YoFi Fest’s 13th Year Champions Diverse Corners of Cinema

Beginning November 7, the Yonkers Film Festival, known as YoFi Fest, will return for its thirteenth year. The ten-day festival brings together movie lovers from Westchester and Rockland Counties, as well as the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut tri-state region.

In 2022, Lionsgate opened a studio on the city’s riverfront. However, Yonkers, the third largest city in the state connected to New York City by the Metro North, has been a growing film destination for years.

Filmmakers David Steck and Patty Schumann founded YoFi Fest in 2013 when, looking to create more spaces for Westchester filmgoers to experience non-commercial cinema, friends at a dinner party encouraged the couple to organize a film festival. Steck remembers thinking, “How hard could it be?”

Organizing the first YoFi Fest proved, in fact, to be a challenge – but Steck believes he and Schumann had a “good combination of enthusiasm… optimism…[and] total ignorance to how festivals work” propelling them forward during the festival’s founding. The festival’s 2013 premiere had a duration of two-and-a-half days and screened works by the couple’s filmmaker friends. When their peers had no new work to screen the following year, Steck and Schumann realized they needed to expand YoFi Fest’s proverbial net.

The couple still directs the festival, which has subsequently developed into a nonprofit organization that offers workshops and industry training year-round.

Spotlighting Westchester and Beyond

This year, YoFi Fest is showing almost 160 films from over 20 countries, in addition to submissions by local talent. Steck encourages diverse programming: “I think that the work we want to [show] is intentionally diverse, because our audience is diverse and the subjects submitted to us are diverse.”

Student films made by New York college students, as well as films made by high schoolers involved with Yonkers Partners in Education will also be screened. Represented schools include SUNY Purchase, Westchester Community College, Vassar College and more.

Unlike many of the major film festivals, YoFi Fest has 100% of its screening slots open before film submissions are reviewed. Those in YoFi’s Fest internal review system are not looking for the biggest possible names to draw attention to the festival. Says Steck: “Fellow [fests], especially the bigger festivals, [are] looking for something with a marquis draw … What we want to do is show good work, and we want to show work that our community hasn’t seen before and otherwise might not have access to.”

Selecting YoFi Fest’s Line-Up

YoFi Fest’s selection process allows programming to be informed by the content of the films submitted. “We don’t have an official theme every year, but there is, I think, one that is created,” says Steck.

Steck views choosing the festival’s selection as a sort of “jigsaw puzzle,” determined by fitting selected films into the festival’s allotted screening time, as well as organizing the films thematically. The festival’s film guide has its offerings sorted into categories such as “Comedy Short,” “Queer Screen” and more. Steck’s pro tip is to explore the guide for hidden gems: “If [the program block] is called ‘Local Shorts 2,’ it’s not the sexiest title…[but] take a look [at what] those films are about… click on that [title], dig into it.”

Three shared qualities among this year’s films emerged for Steck: less presence of the COVID-19 pandemic among submissions, more films with experimental narrative structures and equipment use, and an increased overall quality of submissions. Last year, a title screened at the festival went on to be nominated for an Academy Award. “People [are] making films more often–whether it’s something for fun on YouTube or just shooting something on their own.”

In addition to its screenings, YoFi Fest offers workshops, panels and Q&A talkbacks throughout its ten days. Workshops and panels will focus respectively on topics like film distribution, the convergence of film and video games, AI and the film industry and comedy in today’s political climate— and will include a conversation with Yonkers actor Eric Paladino on his journey from Westchester to Hollywood.

Steck looks forward to the 2025 YoFi Fest’s magic moments when audiences are united in the shared experience of watching a movie: “A room where light is projected and bounces off a screen, onto [the audience], I think is magical. To see the silhouette of people enjoying a shared experience like that, enjoying the art of cinema is great.”

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_{Photos (top to bottom): Previous YoFi Fest event photo; photo still from Köln 75; photo still of Art Spiegelman in Disaster Is My Muse; red carpet from a previous YoFi Fest event (all photos courtesy of YoFi Fest)}