John Sloss is the principal in Sloss Law Office and a founder of Cinetic Media, a consulting firm specializing in the entertainment and media industries. He is also a partner in Independent Digital Entertainment (InDigEnt), an innovative production company dedicated to making digital features in collaboration with established filmmakers and actors. Sloss has served as executive producer or producer on Me and Orson Welles, I'm Not There, A Scanner Darkly, Lonesome Jim, Before Sunset, Before Sunrise, The Company, Pieces of April, The Fog of War, Far From Heaven, Tadpole, and Waking Life. He has orchestrated some of the most notable distribution deals in the last decade, including Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, Super Size Me, Control Room, Capturing the Friedmans and The Station Agent.

Lemore Syvan, Producer, Elevation Filmworks
Lemore's most recent films include The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and Gracie. Previous films include King of the Corner, Rebecca Miller's The Ballad of Jack and Rose (Sundance 2005) starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Catherine Keener, and Duane Hopwood (Sundance 2005), starring David Schwimmer and Jeanine Gerofalo and Shall Not Want, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, John Sayles Casa de Los Babys, Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity (grand prize winner at 2002 Sundance Film Festival). She heads the production company Elevation Filmworks.

Specialty Programming
Exposure | Focus on Music | Youth Initiative

Hudson Valley Film Commission

Hudson Valley Programmers Group

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program and year-round schedule of film, music, and art-related activities that promote artists, culture, inspired learning, and diversity.
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and supporting film, video and media production in the Hudson Valley - Catskills.

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