2026 Woodstock Museum Film Festival Films
Sept. 3 – Thursday
7:30 Happy Birthday, America 7:50 The Exile from Bessarabia 9pm Broker 9:35 The Unseen Thing
7:30 Happy Birthday, America
Filmmaker recalls immigrant friend who had to self-deport because Trump’s ICE storm troopers are a living nightmare. 2m46s
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7:50 The Exile from Bessarabia
Documentary of the Roma Holocaust, silenced genocide in Eastern Europe. A warning for today. 55m50s
“The Exile from Bessarabia” uncovers the forgotten history of the Roma Holocaust through the testimony of its last living survivors. Blending intimate interviews and archival material, the film restores voice to a silenced genocide in Eastern Europe. From Bessarabia to the camps of Transnistria, Roma families were uprooted, displaced, and condemned to exile. For decades, their suffering remained buried in silence. The Exile from Bessarabia restores the forgotten voices of Roma Holocaust survivors — and confronts the silence that followed. A documentary of remembrance. A warning for today…
Director Biography – Sergiu Ene, Natalia Ghilascu
Natalia Ghilascu is an acclaimed journalist, filmmaker, and TV producer from Moldova whose work has earned international recognition and national accolades for her dedication to human rights advocacy and storytelling. Her career reflects an unwavering commitment to giving a voice to the underrepresented and bringing critical social issues to light.
This film would not have achieved its emotional depth without the artistic vision of Sergiu Ene, whose direction and cinematography transform testimony into lived experience. Through restrained visual language, intimate framing, and a profound sensitivity to silence, Sergiu brings the audience into a space where memory breathes. His ability to capture emotion through light, stillness, and gesture allows survivors’ voices to resonate beyond words.
Director Statement
As a journalist and filmmaker from Moldova, I have spent my career documenting the lives of those whose voices are often overlooked. Yet nothing prepared me for the silence surrounding the deportation of the Roma community from Bessarabia during World War II. It was not only the tragedy itself that struck me—it was the absence of public memory.I felt a moral responsibility to confront this historical erasure. The Exile from Bessarabia is built around the fragile yet powerful testimonies of the last surviving witnesses.
I felt compelled to confront this historical erasure—not only because it belongs to the past, but because it speaks directly to our present. Across the world, Roma communities continue to face systemic discrimination, forced evictions, statelessness, and political scapegoating. By restoring visibility to the Roma Holocaust in Eastern Europe, this film seeks to expand the moral frame of collective memory. In a time marked by resurgent nationalism, displacement, and rising hate speech, remembrance itself becomes a human rights act.
Cinema has the power not only to preserve testimony but to reinsert it into global consciousness. My hope is that this film contributes to a broader reckoning—one that affirms dignity, confronts denial, and insists that marginalized histories are central to our shared future.
9pm Broker
After a three year prison sentence, man returns to his home in New Jersey suburbs where he is forced to confront the pain, suffering and lost time brought on by his greedy Wall Street career.
Director Biography –
Alex Haney is a multimedia filmmaker in Brooklyn, NY whose work spans feature films, short films, music videos, documentaries, and animation.
Recent music videos Can You Hear Me (On the Other Side)? (2022) and Cowboy Down (2024) have picked up multiple awards at international festivals, including Best Music Video: World Music Festival & Global Music Awards, The Silver Remi Award: Worldfest Houston International Film Festival, Best Animation: California Music Video Awards, Atlanta Comedy Film Festival, & Simi Music Video Awards, as well as nominations at Cannes, Los Angeles Music Video Awards, and The New York Cinematography Awards.
Haney developed and produced the feature films, Music is the Message: The Story of Kool & the Gang, McGregor’s Medal, Blue Collar Boys, Multiple, and MTV Music Video Awards segments.
For more visit haneyfims.com
Director Statement
As a director doing mostly music videos, animations, and documentaries this film was a leap into something new and exciting for me. It’s a very human story about connection and accountability and although it took many years to develop and a low budget at that, I felt (in 2026) it contains themes that stand the test of time. I chose black and white as an element of the film to emphasize the character relationships through staging and framing and to highlight Paul’s Journey from darkness into light.
9:35 The Unseen Thing
Documentary explores cultural legacy of legendary W. Virginia cryptid, Mothman. Connects 1966 sightings at the TNT facilities to the tragic Silver Bridge Collapse. UFO film. 43m33s
The Unseen Thing is an experimental documentary collaboration by photographer/documentarian Jeremy Chandler and American historian Troy Rondinone. The film explores the real history and enduring cultural legacy of the legendary West Virginia cryptid, Mothman. Told through the voices of the Point Pleasant community at the center of the legend, blending archival research, and on-the-ground investigation, the film connects the 1966 sightings at the TNT facilities to the tragic Silver Bridge collapse, while examining how trauma, folklore, and media transformed a local mystery into a global phenomenon.
Director Biography – Jeremy Chandler, Troy Rondinone
Jeremy Chandler is an artist living and teaching in New England. His work with photographic portraiture, staged tableaus, and documentary and narrative film projects allows him to express his personal history and connection to the places he photographs, underscoring the residue of past experiences. Through imagery that often subverts ritualized expressions of masculinity, he questions how notions of the sublime continue to shape a cultural relationship to wild spaces, while creating altered perceptions of space and place in his viewers’ imagination.
His photographs and films have been exhibited in national and international venues, including Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami), Blowup Film Festival (Chicago), Wassaic Project (New York), Volta (New York), Giampietro Gallery (New Haven), and Balzer Art Projects (Basel, Switzerland). In 2008, he was named the Photographer Laureate for the City of Tampa. Jeremy is currently a Professor of Photography & Video at Southern Connecticut State University. His forthcoming artist monograph, Terra Incognita, will be published through Radius Books.
Troy received his Ph.D. in History at UCLA, and his areas of scholarly interest include cultural, working-class, economic, and radical history. He has published pieces in American Quarterly, The Journal of American Studies, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Connecticut History, The Conversation, Atlas Obscura, The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Lovecraftean Proceedings, and Labor Studies. In addition, he has written chapters in Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies and The Cambridge Companion to Boxing. He has been interviewed by CNN, CT Insider, Hartford Courant, The Hill, History.com, NBC Connecticut, New Haven Register, and NPR, and he has a blog for Psychology Today. His books include The Great Industrial War: Framing Class Conflict in America, 1865-1950 (Rutgers University Press, 2010), Friday Night Fighter: Gaspar “Indio” Ortega and the Golden Age of Television Boxing (University of Illinois Press, 2013), and Nightmare Factories: The Asylum in the American Imagination (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). Troy Rondinone is currently a Professor of History at Southern Connecticut State University.
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