The Art of Brooklyn Film Festival in photos

The Art of Brooklyn Film Festival (AoBFF), of which I’m the executive director, is the only independent, international festival focused solely on films made by or catalyzed within the diverse creative community of Brooklyn — and the innovative use of technology has been a key element in their success.
Art of Brooklyn is all digital: always screening films directly from their original files, thereby avoiding the inevitable technical glitches that plague other festivals that rely on DVD or Blu-ray players. For our sixth annual edition (June 4-12) we employed an all-digital advertising plan focused on social media and press mentions and welcomed 2,000 guests from all over the borough.
We launched our own streaming channel, Brooklyn On Demand, in fall 2014 to promote Brooklyn films and media to a global audience. By 2015, Brooklyn on Demand had been added to Roku, alongside Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime. In January, Brooklyn on Demand was voted the Artist/Creative Group of the Year at Technical.ly’s Brooklyn Innovation Awards. Today, the channel has over 150,000 plays and over 8,000 Roku subscribers.
We opened with the Brooklyn premiere of an important new work by iconic filmmaker Spike Lee. Lee’s new documentary 2 Fists Up is about the University of Missouri’s Concerned Student 1950 movement, whose efforts led to the resignation of UM System President Tim Wolfe over racial issues on campus. Created for ESPN Films, the theatrical version of 2 Fists Up was screened for festival audiences for the first time at AoBFF 2016.

The opening night party was held at Bklyn Commons, a beautiful new coworking space in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens located in the historic Bond Bakery building. Filmmakers, press and ticketholders partied on the rooftop in the shadow of the famous clock tower.

For the U.S. premiere of Star, a French drama co-starring Brooklyn graffiti icon Kaves, formerly of the Lordz of Brooklyn, the filmmakers flew in all the way from Paris and hung a photo call and invited the many graffiti artists in attendance to tag it.

AoBFF became the first independent film festival to partner with New York City’s parks department’s Brooklyn Recreation in 2016, co-producing a free “Best of the Fest” screening on the center lawn of Sunset Park. A giant inflatable movie screen and powerful portable sound system turned the park into a movie theater under the stars.

Around 500 Sunset Park residents joined the Art of Brooklyn for music spun by DJ SugarfreeBK, free tacos and tortas and a slate of fun shorts from past festivals.

The Art of Brooklyn Film Festival partnered with New York Women in Film and Television to present a lively roundtable discussion moderated by producer Roz Murphy (not pictured), which focused on moving beyond talk about gender parity and toward action.
The diverse panelists included:

• Jan Eliasberg, a veteran director, writer and producer whose prolific career includes series television and films
• Dana Verde, a writer, director and producer whose screenplay The Perfect Match was in theaters in March 2016
• Director/producer/writer Meghan Scibona
• Longtime producer and new director Margot Lulick
• Emerging filmmakers Valerie Brooks and Gabriella A. Moses, whose films were featured in the 2016 AoBFF