A Night of Fashion and Film: My Night at the Hamptons Film Festival Closing Celebration at Baker House 1650

East Hampton — I spent Sunday evening at Baker House 1650 for the Hamptons Film Festival’s closing celebration, hosted by Antonella Bertello and Jean Shafiroff. It was billed as a night of fashion and film, and it delivered on both. By the time I walked through the front
door, the festival’s final screening had already ended, and the room carried that particular energy of people who had just watched something together and were not quite ready for it to be over.

The House and the Wine

Check-in ran from seven to nine at the manor on Main Street, a seventeenth-century Cotswold-style house that somehow feels both grand and intimate. The ceilings are low enough to feel residential, the fireplaces are working, and the rooms open onto each other the way old houses do. The evening centered on wine from Mas des Infermières, the Provence estate owned by Sir Ridley Scott and his family. I tasted through the vintages while looking at artwork by Ashley Medici, whose paintings hung between the fireplaces. The staff poured without the usual event-formality; glasses kept appearing, and the conversation moved with them.

What I noticed first was how little the house had been dressed up for the night. No rental furniture, no temporary lighting rigs. The art was on the walls as if it belonged there, and the wine was presented as if the hosts simply wanted you to drink it. That kind of understatement only works when the details are already correct.

Who Was in the Room

The room filled with the festival’s inner circle. Beyond Bertello and Shafiroff, I spotted Ashley Medici herself, Björgvin, Maria van Vlodrop, James and Meghan McCartney, Sarah Kautz, Caroline Rhoad, David McMaster, Victoria Schneps, Donna Rubin, Joni and Christopher Fischer, Frank Cilione, and Katrina Peebles. It was the kind of crowd where every introduction came with a story — filmmakers, collectors, philanthropists, all orbiting the same cause. People lingered in the doorways longer than they needed to. No one was checking the time.

I ended up in a conversation near the fireplace with someone who had been coming to the festival for years. We talked about the closing film more than the party itself, which felt right. The night was still attached to what had just happened on screen.

The Cause

That cause is the Center for Family Services Palm Beach County, and the philanthropic thread ran through everything. Bertello and Shafiroff greeted guests personally as the room moved from wine tasting to conversation, and the warmth felt genuine rather than ceremonial. Shafiroff, in particular, has made this kind of work her life’s signature, and it showed. She moved through the rooms the way hosts used to, stopping long enough to make the introduction matter, then letting the conversation continue without her.

There was no hard sell, no program handed out at the door. The beneficiary was simply present in the way people spoke about why they had come. In a season full of events that blur together, that distinction was noticeable.

A Proper Closing Night

What struck me most was how the setting matched the mood. A closing night should feel like a send-off, not a wrap party, and this did.
Earlier that evening, the festival’s closing film, Wicker, starring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård, screened at Guild Hall and the Regal. So by the time I arrived at Baker House, the night already had a sense of completion to it. People were still talking about specific scenes. That rarely happens at the after-party.

The house helped. Old rooms absorb sound differently than tents or tents-with-walls. You could stand in one room and not hear the next. That quiet made the evening feel longer than it was.

Looking Ahead

It was one of those Hamptons evenings where the details — the wine, the art, the house itself, and the people in it — did the talking. And if the 2027 Old Bags Luncheon on February seventeenth is anything like this, I’ll be first in line. That one’s co-chaired by Shafiroff, Lora Drasner, and Marzia Precoda. I left when the room was still full, which is usually the right time to leave.