Sayville joined the film festival circuit this week. The first Sayville International Film Festival opened Thursday and runs through Sunday, August 16, filling the Sayville Theater on Railroad Avenue with independent features, documentaries and shorts, and putting a red carpet in the middle of a South Shore downtown that has never had one. There is still most of a weekend left to catch it.

The name on the guest list that will stop Long Islanders mid-scroll is Melissa Joan Hart. Before she was Clarissa and long before she was Sabrina, Hart was a kid on Long Island, born in Smithtown, and Sayville claims her as a hometown name. She is scheduled alongside the television producer Paula Hart, her mother and longtime producing partner. These days Hart works mostly behind the camera, directing episodes of network and streaming comedies, which makes her exactly the kind of guest an aspiring filmmaker wants in a small room.

She is not the only recognizable face. Seth Gilliam, familiar from The Wire and The Walking Dead, is on the program, along with the actor Chris Roach and filmmaker Gio Drasconi.

A working festival, not just a screening series

The festival describes itself as a nonprofit, community-driven event with an industry spine, built by the team at Cappricielli Productions. The mission language is about launching careers and building a sustainable creative ecosystem on Long Island, and the schedule backs that up. Saturday is a full day of professional panels at the theater: independent film packaging and distribution in the morning, then sessions on attaching talent, casting, directing for global audiences, pitching, and building a below-the-line career, running from 10 in the morning to about 4:30.

Sunday moves to the CM Performing Arts Center for a professional table read of four screenplays, with the closing ceremony and awards to follow. There is a pitch competition threaded through the weekend, plus filmmaker Q&As after screenings and networking mixers that lean on local restaurants and bars, so the festival spends its money in the hamlet hosting it.

The theater is the other star

Festivals like this live or die on their venue, and Sayville's advantage is that its downtown still has a real movie house on Railroad Avenue, the kind of single-town theater that most of Long Island lost decades ago. Film festivals have been good to buildings like this elsewhere on the Island: they give a historic theater a weekend of full seats and a reason to exist beyond the algorithmic multiplex diet. A hamlet that can walk from dinner to a premiere and back to a bar for the afterparty is doing something Manhattan festivals cannot.

It also extends a pattern worth noticing: Long Island's film scene keeps growing from the ground up. The Island already supports long-running festivals in the Hamptons, at Stony Brook and in Bellmore, and Sayville joining the list at the international scale, with submissions rather than just showcases, says the pipeline of local filmmakers has gotten deep enough to feed another one.

If you want to go

The festival runs through Sunday evening, August 16. Screenings and panels are at the Sayville Theater at 103 Railroad Avenue, with Sunday's table read and closing ceremony at the CM Performing Arts Center. Tickets and passes are sold through the festival's Humanitix page, with payment plans offered on the larger passes, and the lineup of screening blocks is posted on the festival's site. For a first-year festival, the practical advice is simple: the interesting things happen in the gaps, so leave time between screenings to stand on Railroad Avenue and watch a film industry introduce itself to a hamlet.