Kelly Dijorio
On February 16, 2023, the Sayville Theater reopened with a screening of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It was the kind of relaunch that could read as routine, another local business bouncing back after a rough stretch. But the building at 103 Railroad Avenue had already been through worse than a pandemic. The Crescent Theater on Gillette Avenue lasted barely a year before closing in 1914. The Opera House on Candee Avenue burned in 1961 and never reopened. The Sayville Summer Playhouse, once a country estate and then a country club before it hosted film and stage productions in the 1940s and 1950s, is gone too. The only venue from that era still selling tickets sits on the same Railroad Avenue site where the Novelty Theater opened in 1911 and burned to the ground seven years later.
That survival record is not a footnote. It is the reason a Hollywood-connected film festival chose Sayville over dozens of other South Shore towns for its first year, and it is worth understanding before the festival's second season lands next August.
The current building on Railroad Avenue replaced the fire-damaged Novelty Theater and reopened as the Sayville Theatre in 1930, then went through a full remodel under architect John Eberson in 1935. It expanded to a triplex in 1981 and split its balcony into a four-screen house in 1999, the upstairs auditorium becoming the go-to spot for the town's biggest releases. For most of the 2000s it operated as Sayville Cinemas under owner Matt Latten, known as much for its five-dollar tickets as for its films.
Then came the pandemic. The theater closed in March 2020 and stayed dark for nearly two years, reopening briefly in November 2021 before the operating tenant fell nearly 35 months behind on rent, according to the family that owned the building. That tenant's bankruptcy proceedings dragged on until February 10, 2023, when ownership finally transferred to the Fickling family, who had owned the underlying building since 1991 but had rented it out to a series of operators for three decades. Six days after the paperwork cleared, the theater reopened under its original name, and the family began the work of restoring premium laser projectors, new screens, and online ticketing to a building that had been reduced to a single working screen.
That is not a smooth business story. It is a building that had every reason to close for good and instead kept getting rebuilt by whoever held the lease.
Maria Capp grew up in the Sayville area before her production career took her to Los Angeles, where she spent more than a decade building relationships as a Producers Guild of America member. When she decided to launch a film festival on Long Island's South Shore, she built it around what Sayville already had in place: a walkable Main Street and a movie house she could actually use for red carpet programming. Festival organizers describe SIFF as a bridge between Tribeca and the Hamptons International Film Festival, offering a comparable festival experience at a fraction of the cost of either larger event.
A festival built on that pitch needs a venue that can actually host industry programming, not just a screen and some folding chairs. The Sayville Theater's 2023 relaunch, with its restored projection systems and modernized ticketing, gave Capp exactly that. The building's history of repeatedly being rebuilt rather than abandoned is what made it a credible host for red carpet events and casting-director table reads in year one.
The inaugural Sayville International Film Festival ran August 13 through 16, 2026, and screened nearly 90 films at the Sayville Theater, with industry panels, a pitch competition, and a screenwriting table read cast with SAG-AFTRA and AEA talent. The closing ceremony moved to the CM Performing Arts Center in Oakdale, where organizers handed out the festival's first set of awards.
Two of those honors went to figures with direct Sayville roots. Melissa Joan Hart, known for Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and her mother and producing partner Paula Hart of Hartbreak Films received the inaugural Vanguard Legacy Award, recognizing their decades of building a production business while keeping family at the center of it. The festival's Eternal Voice Award for Historical Contribution went posthumously to Mary Louise Foster, a Sayville native who wrote under the name Louise Forsslund and whose novel Old Lady No. 31 was adapted into a 1920 silent film and later reimagined as the 1940 feature The Captain Is a Lady. Former Sayville Historical Society president Roy Fedelem accepted the award on her behalf, tying the festival's first year directly back to a piece of the town's own literary history that most residents had likely never heard of.
A festival does not run on ticket sales and awards alone, and SIFF's list of partners reads like a cross-section of downtown Sayville. Sayville Ford and Five Towns College signed on as founding sponsors. The UPS Store in Sayville handled the festival's printing needs. Filmmaker mixers and networking events were held at Metros on Main Pizza, the Sayville Athletic Club, and Butera's of Sayville, meaning attendees who came for a panel discussion ended up eating and drinking at the same businesses that serve the town every other week of the year.
That pattern matters for anyone trying to understand what SIFF actually is. It is not a traveling event that landed in Sayville and left its economic impact somewhere else. The businesses that supported it are ones residents already walk past on any given Saturday, and the festival's own materials describe itself as bringing a global cinema experience to what organizers call their South Shore Main Street home.
The clearest signal that SIFF intends to stick around is already public. The festival's website lists a full 2027 calendar: filmmaker orientation on July 17, screenings from August 11 through 14, industry panels and the Pitch Perfect competition back at the Sayville Theater on August 14, and the screenwriting table read moving to the CM Performing Arts Center on August 15. Submissions for the 2026 festival are closed and the organizers have already told entrants to watch for 2027 submission dates.
That kind of forward planning, published within weeks of the first festival's closing gala, is not typical of an event still testing whether it will survive. It reads instead like an organization that expects Railroad Avenue to be its home base for years to come, the same way the theater itself has been rebuilt in that spot for over a century regardless of who was holding the lease.
The takeaway is not that Sayville got lucky with one good weekend of press. It is that the town's Main Street has a building with a documented habit of surviving crises that would have closed most small theaters permanently, and that habit is now the infrastructure supporting an annual industry event with confirmed dates a year out. If you already live near Railroad Avenue, the practical note is simple: block out mid-August next year, because the red carpet, the mixers at Metros and Butera's, and the panels at the Sayville Theater are set to return, not as a one-off experiment but as the second installment of something that has already outlined its third.
You can find more on the neighborhood's day-to-day rhythm, from Main Street businesses to the town's seasonal events, on our Sayville neighborhood page. If you have questions about the area or want a local perspective on anything happening around it, Kelly DiJorio is always glad to talk. Let's Connect.
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