On Saturday, September 12, the plaza beside the Wyandanch train station turns into an open-air cinema. The Q31 Film Festival runs from 1 to 8 p.m. at Wyandanch Plaza on Station Drive, it is free, and it is the second year the hamlet has hosted what may be the only outdoor festival on Long Island built around Caribbean and Latinx filmmakers.

Seven hours is a long program, and this one is stacked accordingly: independent short films on an outdoor screen, conversations with the filmmakers who made them, panels with digital creators, cultural workshops, live performances, public art installations and DJs carrying the stretches in between. It is closer to a block party with a film festival inside it than a night at an arthouse, which is exactly the pitch.

A festival that found its home in Wyandanch

Q31 debuted last September at Delano Stewart Plaza in Wyandanch Village, and it returns this year with more on the schedule, adding the filmmaker conversations and creator panels alongside the screenings. The festival is directed by Harper Bella, a first-generation Caribbean American who has framed the project as an answer to a gap: the region talks endlessly about being a melting pot while the stories of its Caribbean and Latin American communities rarely get a screen of their own.

Wyandanch is a fitting host for that argument. The hamlet is one of the centers of Caribbean and Latin American life in Suffolk County, and the festival puts those stories in its literal town square rather than in a theater two towns away.

The backing is serious for a two-year-old event. The festival runs in partnership with the Cinema Arts Centre, the Huntington institution that has anchored independent film on Long Island for half a century, and it carries support from the Suffolk County Office of Cultural Affairs, PSEG Long Island and Walmart. That mix of an arthouse partner and county backing is how a small festival gets a second year, and usually a tenth.

The plaza itself is part of the story

If you have not been to downtown Wyandanch lately, the setting will surprise you. Wyandanch Plaza sits inside the transit-oriented downtown that has grown up around the LIRR station over the past decade, apartments and storefronts arranged around public space where a commuter parking lot and vacant lots once sat. The redevelopment has had its critics and its stalls, but a free seven-hour festival filling the plaza on a September Saturday is the version of the neighborhood its planners were selling all along: a place people ride the train to on purpose.

That train detail is practical, not decorative. The plaza is directly at the Wyandanch station on the Ronkonkoma branch, which makes this one of the few Long Island festivals you can reach without a car, a parking lot or a designated driver.

If you go

The festival runs 1 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, September 12, at Wyandanch Plaza, 10 Station Drive, Wyandanch. Admission is free, and the whole event is outdoors, so the day stretches from afternoon screenings into evening films as the light goes. Bring a chair or a blanket if you like, and plan for the weather the way you would for any outdoor show.

Long Island does not lack for film events, but most of them happen indoors, ticketed, in the same handful of theaters. A free one, outdoors, in a hamlet square, built by and for communities that rarely see themselves programmed, is a different kind of afternoon. If you have ever complained that everything on Long Island costs forty dollars before parking, September 12 in Wyandanch is your counterexample.