The Hamptons International Film Festival’s Audience Awards went to Stephen Frears’s “Philomena,” a drama starring Dame Judi Dench, and set in 1950s Ireland, and “Desert Runners,” Jennifer Steinman’s documentary about the 4 Deserts Race Series of 150-mile ultramarathons. Irene Taylor Brodsky’s “One Last Hug (. . . And a Few Smooches): Three Days at Grief Camp” won the Audience Award for best short.

    “The Selfish Giant,” directed by Clio Bernard, won the Golden Starfish Narrative Feature Award presented by The Wall Street Journal. Ryan McGarry’s “Code Black” earned the Golden Starfish Award for best documentary, presented by A&E Indie Films. The Golden Starfish Award for best short went to “Whale Valley,” directed by Gudmunder A. Gudmundsson. Conner Chapman won a Special Jury Prize for Extraordinary Performance in “The Selfish Giant,” while the ensemble cast of Shubhashish Bhutiani’s short “Kush” also earned a Special Jury Prize.

    “The Square (Al Midan),” Jehane Noujaim’s documentary about the expectations and experiences of a group of protesters from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, won the Victor Rabinowitz and Joanne Grant Award for Social Justice and an honorable mention for the Brizzolara Family Foundation Award for a Film of Conflict & Resolution.

    “Plot for Peace,” directed by Carlos Agullo and Mandy Jacobson, was awarded the Brizzolara Family Foundation Award prior to the festival. Also announced in advance of the festival was the 2013 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, which went to “Decoding Annie Parker,” directed by Steven Bernstein.

    “Free Ride,” a narrative feature by Shana Betz, won the Tangerine Entertainment Juice Award. The Zelda Penzel Giving Voice to the Voiceless Award was earned by “Emptying the Skies,” a documentary by Douglas Kass and Roger Kass.

    A recent addition to the festival’s awards is Variety’s 10 Actors to Watch. This year’s selections were Dane Dehaan, Scott Haze, Jack Huston, Oscar Isaac, Michael B. Jordan, Brie Larson, Tatiana Maslany, Lupita Nyong’o, David Oyelowo, and Lea Seydoux.

    Jurors for the Golden Starfish Award for documentary feature were Daniel Crown, Michael Halsband, and Nancy Gerstman. Karen Durbin, Alex Karpovsky, and Raul Esparza made up the Golden Starfish narrative feature jury.  

    A new production of Shakespeare’s “Othello” from London’s National Theatre will be screened at Guild Hall on Saturday at 7 p.m. Directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear, both Olivier Award-winning actors, the production transposes the action from 16th-century Venice to a contemporary military installation. Tickets to this encore presentation of National Theatre Live are $18, $16 for Guild Hall members.

    “The Nose,” Dmitri Shostakovich’s satiric opera based on Gogol’s story of a St. Petersburg official whose nose leaves his face and develops a life of its own, is the next program in The Met: Live in HD series at Guild Hall. The production, designed by William Kentridge and starring Paulo Szot, will be screened Oct. 26 at 1 p.m. Mr. Kentridge, a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films, has staged several operas, most notably Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” at La Scala and other venues. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, $15 for students.

    The award-winning pianist Liza Stepanova will perform at the Parrish Art Museum tomorrow at 6 p.m. as part of the ongoing Salon Series of classical music concerts. Ms. Stepanova has twice been a soloist with the Juilliard Orchestra led by James DePreist and Nicholas McGegan and was a top prizewinner at the Liszt-Garrison, Juilliard Concerto, Steinway, and Ettlingen competitions. She began her position as the Iva Dee Hiatt visiting artist and lecturer at Smith College this fall. Ms. Stepanova’s program will include works by Liszt, Wagner, Debussy, Scarlatti, Mendelssohn, and Ligeti.

    Corky Laing, a longtime drummer for the rock band Mountain and the blues-rock supergroup West, Bruce and Laing, will conduct a drum workshop at Crossroads Music in Amagansett Sunday at 5 p.m. Mr. Laing will share both stories and his expertise. Michael Clark of Crossroads advises attendees to take their own sticks but also stresses that one does not have to be a drummer to enjoy the event. Tickets are $60. Seating is limited and the program will be interactive.

   “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” opens tonight at 8 p. m. at the Bridge, the “black box” stage at the Bridgehampton Community Center. It is being produced by the Hamptons International Theater Festival and the Naked Stage.

    First produced in 1987 Off-Broadway, it is considered one of Terrence McNally’s finest plays, a boy-meets-girl story with a theatrical twist. Both middle-aged, Johnny, played in this production by Seth Hendricks, believes he has found his soul mate in Frankie (Rachel Feldman), while she is more than skeptical.

    “It is the battle of wills, the battle of the sexes,” director Joshua Perl said Sunday. “It’s charming, and it’s funny,” he said.

    It is also a wonderful vehicle for leading actors. The original production, directed by Paul Benedict at the Manhattan Theater Club, starred F. Murray Abraham and Kathy Bates. When it was revived for Broadway in 2002, in a production directed by Joe Mantello at the Belasco Theater, Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci starred.

    Mr. Perl and Mr. Hendricks have been looking for a project to work on together and this one seemed amazingly timely.

    Written at the dawn of the modern personal electronics era, Mr. McNally foresaw growing isolationism and alienation as the counter-intuitive product of technology.

    “The play tells us that we should have faith,” Mr. Perl says. “Inside of people is something that needs to be touched. Even though they’re in their 40s,” Mr. Perl said, “and are told constantly, ‘You missed your chance,’ that is not the case. The play is about what we can be if we believe in ourselves, as opposed to what we’re told we can do.”

    Mr. Perl promises a theatrical treat for the audience, starting with the black box set designed by Peter Tolin-Baker. The audience will sit around a New York City studio apartment, looking through the walls as the title couple find their way.

    Ms. Feldman, who was in last season’s production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” at Guild Hall, came on board via the audition process. The two actors, Mr. Perl said, “have an incredible chemistry.”

    This production runs through Oct. 26, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., with Saturday matinees at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased at fandj.eventbrite.com.

    The Watermill Center is presenting a weekend of screenings starting tomorrow at 4:15 p.m., when the Hamptons International Film Festival will show Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s “Absolute Wilson,” a portrait of the center’s founder and artistic director, Robert Wilson, at the East Hampton Cinema. The film will be screened again, at 4 on Saturday, at the center itself, where it will be followed by a conversation between the filmmaker and Dr. Frank Hentschker, executive director of the City University’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center in Manhattan.

    “Sunshine Superman,” a short film by Richard Rutkowski about the artist Christopher Knowles, a frequent collaborator of Mr. Wilson’s, will be presented Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, followed by a conversation between Mr. Knowles and Lauren DiGiulio, a New York writer and curator.

    Beatty Cohen, a psychotherapist, sex therapist, columnist, and radio host, will tell audiences how to “Rate Your Mate Before It’s Too Late & Never Make a Mistake in Love Again!” on Saturday at 1 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

    Ms. Cohen is the author, with her husband, Elliot, of “For Better, for Worse, Forever: Discover the Path to Lasting Love,” and hosts  “Ask Beatty” on the Progressive Radio Network. With more than 35 years of clinical experience, she practices in Manhattan, East Hampton, and Sarasota, Fla.

    Scott Cuellar, an award-winning Juilliard pianist, will perform on Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Shelter Island Presbyterian Church. The program, organized by the Shelter Island Friends of Music, includes work by Haydn, Fauré, Scriabin, and Schumann.

    Mr. Cuellar, who holds a degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, has performed nationwide and collected awards in over 15 competitions. In April he won the Virginia Waring International Piano Competition, a major event held every two years in Palm Desert, Calif.

    Admission is free.

    Guild Hall, in partnership with the Round Table Theatre Company and Academy, will offer a classical acting course, “Speaking Shakespeare,” on seven consecutive Mondays from 6 to 9 p.m., starting on Oct. 21. Students age 16 and up will work on sonnets, monologues, mask work, and scene work, culminating in a performance on the stage of the John Drew Theater on Dec. 4.

    The class will be led by Morgan and Tristan Vaughan, both of whom have studied at the Circle in the Square Theatre School in Manhattan and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. The cost is $300, $275 for Guild Hall members. More information can be found by e-mailing [email protected]. 

    Remember: Monday is the last day to see the exhibitions “Chuck Close: Recent Works” and “Joel Perlman” at Guild Hall.

    The opening, closing, centerpiece, and spotlight films may get all the attention, but the movies people talk about online, the ones that may not get major distribution but are singular and captivating as well, are the ones that define a film festival and make it memorable. The Star staff previewed a handful of these films to see whether each was worthy of some non-spotlight attention. They are a rich field of local, national, and international subjects, from short to feature length.

“Big Shot”

Kevin Connolly

East Hampton, Saturday, 3 p.m.

Sag Harbor, Monday, noon

    Are you one to admire the gumption of a 33-year-old nobody who essentially bought a marquee professional sports franchise without anywhere near the money to do so? Or are you weary of a culture in thrall to bullshitting and the overvaluation of mere self-confidence. Are you appalled by bald-faced lies? Or do you expect them and consider that reaction naive.

    How you answer those questions may affect your view of Kevin Connolly’s ESPN Films documentary “Big Shot,” the story of John Spano and the legendary snow job he pulled on the National Hockey League and the ownership of the New York Islanders. It could have been titled “Big Lie,” because we all know those tend to get swallowed whole. After all, who would be crazy enough to simply pretend to have hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal?

    At one point Mr. Connolly, the Patchogue-born Islanders fan best known for his role in the HBO series “Entourage,” asks Mr. Spano if he remembers one particular whopper — that his money was tied up in British ventures and he couldn’t get at it because of an I.R.A. bombing — and his answer is telling: “More importantly, did they believe it?” Right, the onus is on the suckers.

    So, “Big Shot” is what he wanted to be and what he took. Sure, he later went to the slammer, but just for the record? He doesn’t regret any of it. He came with it and he went with it, in Jackie Gleason's words, bedding gorgeous women, supping to surfeit on steaks and vodka, kicking it in the finest hotels, and glorying in the adulation as the presumed savior of a storied franchise on the rocks.

    You call those memories, sports fans. B.G.

“A Fragile Trust: Plagiarism, Power, and Jayson Blair at the New York Times”

Samantha Grant

East Hampton, tomorrow 3:45 p.m.

Sag Harbor, Saturday 1:30 p.m.

    If you think a 10-year-old story about journalistic plagiarism is old news, think again. “A Fragile Trust,” a film about Jayson Blair, the New York Times journalist whose serial fabrications besmirched the “newspaper of record” and brought down two top editors, is a fascinating and suspenseful documentary. Directed by Samantha Grant, the film is artfully assembled from interviews with journalists from The Times and other publications, television news clips, and extensive footage of Mr. Blair explaining and reflecting on what he did.

    The film opens with the story that broke the story — Mr. Blair’s article on his visit to the mother of a soldier missing in Iraq. Macarena Hernandez, a reporter for The San Antonio Express-News, and her editor Robert Rivard, discovered that the article had blatantly plagiarized the piece Ms. Hernandez had written and published eight days before. From that point, the film moves backward and forward in time to detail Mr. Blair’s rapid rise to a job as a Times reporter at the age of 23 to his eventual exposure and disgrace.

    Mr. Blair’s story alone is complicated enough, involving drug and alcohol abuse, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and his admission that “I lied, and I lied, and I lied.” At the same time, he is articulate, remorseful, even sympathetic. Yet, as one Times editor remarks, “Where does the illness end and gaming the system begin?”

    But the film is not just about Mr. Blair. It is about the culture of The New York Times, the implications of the Internet for print journalism, and, inevitably, since Mr. Blair is black, whether affirmative action was a factor in his retention by the paper despite mounting evidence of his malfeasance.    M.S.

“The Last Safari”

Matt Goldman

East Hampton, Sunday, 2:15 p.m.

Sag Harbor, Monday, 5:15 p.m.

    The photojournalist Elizabeth L. Gilbert spent a decade covering the bloody civil wars of Central Africa, eventually finding herself wondering if her record of those tragic times had made any kind of positive mark. As she says in this film, after capturing all that horror, she wanted to leave Africa having documented something beautiful. And she did, traveling across East Africa’s Great Rift Valley photographing its various tribes and their age-old traditions at a moment when many of those traditions were in danger of being lost.

    After publishing the stunning “Tribes of the Great Rift Valley” in 2007, she returned to Kenya to hold “cinema” shows of her images for those same tribes, revisiting many remote regions and reconnecting with people she met and photographed there. “I wanted people to have an experience of photography that would counter that feeling of exploitation,” she explains in the film, which she produced.

    That often-difficult trek with the director, Matt Goldman, and a crew of 10 Kenyans in three cars, few of them familiar with the rough terrain they were covering, is the heart of this compelling and personal documentary. A loving portrait at times, it is also an elegy for ways of life already extinct and a way of seeing. Filmed entirely in Kenya, it offers plenty of breathtaking backdrops, but it is hardly anyone’s fantasy version of a safari, instead showing that there’s lots of dirt and dust and disappointment along with the beauty inherent in this type of sweeping journey.    C.K.

“A Poet Long Ago”

Bob Giraldi

East Hampton, tomorrow, 5:30 p.m., Saturday, 1:30 p.m.

    Peter Malloy is a media guy who drives an Audi with telltale pollution-yellow Jersey plates. Sonny Rizzelli rides the back of a garbage truck. Their chance meeting on a New York side street in Bob Giraldi’s new short film, “A Poet Long Ago,” triggers a pained exploration of a life’s trajectory and lingering regret over talent left to die on the vine.

    In a coffee shop, the two old pals’ reminiscence is intercut with flashbacks to their school days in the 1970s, when they were “kids from the wrong side of Brooklyn” and Sonny was writing poetry good enough to get published in a city tabloid. But, sorry, kid, a tough neighborhood, hostile classmates, and a traditionalist ignoramus of a father conspire to beat it out of him.

    This is based on a story by Pete Hamill, bard of New York newspapermen, so you know it’s got heart and grit. It stars two veteran TV actors, Steve Schirripa and Boris McGiver, and Mr. Giraldi has been around long enough to have directed Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” music video. Given all that, you may find yourself equating young Sonny’s drive to write poetry for its own sake with the ambition of the filmmakers to make a short just for a stab at artistry.

    B.G