The Hamptons Film Festival Opens Tonight With Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky, Starting an 11-Day Run
The 34th Hamptons International Film Festival begins on Friday with the East Coast premiere of a film about how Sylvester Stallone fought to write and star in Rocky, and runs to 12 October.
Friday, October 2, 2026/2 min read
The 34th Hamptons International Film Festival opens on Friday 2 October and runs through 12 October, with the East Coast premiere of Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky as its opening-night film. According to The Contending, the film stars Anthony Ippolito as Sylvester Stallone, in the story of how the actor fought, against repeated rejection, to write and star in Rocky.
An opener built on an underdog story
It is a fitting choice for a festival audience full of filmmakers. Farrelly has built a career on crowd-pleasers, and a film about a young writer insisting on playing the lead in his own script has an obvious appeal for people who know how hard it is to get anything made. Ippolito is also being honoured by the festival, as one of its FLYTE Breakthrough Performer Award recipients.
The honourees
The festival's list of honours, set out in Dan's Papers when the lineup was announced in August, is a broad one. Bob Balaban receives the Lifetime Achievement Award. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the directing pair behind a run of studio comedies and animations, receive the Achievement in Directing Award. Alongside Ippolito, Rosalind Eleazar takes a FLYTE Breakthrough Performer Award, and Jordan Firstman receives the FLYTE Breakthrough Director Award.
What else is on the programme
The Spotlight selections include Bunker, Club Kid, The Man I Love, Misty Green and A Talent for Murder. The festival lists five world premieres: Barbizon, The Drug in Our Pocket, Kingdom Fungi, Maman Bibi Coco and Not Dead Yet. Andrew Morgan's Bleeding Hearts is billed as an East Coast premiere.
The programme mixes narrative features, documentaries and shorts, and it is spread across the Hamptons rather than centred on one cinema, which is part of the festival's character.
Why it matters for the season
The Hamptons event arrives early in the autumn festival run, at a point when distributors are still deciding which films to push toward awards season. A strong opener and a crowded list of honourees tend to attract the industry attendance that gives a regional festival its weight.
For visitors, the practical point is the length. At eleven days it is a festival that rewards a second weekend, and the second half of the programme, once the honours are out of the way, is usually where the quieter discoveries sit.
Published in The Outspoken Digest
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