Hamptons Film Festival 2026: Lord & Miller, Bob Balaban Honoured as Line-Up Takes Shape
The 2026 Hamptons Film Festival will run 2–12 October, opening with the East Coast premiere of Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky and handing awards to Phil Lord, Chris Miller, Bob Balaban and a roster of breakout names, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Lord and Miller, the directing duo behind the upcoming Project Hail Mary, will receive the Achievement in Directing Award. Bob Balaban — the actor and director whose career spans from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to The French Dispatch — takes the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Anthony Ippolito, who stars in the opening-night film I Play Rocky, will receive a breakthrough performer award. Jordan Firstman, director of Club Kid, and Rosalind Eleazar, star of Misty Green, will split the festival's FLYTE Breakthrough awards — Firstman for directing, Eleazar for performance.
The festival's world premieres span fiction and documentary. Jake Silberman's Barbizon and Eric and Nick Weber's Not Dead Yet — starring Richard Kind, Paul Raci, Polly Draper, Tovah Feldshuh, Toby Huss, Seth Herzog, Ed German and Bill Smitrovich — represent the narrative side. Three documentaries make their debuts: Anne Sundberg's The Drug in Our Pocket, Josh Thompson's Kingdom Fungi, and Célia Millat and Bastien Garcia's Maman Bibi Coco.
Several titles arrive with festival pedigree already attached. Florian Zeller's Bunker, starring Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, gets its U.S. premiere. Anton Corbijn's A Talent for Murder, with Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich and Olivia Cooke, screens as an East Coast premiere. Ira Sachs' The Man I Love, starring Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge and Rebecca Hall, also plays the festival.
Two music-adjacent films round out the announced slate: Club Kid, directed by Firstman, and Misty Green, directed by Chris Rock. Andrew Morgan's Bleeding Hearts, which follows Chaparelle musicians Zella Day and Jesse Woods, screens as an East Coast premiere.
David Nugent serves as chief creative officer of HamptonsFilm, with Bob Feinberg as executive director. The festival has become a regular autumn stop for awards-season titles — East Coast premieres, in industry terms, meaning a film's first screening for audiences in the region after an earlier debut elsewhere.
For a festival that sits comfortably between the fall festival corridor of Toronto and the winter awards voting, the 2026 line-up leans into familiar names. Mirren, Bardem, Cruz, Malek — actors whose work already circulates in awards conversation. Lord and Miller, fresh off a major studio release, bring directing-star wattage. And Balaban's lifetime honour places a character-actor career at the centre of the room.
