2022 Virginia Film Festival Set for November 2-6

Charlottesville, VA – March 8, 2022 – The Virginia Film Festival announced today that the 35th annual VAFF will take place from November 2-6, 2022.

The Virginia Film Festival is a program of the University of Virginia and the Office of the Provost and Vice Provost for the Arts.

“We are very excited to announce that this year’s Virginia Film Festival will be returning to its traditional format of indoor theater venues from November 2-6,” said Jody Kielbasa, Virginia Film Festival Director and University of Virginia Vice Provost for the Arts. “We look forward  to delivering a robust VAFF experience that will feature a deep, vibrant, and inclusive program and a range of enticing special guests who will launch the kind of conversations and events for which we have become known throughout the industry.

“These past two years have brought significant challenges across the arts world,” Kielbasa added, “and we are hopeful that the current, declining pandemic trends will continue and allow us to gather in a more traditional way and with fewer restrictions.”

The VAFF provided one of the first in-person arts festivals in Charlottesville in 2021, beginning with a sold-out screening of the Wes Anderson film The French Dispatch at the Paramount Theater. “That evening and throughout the course of the Festival weekend,” Kielbasa said, “we were so heartened by how grateful our audiences were to be able to once again enjoy the full, in-person VAFF experience.”

The films in the 2021 program earned a remarkable 33 Academy Award nominations in all, led by Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog with 12, the most of all films this year. Kenneth Branagh’s moving drama Belfast earned seven nods, followed by Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut The Lost Daughter (3); Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated docudrama Flee (3); Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers (2); and Pablo Larraín’s Spencer, for which Kristen Stewart was nominated as Best Actress.

Another awards-season standout from the VAFF program, Dopesick, just earned Michael Keaton Best Actor honors at the SAG Awards for his portrayal of a West Virginia doctor caught in the vortex of the opioid crisis in a series that took viewers to the epicenter of America’s struggle with addiction, from the board rooms of Purdue Pharma, to a distressed mining community, and to the hallways of the DEA. The Festival was honored to screen an episode of the series and to host Dopesick showrunner Danny Strong and author Beth Macy, who wrote the book upon which it is based, for a post-screening conversation.

Joining Strong on the 2021 VAFF Special Guest roster were Emmy Award-winning actor Martha Plimpton, discussing her powerful film Mass; and Tony-nominated playwright and acclaimed screenwriter Jeremy O. Harris, who received the Festival’s American Perspectives Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cinema and screened his film Zola.

The Virginia Film Festival has been approved for an Arts Project Grant Award from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the 2022 Virginia Film Festival.

For more information on the Virginia Film Festival, visit virginiafilmfestival.org.