By: Michele Schultz

The New York summer film festival continues with the Greenpoint Film Festival (GFF), marking its fifteenth anniversary across five days on August 5-9, 2026, in North Brooklyn. This year’s theme, “Unbound: Celebrating the Freedom to Tell Untold Stories,” reflects on its inception in 2011: ‘For Filmmakers. By Filmmakers. With Filmmakers.’

The 2026 program spotlights 8 narrative features, 6 documentary features, 94 narrative shorts, 19 documentary shorts, and 7 animated films, alongside numerous premieres across categories. The jury for this year includes Andrea Purcigliotti, Brooke Berman, Elizabeth Lo, James Madio, Malcolm Purnell, and Signe Baumane. 

Leading the festival’s opening film is Café Chairel (dir. Fernando Guillermo Barreda Luna), with When We Were Live (dir. John Spottswood Moore), a documentary closing the night, including New York premiere Mistake (dir. Honey Lauren), and a documentary feature, Nothing to See Here: Watts (dir. fifteen community members).

This year’s horror lineup will reflect on the festival’s 2026 theme ‘Unbound,’ which GFF Creative Director Siyu Lin said isn’t just about scares. Additionally, Lin said further that what really stood out to GFF is how the filmmakers use horror to explore fears, personal experiences, and perspectives that don’t always get represented on screen.

The Visitor (dir. Elliot Kealoha Blanchard) follows a struggling actress haunted by a silent double intent on taking her place, forcing her to confront what it means to be seen, remembered, or erased. Blanchard said on The Visitor to screen at the 15th annual Greenpoint Film Festival, then about programmed in the horror genre followed by the intention behind the trailer, the initial inspiration elaborating on the concept of doubles evolved into the core premise connecting the themes to concerns about AI and actors’ fears, explained the short deals with identity, replacement, being made visible as a creative to point out visibility, the agency in acting, and the artistic intent. At the same time, discuss how The Visitor shaped his view of future work:

“I mean, it’s a great festival! It’s also a fantastic sort of meeting place, and it’s a great gathering, so it’s a big honor to have your film there. The Visitor specifically, my films in general, they don’t quite fit in one genre; they kind of bounce around in different festivals. Emily’s character, she’s the actor, is basically on screen 100% of the film, as the sort of whole AI thing started to take off, I saw all of the anxiety that that was generating in a lot of actors, it kind of clicked that that could be kind of like an interesting way to sort of explore that concept of trying to be creative, but also sort of being challenged by sort of a double of yourself. Actors and sort of performers in general often are in this strange middle ground of being very visible, but they also don’t have agency. I kind of wanted to challenge myself by really only having one character and seeing if I could build something that was like interesting and memorable for that.”

Fully Stocked (dir. Nicolai Feldman) follows a young couple’s Airbnb getaway that takes a terrifying turn when they discover the rental’s fridge is haunted. Feldman said on born and raised in New York just means a lot to him to have his first debut short film, directed and written, selected for the Greenpoint Film Festival, emphasizing his initial intention behind the narrative of the short film to the emotional spectrum of the relationship with food, and the fridge clarifies why he leaned into the horror genre with this subject matter explain how the short film fits into the horror genre and what kind of fears it taps into while describe the specific idea that inspired the narrative of the short to plans on expand the short into a feature building a consistent body of work with evolving a horror style in future work:

“It’s very exciting—it’s the first film that I’ve ever written and directed, and for it to get into a festival this close to home is really nice. I wanted other people to feel what I was feeling and how I was looking at this. I know everyone has a relationship with the refrigerator or food for that matter—I kind of wanted to explore the fear more and make a horror about it. I felt like I had this idea, like, ‘Oh, if I put something in the refrigerator, it’d be funny if it disappeared.’ And that was what led me into that. I feel like exploiting the fear that everyone might have around eating or a fridge– not everyone, but I thought that at least from my own experience, and maybe some others, I think trying to touch on real-world problems and everyday issues. I loved how Fully Stocked came out, so I want to try to not copy it but just keep going down that same structure that I did for Fully Stocked, with other films that I also have other projects in mind that have a similar vibe to this aesthetic and color scheme.”

Meat (dir. Jacob Hopewell) follows a young woman who enters a men’s support group and recounts the events of a horrific night where the hunter becomes the hunted. Hopewell said it means a lot to point out Greenpoint Film Festival’s reputation for championing bold, independent work to have MEAT selected for the 15th edition, to further explain the initial intention for MEAT, the direction that went into filming MEAT started as a stage monologue written by Abi Zakarian for the horror theatre company Terrifying Women where the intention was to take that everyday scenario of every woman knows walking home alone at night and completely flip it instead of another story about a woman in peril but to turn the gaze back on itself and ask what happens when the prey decides she’s done being prey with drawing on the horror context was resisting the obvious to avoid the bleak, gritty look that is expected from this subject for something more mysterious almost like the room isn’t a real place at all…more of a purgatory worked closely with his DOP Morgan Sinclair to land that by shooting the opening monologue on steadicam in long takes to protect Elle’s flow then build the tension through edit, sound and choreography by Mikey Boats, and his intention as a horror filmmaker, including future projects after MEAT:

“It’s a film that asks a lot of its audience, so knowing it’s going to play to a crowd who actively seek out that kind of cinema is exciting. For a film like this, festivals are everything—it’s where it finds the people it was made for, and I can’t wait to see how a New York audience takes it. It was never about shock for shock’s sake. It was about taking those familiar tropes and weaponising them, making the audience sit with their own judgement of this woman and keep questioning it. The whole approach shifts as the film goes, starting in intimate realism and slowly tipping into something far more heightened and uncanny. It was about control, letting the audience think they know where it’s going, then pulling the floor out. There were a few key touchstones: the claustrophobic dread of Polanski’s Repulsion, the visceral revenge of Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes, the sensory overload of Noé’s Climax, the cold, watchful gaze of Glazer’s Under the Skin. We took those influences and synthesised them into something that moves between grounded realism and heightened artifice. It sits somewhere in that modern arthouse horror space, with a bit of giallo in the visual language too. I love horror that unsettles you intellectually as much as it does viscerally, and that’s the lineage we were reaching for. For me, horror is the perfect genre to smuggle in ideas; it lets you take something real and uncomfortable and push it somewhere primal. With MEAT, I wanted to make a film that was as much a conversation as a scare, something that challenges the genre I love rather than just serving it. Going forward, I want to keep doing that. My next project heads in a slightly different direction… a story about a son breaking free from his mother’s control by convincing a Pentecostal church congregation he’s been healed, set in 1990s England. Same instinct, though, taking ordinary worlds and finding the strange, unsettling power underneath them; I’m hoping to develop that one into a feature.”

The Lone Piper (dir. Matthew Kravchuk), set in 1759 during the Seven Years’ War, this atmospheric folk-horror tale that follows a Scottish bagpipe player and an Algonquian girl as they confront the horrors of war, colonialism, and the unknown. Kravchuk said the significance of having The Lone Piper selected for the Greenpoint festival’s horror lineup, his thematic background focuses on the horror in The Lone Piper, his approach to use historical setting elaborate more on the French and Indian War as well as broader themes connecting to a contemporary issue in specific chosen a period, on folklore feels fitting explain the period belief system ties into the themes further emphasized on the ending on The Lone Piper as proof of concept to a feature on the isolated setting and his next folklore short received its recognition for actually won the Tony Cox screenplay at the Nantucket Film Festival:

“For me, it means a lot because I work in production in New York City, so I’ve actually worked at Broadway Stages several times over the years. I’m actually working in Greenpoint on a job right now. So it’s just nice to do a well-renowned local regional festival that, at least in New York City circles, is really well respected, especially for how relatively new it is in the brand scheme of things. I love horror; I grew up on creature features, slashers, and to me, the best part about horror is that it’s such a spectrum. I always like folklore, especially ones that are set in a period piece, because these aren’t just unusual supernatural things that are happening—they’re things that people of that time period genuinely believed in. I think I’ve always had a love of history, but I’ve had a recent Renaissance as far as learning the natural history of our country. I just think, given our nation literally started under colonial powers, and then we as a country have just continued it. I think setting it during the French and Indian War, which was the first major North American European war on our continent, kind of just made sense given the subject matter. I really like telling folks horror stories in American history in particular, and I think it’s an opportunity to talk about a little bit of social commentary. Mostly, the themes I focus on in my work are stories where the people are the real monsters, and the creature of supernatural aspect is just a medium for talking about different issues—in this case, colonialism is xenophobia. I think that adds, at least for the characters, there’s an added level of mystique or creep factor because these aren’t things that are things that they inherently feared, and again, in this particular story, it’s a fear of the other. In essence, just the historical atrocities kind of are the horror in and of themselves. And the setting, as I said, is kind of just a medium to hopefully make people think a little bit.”