
ABOUT
Astoria Film Festival Inc, in the Kaufman Arts District in Astoria NY, is a 501c3 non-profit organization.
Each year, we produce a main festival, a Youth Festival, and a Horror Festival organize a Virtual Media/Film/TV Career Fair, provide virtual and in-person internships for HS and college students interested in Media/Film/TV Careers, select and train a group of youth to be our Film Fellows, and work on film and video production projects with us, and hold film education workshops in schools, after schools, and for the general public, of all ages, throughout the year.
Astoria Film Festival empowers people to tell their own stories using film and digital media arts, through all of our endeavors..
We are especially interested in social justice stories and storytelling by groups that are typically ignored in society - Disabled people, 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 15-25 with 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-served youth jobs in media/film, they can help create more diversity and representation in that industry as well. And we 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.