October 14 – 20, 2024
LitFilm – BPL’s popular film festival about writers – celebrates its seventh year with seven nights of documentaries and films, highlighting some of the most influential and iconoclastic literary minds: N. Scott Momaday, Nikki Giovanni, Julia Alvarez, Norman Mailer, Mahmoud Darwish, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott and Hunter S. Thompson. Get an inside look at the private lives, artistic processes and political struggles of an array of literary luminaries. Past years have featured Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Gottlieb, Naguib Mahfouz, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, Audre Lorde, Dylan Thomas, and more.
All screenings are free but require reservations. Times subject to change. Check back soon for more.
LitFilm: A BPL Film Festival About Writers is made possible with support from BPL's Fund for the Humanities. BPL Presents programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Upcoming Events
LitFilm 2024: Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page
Documentary, dir. by Mary McDonagh Murphy
U.S., 2020, 83 min
Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page presents an unvarnished look at the unlikely author whose autobiographical fiction helped shape American ideas of the frontier and self-reliance. A Midwestern farm woman who published…
LitFilm 2024: N. Scott Momaday: Words From a Bear Screening & Talkback
Documentary, dir. by Jeffrey Palmer
U.S., 2019, 85 min
American Masters examines the enigmatic life and mind of National Medal of Arts-winner Navarro Scott Momaday, the Kiowa novelist, short-story writer, essayist and poet. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn led to…
LitFilm 2024: Baldwin’s N*gger
Documentary, dir. by Horace Ové
U.S., 1968, 45 min
In this riveting short documentary by pioneering Trinidadian-British filmmaker Horace Ové, James Baldwin and comedian-activist Dick Gregory speak to a group of radical West Indian students in London about everything from the state of…
LitFilm 2024: Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Documentary, dir. by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson
U.S., 2024, 102 min
This award-winning documentary travels through time and space to reveal the enduring influence of Nikki Giovanni, one of America’s greatest living artists and social commentators. Going to Mars: The Nikki…
LitFilm 2024: What Was Virginia Woolf Really Afraid Of?
Documentary, dir. by Vance Goodwin and Adrian Munsey
U.S., 2024, 50 min
Exploring the life of writer Virginia Woolf, What Was Virginia Woolf Really Afraid Of? starts with her suicide. Her husband Leonard Woolf eventually realizes what has happened, though her body was not found until…
LitFilm 2024: Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word is Power
Documentary, dir. by Nancy Lang and Peter Raymont
U.S., 2019, 93 min
The film explores Atwood’s “backstory,” her early days in the Canadian wilderness and as a poet. Atwood’s novels are explored, including her latest, The Testaments, the highly anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale…
LitFilm 2024: Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women
Documentary, dir. by Nancy Porter
U.S., 2009, 83 min
Louisa May Alcott’s reputation as a morally upstanding New England spinster, reflecting the conventional propriety of mid-19th century Concord, Massachusetts, is firmly established. Raised among reformers, iconoclasts and…
LitFilm 2024: The Pigeon Tunnel
Documentary, dir. by Errol Morris
U.S., 2023, 93 min
The Pigeon Tunnel spans six decades as le Carré gives his final and most personal interview, interrupted with rare archival footage and dramatic anecdotes. It is set against the stormy Cold War backdrop that extends into the present…
LitFilm 2024: Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined
Documentary, dir. by Adriana Bosch
U.S., 2024, 118 min
Filmed in the U.S. and the Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined features extensive interviews with Alvarez, her family, and her literary contemporaries. Her semi-autobiographical novel, How the…
LitFilm 2024: Kafka (episode 1)
TV Series, dir. by David Schalko
Germany and Austria, 2024, 42 min
In the first episode of this German-Austrian mini-series, Franz Kafka’s friend Max Brod is a well-connected writer and editor who saves his close friend’s work from oblivion by breaking his promise to burn all…
