Astoria Film Festival 

Astoria Film Festival Inc, in the Kaufman Arts District in Astoria NY, is a 501c3 non-profit organization an official NYC DOE VENDOR.

Each year, we produce a main festival and a Youth Festival, organize a Career Fair, teach filmmaking workshops to ages 8-adult in schools, after schools, and community centers, provide virtual and in-person internships for HS and college students interested in Media/Film/TV Careers, and select and train a group of youth to be our Film Fellows, who then work on film and video production projects with us and with various industry professionals and local businesses.  

We are also and hold film education workshops in schools and after schools throughout the year.

Astoria Film Festival is devoted to increasing the representation of under-represented people by empowering them to tell their own stories using film and digital media arts.  We are especially interested in storytelling by groups that are typically ignored and/or oppressed in society - Disabled people, women, FLI (First-Gen/Low-Income/Immigrants), BBIA (Black/Brown/Indigenous/Asian people), LGBTQIA+.

In our Film Fellows and Intern programs, we provide local youth ages 14-26 with work skills and job experience and connect them with festival filmmakers and industry professionals to create a strong and supportive local filmmaking community.  We hope that by getting under-represented youth jobs in media/film, they will go on to create more diversity and representation in that industry. We also bring some of the Film Fellows and industry professionals to schools and after schools, as part of our filmmaking workshops, thus creating a multi-generational local filmmaking community and network.

​

We are very much a hybrid organization, as committed to education and community as we are to independent filmmaking and storytelling.