FESTIVAL ORGANIZERS

Melody Gilbert, Festival Director

Melody is an award-winning filmmaker, educator, and veteran of attending hundreds of film festivals since she made her first documentary in 2001. Along the way, she directed, produced, and filmed over a dozen docs, became a film professor (in the U.S. and overseas in Bulgaria), and kept attending film festivals. At some point, she started helping with programming festivals, teaching master classes and workshops at festivals like her Documentary Boot Camp, and being on juries, where she learned the innerworkings of the film festival world. When asked if she would run the first Borscht Belt Film Fest, Melody jumped at the opportunity, especially because she remembers vacationing here with her family at the Concord and Grossinger’s, and she recently discovered her grandparents also vacationed up here when she found photo key chain souvenirs of them at the Pines and Brown's. After living in Minnesota, Bulgaria and most recently Louisiana, Melody recently moved to Kerhonkson full time with her husband, a sports journalist, and her dog Harry.

Jay Blotcher, Director of Programming

Jay proved his mania for cinema by fast-talking his way into the 1981 Cannes Film Festival as a college student. He wrote about film for numerous publications from 1982 to 2014. Currently, Jay is a film programmer at the Rosendale Theatre and an executive producer of a forthcoming documentary about activist Gilbert Baker, creator of the iconic LGBTQ Rainbow Flag. Jay has been a Hudson Valley resident since 2001.

Andrew Jacobs, President, Borscht Belt Museum 

Andrew is a reporter for The New York Times, where he writes about global health for the Science section. He has written for the Metro, Styles and National sections, where he covered the American South, and he has reported from more than a dozen countries, including China, where he spent nearly eight years. He is also the director of “Four Seasons Lodge”, a documentary about a community of Holocaust survivors who shared a bungalow colony in Ellenville. He splits his time between Manhattan and a former dairy farm in Napanoch.