Local author and Lake Placid Film Festival co-founder Russell Banks speaks during a tribute dinner for him at the High Peaks Resort in Lake Placid Friday night. (Enterprise photo — Griffin Kelly)

LAKE PLACID — October 25 will now be known as Russell Banks Day.

For this year’s Lake Placid Film Festival, the Adirondack Film Society held a tribute gala, honoring the Keene-based author and festival and society co-founder Russell Banks Friday at the High Peaks Resort.

“It’s really not so much a celebration of me as much as it is of the film festival,” Banks said. “They’ve persisted and lasted this long. They bring to this community a kind of film sophistication and intelligence and discrimination that you don’t get in small-town America.”

Banks, born in 1940, grew up during the American civil rights movement. His stories often deal with the under-represented and the working-class people in society, who may deal with trauma and depression but also express a great deal of hope and strength. Some of his works include “Continental Drift,” “Cloudsplitter” and “The Sweet Hereafter,” which was adapted into a 1997 film that received the Grand Prix award at the Cannes Film Festival that year.

Banks co-founded the film festival, formerly the Lake Placid Film Forum, in 2000, and he said it was almost like a scrappy, spur-of-the-moment idea.

“When we first started, we were basically like Mickey Rooney going, ‘Hey, let’s put on a show!'” Banks said, referencing the 1939 musical comedy “Babes in Arms.”

“In the beginning, it was a recognition that there was in the Lake Placid area a very sophisticated, interested and engaged film community that wasn’t being properly served,” he continued. “They weren’t getting the films they wanted to see because they were stuck with the usual distribution deals in theaters.”

Though Banks said he appreciates the film festival for what it is and how it’s become part of the community, he said he doesn’t see it as too different from others. He said the Lake Placid Film Festival should expand its reach to people who view film as a pretentious, esoteric art form.

“Otherwise people are just going to go see cartoon movies and movies that reaffirm their own fantasies about sex, about violence, about masculinity, et cetera,” he said. “To find films that are really going to tell them the truth about reality, you’re going to have to do some very complicated, sophisticated and sympathetic marketing. This film festival is like all film festivals, in a sense. It’s elitist. It’s by people who already know a lot about movies, and they bring in a lot of art-house films. We need to find a way to reach out and not be limited by that.”

Banks said he also sees the North Country as an environment with great potential for movie making.

“A filmmaker friend of mine, Raoul Peck, was up here, making a big four-part series for HBO,” Banks said. “He sent his director of photography and location person to visit Keene, saying ‘I need footage of the American wilderness before the colonial engagement, before the white people arrived.’ They hung out, and I introduced them to local people who had places they could launch their drones from and pretty soon they’ll have the crews coming up. There is a tremendous future up here (for filming) if you figure out how to imagine it and do it.”

During the gala dinner, old friends such as former New York Daily News film critic Kathleen Carroll and Lake Placid News columnist Naj Wikoff shared memories and appreciation of Banks. Filmmaker Dennis Mueller showed a clip from his documentary about Banks and how his stories help explain the political, economic, social and historical reasons that separate people.

At one point, Banks received two video messages, wishing him well. One was from Willem Dafoe, who starred in the adaptation of Banks’ book “Affliction,” which centers on a small-town police officer trying to solve a fatal hunting accident while dealing with personal demons of an abusive father and a wife who’s leaving him. The second message came from “Goodfellas” director Martin Scorsese, who was a guest at one of the first festivals.

After that, village Mayor Craig Randall and North Elba Deputy Supervisor Jay Rand read a resolution on behalf of the village board and the town council, proclaiming the new holiday in honor of Banks.