Written by Neil Turitz
Photos by Kevin Sprague
The Berkshire International Film Festival started because a newly single mom needed a job. That’s the story behind an event that Moviemaker Magazine has referred to as one of the 25 coolest festivals in the world. Now in its 20th year, the BIFF has become one of the region’s cultural touchstones, which is saying something when you consider the company it keeps.
With the 2026 festival set for May 28–31, The B talked to many of those instrumental in the BIFF’s creation, development, and continued success. Twenty years on, they look back on how it began—and why it has lasted.
FADE IN: The first festival took place in spring of 2006. It was years in the making.
KENT JONES: A long time ago, when my parents were still alive, I’d had this idea that the Berkshires needed a film festival, but it was just a vague kind of thing.
KELLEY VICKERY: My joke is that it started because I needed a job. My background is special events and PR, and it dawned on me that it was odd that we didn’t celebrate film here when we celebrate music, dance, art, and theater.
KENT: It’s a lot of energy to get a film festival going, and when I met Kelley, I thought, well, here’s somebody who has that kind of energy. She asked if I wanted to be a part of it, and suddenly I found myself as a permanent jury member for the next 20 years.
KELLEY: Some of my friends are in film distribution companies. They threw me some films, and then I talked to Richard Stanley and John Valente of The Triplex, and they said, “Yeah, we’ll give you a home here.” Lillian Lennox helped me start the program, and we cobbled together 40 films.
LILLIAN LENNOX: I had contacts in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. I knew a lot of filmmakers. I went to university in Sydney and had a very interesting life in the arts there.
KELLEY: About halfway through building this, I met Lauren Ferin. She needed a job, too. I said I couldn’t really pay anything, but she came on anyway.
LAUREN FERIN: I was studying film at Montana State, and came back to the Berkshires with a 4-year-old in tow. Some mutual friends introduced us. Neither of us had any experience in starting a festival, but Kelley said it’s going to be a learn-as-you-go kind of situation.
KELLEY: I took out two credit cards, and we opened on a Friday night and ran the 40 films through Sunday afternoon. It was so much fun, and people had such a great time. It just instantly took hold in the community.
Vickery also got help from Anne McLaughlin, who worked at Canyon Ranch and wanted to volunteer.
ANNE MCLAUGHLIN: Canyon Ranch sponsored the first three years of BIFF. I was in charge of communications and marketing. I was basically a consultant doing the event planning and management until I joined the festival full time in 2023.
CUT TO: The first festival needed an honoree, and Pittsfield native Mike Haley was chosen. A first assistant director and producer, Haley had worked for years with legendary director Mike Nichols.
MIKE HALEY: When the phone rings and they say, “We’re starting a new film festival and you’re from here and you’ve had a spectacular career, would you be willing to come up and let us honor you?” The answer was simple.
KELLEY: We held it at the Norman Rockwell Museum because there was no place to hold a sit-down dinner for 120 people. Leonard Nimoy was at the dinner because he was a friend of Sid and Nancy Ganis. Harold Ramis did a hilarious video, giving a very earnest and heartfelt speech, and in the background were pole dancers. The extraordinary thing was Mike Nichols came. He extemporaneously talked for 20 minutes about Mike.
MIKE: It was in a tent. It was windy. It was rainy. But it was great. It was like going to McDonald’s before it became a chain.
Daniel Mathieu, Kelley Vickery, Jaqueline Togut, Annie Selke, Diane Patrick, Kate Morris, and Deval Patrick
CUT TO: The success of the first year led to an even bigger second year.
KELLEY: After the second year, I retired the debt on my credit card, we added a few more board members and got more sponsors, and it just took off from there.
From the start, Vickery had help from some big Hollywood names.
KAREN ALLEN: I got involved the second year because Arthur Penn was a great friend of mine. He had a place in Stockbridge and I suggested that he would be a great person to honor. I think the third year Kelley asked me to join the board, and I’ve been on it for 17 years.
NANCY GANIS: Friends of ours from Los Angeles, Tom and Suky Werman, had moved to the Berkshires, and they called and wondered if we could help. So we had a little movie that had just come out, “Akeelah and the Bee.” They decided to show that movie at that first festival. And then we came back almost every year.
SCOTT COHEN: We moved up here and had a certain kind of celebrity, so we were invited to the parties at first, then got involved with the festival itself. Any independent movie I do now, I try to get it in here.
SID GANIS: We were an outside source of verification, information, opinions. It’s always been a back pocket thing for me. Somebody would say Sundance, and I would always flip out, “Hey, there’s also this wonderful little Berkshire film festival that’s an absolute gem.” It takes hold if you say it enough times.
CUT TO: The festival grew naturally, then exponentially—with Vickery and Lennox focused on programming and Ferin and McLaughlin handling event planning—and by year five, it was well established.
KELLEY: Year five, we added the Jury Prize Award and the Next Great Filmmaker award. The sixth year we added the Filmmaker Summit.
KAREN: The programming was always great, but the events that have been created, like the Filmmaker Summit, have been such an incredible experience for the filmmakers. Certain things like that have turned into Berkshire traditions now.
LAUREN: I love the fact that, as long as we’ve been doing this, there’s always new elements that keep us fresh and unique and keep people engaged. The Real Friends Film Society has definitely exploded in the last eight or nine years, and helps us stay relevant throughout the year and not just be this one-weekend festival and then forgotten about.
LILLIAN: Kelley and I started the Environmental Film Focus eight years ago. We wanted to enrich the community and bring support and connection through screening about four environmental-focused films a year under that title.
SID: I think for Nancy and me, especially now in our lives and careers, mentoring is part of the game for us. We love being with young people and they like talking to us. We get a sense of these young filmmakers who like talking to the old guys.
CUT TO: One such filmmaker is Nicholas Ma, whose father, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, has a residency at Tanglewood every summer, and whose first film, the Fred Rogers documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” premiered at the BIFF in 2018 as the closing-night film.
NICHOLAS MA: Kelley was literally the first stop when I had the courage to say it out loud that I wanted to be a filmmaker. She was immediately supportive and it was actually thanks to Kent Jones seeing “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” at BIFF that it went on to play at the New York Film Festival.
Over two decades, hundreds of films have screened, with some very special guest stars and honorees.
KELLEY: People still talk about year three, when we opened with “Man On Wire,” and Philippe Petit was here. When he got up on stage after that film, it took everyone’s breath away. He was so charming.
We honored Kevin Bacon that year, and he and his brother Michael spent the whole weekend with us. Same with Patricia Clarkson when we honored her in 2010.
Darlene Love sang on stage after a screening of “20 Feet From Stardom” in 2013, the same year Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach were here with “Frances Ha” as the closing-night film.
In 2015, we opened with the climbing documentary “Meru,” and its subject, Conrad Anker, was here. When he got up on stage, the audience got to their feet and Conrad started crying. He just couldn’t believe the warmth.
Then, in 2017, honoree Christopher Plummer said, “People say I’m naughty,” and he pulled me off stage. He made me blush, and I’m blushing now, just talking about it.
DISSOLVE TO: By many accounts, one of the festival’s greatest nights was a conversation at the 2019 festival between Kent Jones and his friend, legendary director Martin Scorsese.
KENT: When Marty and I did our thing, for some reason, it wasn’t filmed. I don’t know why. His wife grew up in Alford, and he has a very funny attitude about that. “My wife grew up on an estate in Alford. I myself grew up on an estate in an apartment building on the Lower East Side in a tenement.” He wanted me to set him up for that remark.
Special guests have included Rachel Weisz, Lauren Ambrose, Chris Noth, and Martin Scorsese
CUT TO: Vickery thought the festival would grow even more the following year, but then the pandemic happened, which almost killed the BIFF altogether.
KELLEY: COVID, I’ll just be very honest. I was at my dining room table, in tears, saying, “BIFF is over. How do we survive this?”
LILLIAN: It was frightening, and also understanding we were in a similar place as many arts organizations, that we were now fighting for our life.
The team knew they would have to get creative to survive, which meant outdoor screenings for people in their cars in 2020, and putting the festival online in 2021.
LILLIAN: When it went online the next year, there was a silver lining. It birthed the hybrid component for us. Now the BIFF continues to be a hybrid festival and, in a way, has helped the BIFF grow. A blessing in disguise.
Even though the festival had scraped by in 2020 and 2021, 2022 was a make or break year. Honorees over the years included Douglas Trumbull, Rachel Weisz, Bruce Dern, Barbara Kopple, and, in 2022, Alfre Woodard came to Great Barrington.
KELLEY: She was going to be our honoree in ’21 so we built around her, and people came back. People loved the hybrid. They were going online and watching some films. They were coming into the theater. It galvanized our community to be even more loyal, if that’s even possible.
That sense of community is one of many things the festival has going for it and, sure enough, the 2025 festival had similar attendance numbers to the 2019 festival, which had been the high-water mark.
ANNE: We’ve elevated the festival in terms of what the industry is seeing. Until 2024, we typically had 30 to 40 filmmakers in attendance. Last year, we shot up to 70. This year we’re going to meet that again, if not push it a little higher.
CUT TO: For the founder and driving creative force behind the BIFF, there’s nowhere to go but up.
KELLEY: I’m really proud of what we built at 20, but we can do better. We can do more throughout the year, and continue to make inroads into the next generation. That’s really important to me, that we are building a network with the next generation.
THE END
BIFF FOUNDER & ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
KELLEY VICKERY
BIFF ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
LAUREN FERIN
BIFF PROGRAMMER
LILLIAN LENOX
BIFF EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
ANNE MCLAUGHLIN
ACTOR, BIFF BOARD MEMBER, 2026 HONOREE
KAREN ALLEN
ACTOR, PRODUCER, JUROR
SCOTT COHEN
PRODUCER, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE MOTION PICTURE ACADEMY, LONGTIME BIFF PARTNER
SID GANIS
PRODUCER, PUBLICIST, LONGTIME BIFF PARTNER
NANCY GANIS
FILMMAKER, PITTSFIELD NATIVE, FIRST BIFF HONOREE
MIKE HALEY
JOURNALIST, FILMMAKER*, JUROR
KENT JONES
FILMMAKER, ADVISORY BOARD MEMBER, LONGTIME BIFF PARTNER
NICHOLAS MA
*KENT JONES’ NEW FILM, “LATE FAME,” WILL SHOW AT THE 2026 FEST
