BOROUGHWIDE — It’s showtime: The Art of Brooklyn Film Festival returns to the borough for its 16th season.
The 10-day long festival, which began in 2011, will include 55 new independent films from local, national and international filmmakers. Feature films and shorts from every genre will screen in venues across the borough and stream online. The festival runs June 1 through June 10.
Co-founder and Bay Ridge resident Anthony DeVito said the festival was created because Kings County didn’t have a large-scale, filmmaker-focused event of its own.
“We have a beautifully curated selection of shorts from comedies, to thrillers, to documentaries, to experimental films, with themes ranging from family ties, to romance gone wrong, to how we define friendship, to profiles of artists from around the world,” DeVito said. “We’re excited to be screening at Film Noir Cinema and 100 Sutton, both in Greenpoint, the Tom Kane Theatre in Industry City, and the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”
“We designed Art of Brooklyn as a film festival for the entire borough, because we knew that there are artists and enthusiastic audiences in every community, from one end of Brooklyn to the other,” he added. “Filmmakers, audiences and the industry were ready for what we were doing, so it was a big success right away. By our second year, we’d entertained audiences from every single zip code in the borough.”
The Art of Brooklyn Film Festival has differentiated itself from other film festivals. It created a Guest Festival Director Program in 2016 by opening the role to different filmmakers every season.
Co-founder of the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival Anthony DeVito. Photo: Anthony DeVito
“While filmmakers may program individual blocks at other festivals, we offer them an unprecedented level of creative control, surrendering the entire curation process and granting them final say,” DeVito said. “We never throw anyone in the deep end though. We mentor our Guest Festival Directors in film curation and prepare them to take center stage at our festival, where they lead conversations about the future of independent film.”
Post-festival, the organizers become a hub in their professional networks, offering references, letters of recommendation and large social media platforms to support projects.
“These long-term relationships are central to our success,” DeVito said. “It’s a win-win. We create professional opportunities in creative leadership for filmmakers while ensuring that our curation doesn’t ever default to a single point of view.”
The location of the venues is also important.
“Producing our festival in neighborhoods across the borough makes it possible to build a wide audience for new independent films, and we take that seriously, working closely with filmmakers to fill their screenings,” said DeVito. “As of 2025, Art of Brooklyn has produced screenings and events in 29 ADA-accessible venues across 13 different neighborhoods around the borough, and we employ a Virtual Festival Platform to screen online encores of our films to maximize audiences from across the country, as well as creating even more access for disabled audiences and filmmakers to participate in our event.”
Over the years, the festival has steadily grown in popularity, being recognized by outlets as a top festival in the city.
“Filmmakers in capitals around the world — Los Angeles, Toronto, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris — choose to premiere with us here in Brooklyn,” he said. “We’ve built an audience that has endured despite the ups and downs in the industry. We’re proud that we’re now in a position to advocate for filmmakers in our network directly with distributors.”
This year promises to offer something different for everyone within the 55 new films. A Japanese martial arts thriller called “Traverse 2: Next Level” will premiere. Local films include the road movie “Berman’s March,” horror–comedy “The Flesh People,” and “Growing Up Slowly,” a documentary about how important play is for children as they grow and develop.
DeVito is a fourth-generation Brooklynite who grew up in Bergen Beach and has lived in Bay Ridge since the early 1990s. He worked in NYC agencies as a graphic designer and creative director. He is also a SAG-AFTRA actor who works in television and films.
“You might have seen me cursing out Jennifer Aniston and Jon Hamm in ‘The Morning Show’ when they visited Coney Island,” he said of one of his roles.
One of the highlights of the festival DeVito is excited about is that it is opening with the East Coast premiere of a timely dark comedy called “Dead or Dying,” a collection of Los Angelenos struggling to cope with a city where people have been dying off in droves.
“At the risk of sounding biased, all our selections really are wonderful,” DeVito said. “It’s always an achievement for independent artists to come together to create a film, no matter what the topic or genre. These films entertain and inspire audiences and other artists, and we’re proud to do everything we can to showcase them and give these filmmakers the respect they deserve.”