Tag: Film at Lincoln Center

August 12, 2025

The following is a press release from Film at Lincoln Center:

Film at Lincoln Center announces the 63rd New York Film Festival (NYFF63) Spotlight lineup. A complement to the NYFF63 Main Slate, Spotlight showcases a selection of 12 significant and anticipated features, including three world premieres, two U.S. premieres, and six New York premieres, as well as nine short films shown in two programs. Presented by Film at Lincoln Center in partnership with Rolex, NYFF63 takes place September 26 through October 13, 2025 at Lincoln Center and in venues across the city.

Secure your tickets with Festival Passes, with discounts through this Thursday only. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere pre-sale access is only available to FLC Members. Join by August 29!

This year’s Spotlight selection presents five compelling feature-length portraits of iconic artists and entertainment figures. Acclaimed director Richard Linklater returns to NYFF for the sixth time with two inventive works: Blue Moon, capturing a pivotal night in the life of lyricist Lorenz Hart as Oklahoma! opens on Broadway, and Nouvelle Vague, a playful reimagining of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. In Mr. Scorsese, filmmaker Rebecca Miller (Maggie’s Plan, NYFF53) delivers a definitive five-part portrait of Martin Scorsese, told through his own words and new interviews with collaborators and family. Ben Stiller (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, NYFF51 Centerpiece) explores his roots in Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, about the lives and legacy of his parents, comedy icons Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. Rounding out the program is the Spotlight Gala selection Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, Scott Cooper’s moving biographical drama that captures the early-’80s period when Bruce Springsteen created the raw, acoustic songs that became his landmark album Nebraska.

Two powerful documentaries in Spotlight utilizing everyday media and technologies reveal urgent global issues. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, directed by Sepideh Farsi, unfolds through smartphone communications and offers a harrowing portrait of photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, who documented life under siege in Gaza. The Perfect Neighbor, from Geeta Gandbhir, reconstructs a racially motivated crime in Florida using police body-cam footage and firsthand witness testimonies, creating an unflinching, intimate account of violence and justice in America.

Additional Spotlight selections feature a vibrant mix of acclaimed international films and emerging talent. Fresh from the Venice Film Festival is the Italian festival’s opening night feature, La Grazia by Paolo Sorrentino, and Scarlet, a visually striking animated fantasy film by Mamoru Hosoda (Belle, NYFF59). Following its debut at the Cannes Film Festival is the dark comedy-mystery A Private Life, directed by Rebecca Zlotowski and starring Jodie Foster, who delivers her first performance entirely in French. The section also showcases two impressive debuts: the world premiere of Anemone by Ronan Day-Lewis, featuring the acting return of Daniel Day-Lewis, and the New York premiere of Pillion by Harry Lighton, which won Best Screenplay at Cannes Un Certain Regard and received wide critical acclaim.

Two programs of short films will be featured. Spotlight Shorts includes new work by filmmakers previously featured in NYFF and New Directors/New Films: Radu Muntean’s Index, Gabriel Abrantes’s Arguments in Favor of Love, Abdellah Taïa’s Cairo Streets, and Alice Diop’s Fragments for Venus; and New York Shorts features films by directors with ties to New York: Bingham Bryant’s Doomed and Famous, Eve Liu’s Nervous Energy, Mary Rose McClain’s February Omen, Nathan Silver’s Carol & Joy, and David Cardoza’s Turtle Sandwich.

NYFF63 films are screened at Lincoln Center and at four venues across the city: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), AMC Bay Plaza Cinema (Bronx), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) (Brooklyn), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens). 

The NYFF Main Slate and Spotlight selection committee is chaired by Dennis Lim, NYFF Artistic Director, and includes Florence Almozini, Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, and Rachel Rosen. Violeta Bava, Michelle Carey, Leo Goldsmith, and Antoine Thirion are NYFF program advisors. Aily Nash and Tyler Wilson are head shorts programmers for NYFF. The New York Shorts program is programmed by Katie Zwick.

NYFF63 is generously supported by Festival Co-Chairs Susan and John Hess, Imelda and Peter Sobiloff, and Nanna and Dan Stern; Vice-Chairs Susannah Gray and John Lyons, and Tara Kelleher and Roy Zuckerberg; and Supporters Hillary Koota Krevlin and Glenn Krevlin, Ronnie Planalp, and Ari Rifkin.

The New York Film Festival is an annual celebration of the most significant films from around the world. Since its inception in 1963, NYFF has played a pivotal role in shaping film culture, presenting a curated selection of bold and remarkable works by acclaimed directors alongside emerging talents.

Secure your tickets with Passes, limited quantities on sale now with final discounts through this Thursday, August 14. NYFF63 single tickets will go on sale to the general public on Thursday, September 18 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date. Become an FLC Member by August 29 to secure NYFF63 pre-sale access and discounted tickets year-round. NYFF63 Press and Industry accreditation is now open through August 18.

Explore the NYFF63 lineup and sign up for forthcoming announcements, including Revivals and Talks.

Spotlight Films & Descriptions

Spotlight Gala
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Scott Cooper, 2025, U.S., 120m

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Photo by Macall Polay, © 2025 20th Century Studios.

Jeremy Allen White inhabits a legend and lays bare his beating heart in this graceful, exceptionally moving film about a very specific part of peerless American rock icon Bruce Springsteen’s life. Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, adapted from Warren Zanes’s 2023 best-selling chronicle of the same title, is set at an early-’80s crossroads in Springsteen’s career when, still negotiating the transformative waves of his rising fame, he crafted the intensely personal acoustic songs that would become his mythic album Nebraska—at the same time that he was recording the demos for Born in the U.S.A., which would catapult him to global superstardom. This biographical drama focuses with gratifying specificity on the nitty-gritty of Springsteen’s songwriting, while never shying away from the realities of his familial traumas and personal depression. It’s more than just a tour de force for its incandescent star—it’s a reminder that the reason we love this seemingly larger-than-life hero is because he’s always been palpably human. Featuring a superior supporting cast, including Jeremy Strong (as Springsteen’s longtime manager and co-producer Jon Landau), Stephen Graham and Gaby Hoffmann (as Bruce’s parents), Paul Walter Hauser, David Krumholtz, and Odessa Young. The film is produced by Cooper, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Eric Robinson, and Scott Stuber. Tracey Landon and Zanes executive produce. A 20th Century Studios release. 

Anemone
Ronan Day-Lewis, 2025, U.K., 121m
World Premiere

Anemone. Courtesy of Focus Features.

Three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis roars back to the screen for his first role in eight years in this absorbing family drama directed by Ronan Day-Lewis about lives undone by seemingly irreconcilable legacies of political and personal violence. Co-written by father and son, the Northern England–set Anemone begins as a middle-aged man (Sean Bean) sets out from his suburban home on a journey into the woods, where he reconnects with his estranged hermit brother (Day-Lewis). Bonded by a mysterious, complicated past, the men share a fraught, if occasionally tender relationship—one that was forever altered by shattering events decades earlier. An emotional powerhouse, this directorial debut is assured in both small details and grand gestures as it charts the path toward familial redemption against all odds. In addition to its unflinching lead performances, Anemone features standout supporting work from Samantha Morton and Samuel Bottomley, and sensationally expressive widescreen cinematography by Ben Fordesman. A Focus Features release.

Blue Moon
Richard Linklater, 2025, U.S./Ireland, 100m
New York Premiere

Blue Moon. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

The lyricist Lorenz Hart’s contributions to the Great American Songbook cycle, collaborations with composer Richard Rodgers, are the stuff of legend. Yet, in 1943, only months before he died from pneumonia, a consequence of heavy drinking, Hart’s partnership with Rodgers was on the rocks. Rodgers had first paired up with Oscar Hammerstein II, and their musical Oklahoma! had reinvigorated and all but reinvented narrative musical theater. Richard Linklater’s (Hit Man, NYFF61) luminous, erudite drama imagines a loquacious Hart (an astonishing tour de force by Ethan Hawke) on the night of Oklahoma!’s premiere, holed up at Sardi’s and moving through various stages of grief and acceptance—and blistering wit—when faced with Broadway’s new world order. Also featuring stellar supporting work from Andrew Scott (who won the Silver Bear for best supporting performance at the Berlinale), Margaret Qualley, and Bobby Cannavale, Blue Moon is a surprising yet entirely fitting addition to the Linklater canon: a film about the inevitable passage of time and the feeling of being left behind by those stuck in its folds. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

La Grazia
Paolo Sorrentino, 2025, Italy, 128m
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere

La Grazia. Courtesy of MUBI.

Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino returns to the baroque world of presidential politics in his native Italy, but in a departure from the feverish exposés of Il Divo and Loro, he has crafted an elegantly restrained portrait of a fading ruler’s reckoning with age, power, and moral obligation. La Grazia centers around fictional Presidente Mariano De Santis (played with exquisite composure by Sorrentino regular Toni Servillo), whose term is nearly up. Disparagingly nicknamed “Cemento armato” (reinforced concrete) for his intractable nature and overly careful approach to politics, he has grown lonely in the echoing halls of the presidential palace, mourning the loss of his wife and listening to hip-hop. Before returning to civilian life, De Santis must make a series of bold decisions—a pair of presidential pardons and a groundbreaking policy bill—that will cement his legacy. Sorrentino’s film does the unexpected for our moment, infusing a tale of government affairs with a refreshing dose of humanity. A MUBI release.

Mr. Scorsese
Rebecca Miller, 2025, U.S., 285m
World Premiere

Mr. Scorsese. Courtesy of Apple TV+.

The unflaggingly vital American cinema legend gets the definitive portrait his epochal, profoundly personal career deserves in this five-part documentary from director Rebecca Miller (Maggie’s Plan, NYFF53). Told through his own words, as well as those of a discerning, incisive series of creative collaborators and family members, Miller’s documentary functions almost like a Martin Scorsese film itself, a full-throttle rocketing through an American century and 60-plus years of moviemaking that transformed Hollywood cinema and will continue to inspire untold generations of artists and cinema advocates. Featuring probing film analyses, personal reflections, and unprecedented access to private moments, Mr. Scorsese does justice to an unparalleled body of work relentlessly focused on sinners and saints, highlighted by new interviews with, among others, Jay Cocks, Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Rodrigo Prieto, Isabella Rossellini, Thelma Schoonmaker, Steven Spielberg, and Sharon Stone. We are pleased to screen Miller’s documentary in its entirety as a cinematic experience. An Apple TV+ release.

Nouvelle Vague
Richard Linklater, 2025, France, 106m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere

Nouvelle Vague. Courtesy of Netflix

The spirit of cinematic revolution is alive and well in Richard Linklater’s (Last Flag Flying, NYFF55 Opening Night) affectionate and wildly entertaining passion project, which transports the viewer back to a creative landmark: the 1959 making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Played with uncanny Proustian precision by the extraordinary Guillaume Marbeck, Godard desires to make his own mark as a filmmaker, envious of the big-screen success of his fellow Cahiers du cinéma critics François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. Working from—if only gesturing to—Truffaut’s noir-inspired script treatment, Godard embarks on his runaway production on the streets of Paris, determined to make a work of intellectual honesty and moral integrity, while fending off the frustrations of producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), playfully sparring with star Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), and ignoring the bemused protestations of leading lady Jean Seberg (a winsome Zoey Deutch). Shot on film in black-and-white and edited with a restless elegance that echoes the Nouvelle Vague ethos that Breathless all but created, Linklater’s film is a buoyant expression of the importance of artistic freedom and ingenuity from one of contemporary American cinema’s true independent souls. A Netflix release.

The Perfect Neighbor
Geeta Gandbhir, 2025, U.S., 96m
New York Premiere

The Perfect Neighbor. Courtesy of Netflix.

In June 2023, on a typical suburban street in Marion County, Florida, a white woman named Susan Lorincz fired a handgun through her front door, killing her neighbor, Ajike Owens, a Black mother of four. Lorincz claimed she felt she was in danger, defending herself using the state’s Stand Your Ground law. In reality, as Geeta Gandbhir’s film documents with precision and mounting dread, the killing was the culmination of months of escalating conflicts between Lorincz and her neighbors, whom she treated as unwanted invaders of her space. Brilliantly edited into a gripping and devastating narrative almost entirely from police body-cam footage, The Perfect Neighbor is an intimate account of an appalling, racially motivated crime. Rather than sensationalize a story that’s already been through the media grist mill, Gandbhir has made a humane documentary that speaks to lingering national traumas, the deadly consequences of biased policing laws, and one specific instance of profound loss. A Netflix release.

Pillion
Harry Lighton, 2025, U.K., 107m
New York Premiere

Pillion. Courtesy of A24.

In his unorthodox queer romance, first-time feature director Harry Lighton has fashioned something highly improbable: a film about a sadomasochistic relationship that is both transgressive and disarming. Harry Melling plays the mild Colin, whose gayness is happily accepted by his parents (Lesley Sharp and Douglas Hodge) and who is most extroverted when singing in a barbershop quartet. When this sweet-natured square catches the eye of strapping, leather-clad biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) at the local pub, he finds himself entering a submissive role—both domestic and erotic—for the inscrutable beauty who brings him both satisfaction and confusion, pain and pleasure. As their affair continues, Colin must decide what he wants and needs—and who he really is. Comic without ever descending into judgment of its characters, Pillion is a beguiling inquiry into the social and sexual performances of masculinity, featuring fearless work from Melling and Skarsgård. An A24 release.

A Private Life / Vie privée
Rebecca Zlotowski, 2025, France, 103m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere

A Private Life. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Jodie Foster is entrancing in her first French-language performance, playing an American psychoanalyst in Paris whose tightly knit world begins to unravel after the sudden death of a patient. In the midst of her own familial and professional crises, Foster’s neurotic Dr. Lilian Steiner takes it upon herself to investigate the circumstances around this patient’s alleged suicide, which she begins to suspect might have been a murder. Director Rebecca Zlotowski (Other People’s Children) masterfully balances the sinister and the playful, and surrounds Foster with a veritable who’s who of French movie stars, including Daniel Auteuil as Lilian’s affectionate ex-husband, who gets coerced into her dangerous inquiries; Vincent Lacoste as her semi-estranged grown son; Virginie Efira as the late patient Paula, seen in flashback; and Mathieu Amalric as Paula’s grieving, rage-filled husband. Unpredictable and loose-limbed, A Private Life, like its incandescent star in her most dexterous role in years, is a complete delight. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
Sepideh Farsi, 2025, France/Palestine/Iran, 113m
English, French, and Arabic with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Driven to make a film that would bear witness to the escalating violence against Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military following October 7, but unable to enter Gaza, filmmaker and photographer Sepideh Farsi decided to turn her camera on one woman. Seen entirely in smartphone correspondence, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna becomes the subject of this documentary, and our guide to the horror of living under siege. Embodying improbable fortitude, warmth, and calm in the eye of the storm, Fatma is an unforgettable screen presence, followed over the course of a year as she experiences one loss after another. Visually spare yet emotionally expansive, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk intercuts the evolution of Sepideh and Fatma’s relationship with footage of the destruction on the ground in Gaza. It’s a work of great intimacy that will stand, now and always, as an unerasable record of a life. A Kino Lorber release.

Scarlet / 果てしなきスカーレット
Mamoru Hosoda, 2025, Japan, 111m
Japanese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Scarlet. ©2025 Studio Chizu.

Animator-director Mamoru Hosoda (Belle, NYFF59) transports viewers to jaw-dropping fantasy worlds that exist in the dazzling space between two- and three-dimensional realms. In his towering new achievement, Hosoda conjures a phantasmal riff on Hamlet: after attempting to avenge the brutal death of her father at the hands of her power-hungry uncle Claudius in 16th-century Elsinore, the princess Scarlet awakes in the Land of the Dead. In this forbidding purgatory of mountains and desert, governed by a powerful godlike dragon, Scarlet must fight for her own soul and body while still vowing to defeat Claudius. Yet her plans are complicated by the presence of the handsome Hijiri, a saintly hospital nurse from our contemporary world who refuses to accept that he’s dead—or that revenge can end history’s cycles of violence. Combining weighty Shakespearean themes with wondrous anime imagery, Hosoda has made an epic fantasy that weighs the human impulse for revenge against the need for care, forgiveness, and survival. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost
Ben Stiller, 2025, U.S., 97m
World Premiere

Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost. Courtesy of Apple Original Films.

In the most personal film of his career, Ben Stiller (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, NYFF51 Centerpiece) tells the story of his parents: the groundbreaking husband-and-wife comedy duo of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, whose television and theater appearances were a beloved mainstay of 1960s and ’70s American culture. After Anne and Jerry passed away in 2015 and 2020, respectively, Stiller dug into the vast treasure trove of recordings, footage, letters, and other ephemera with which they documented their personal and professional lives. These extraordinary archives are the foundation of this immensely moving—and, of course, very funny—documentary, beautifully directed by Stiller and edited by Adam Kurnitz (The Velvet Underground, NYFF59), which charts, with love and candor, the challenges and insecurities that are part of any show-business family’s essential makeup. Though featuring perceptive interviews with such friends and collaborators as Christopher Walken and John Guare, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost is above all a true multigenerational family project, made with the collaboration of Stiller’s sister, Amy Stiller; his wife, Christine Taylor Stiller; and children Ella and Quinlin Stiller. An Apple Original Films release.

Spotlight Shorts
79m

This shorts program includes Radu Muntean’s Index, Gabriel Abrantes’s Arguments in Favor of Love, Abdellah Taïa’s Cairo Streets, and Alice Diop’s Fragments for Venus.

Index
Radu Muntean, 2025, Romania, 29m
No dialogue
North American Premiere

Index. Courtesy of Tangaj Production.

Radu Muntean (Întregalde, NYFF59) returns with a fine-tuned short about a forest ranger who spots disturbing activity on his closed-circuit surveillance system and takes up an investigation that pushes him toward an uncertain fate. Splitting the difference between landscape film and horror movie, Index conjures a suggestive atmosphere with gorgeous widescreen images and a dense sound mix.

Arguments in Favor of Love
Gabriel Abrantes, 2025, Portugal, 10m
U.S. Premiere

Arguments in Favor of Love

Gabriel Abrantes (Diamantino, NYFF56) draws the dying stages of a relationship with bracing candor and concision. Though dressed as ghostly sheets, Arguments’ players are all too human—their fights comprise petty accusations, rage-filled confessions, and a sorrowful departure, punctuated by heartfelt musical interludes—while the film’s animation registers every emotion in a spare, painterly set of expressions.

Cairo Streets
Abdellah Taïa, 2025, France, 19m
Arabic with English and French subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Cairo Streets. Courtesy of Shortcuts.

Cairo, 2007. Abdellah searches for Omar, his old companion who has disappeared among the city’s busy streets. A visit with the legendary Youssef Chahine, a nighttime film shoot at the pyramids, and maritime revelry are all captured on nostalgia-textured video while Omar—a brilliant structuring absence—haunts proceedings until, during a final encounter, comfort is found in cinema and personal touch alike.

Fragments for Venus
Alice Diop, 2025, France/Italy, 21m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere

Fragments for Venus

Continuing the meditations that shaped Saint Omer (NYFF60), Alice Diop’s new short indexes centuries-old artistic representation in the Louvre before observing womanhood on the streets of contemporary New York. Running between refined and loose—Miu Miu costumes complement quotidian streetwear while the museum’s silent halls are juxtaposed with metropolitan clamor—Fragments for Venus poses difficult questions while celebrating everyday living’s basic pleasures.

New York Shorts
78m

This shorts program includes Bingham Bryant’s Doomed and Famous, Eve Liu’s Nervous Energy, Mary Rose McClain’s February Omen, Nathan Silver’s Carol & Joy, and David Cardoza’s Turtle Sandwich.

Doomed and Famous
Bingham Bryant, 2025, U.S., 10m
World Premiere

Doomed and Famous

New York’s Miguel Abreu Gallery is at the center of Bingham Bryant’s short, which follows Adrian Dannatt across his eponymous exhibit while observing works from, among others, Pablo Picasso, Guy Debord, Nan Goldin, Damien Hirst, and Duncan Hannah. Each is captured by cinematographer Sean Price Williams in appropriately textured images while a studious, amusing voice-over jumps between biography and philosophy.

Nervous Energy
Eve Liu, 2025, U.S., 15m
English, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and French with English subtitles
New York Premiere

Nervous Energy

Eve Liu’s short, executive produced by Spike Lee, is shot and edited with an exuberance that never betrays rich character psychology. Nervous Energy’s caustic, cutting humor and formal jazziness are so potent as to dominate an end-credits sequence that seemingly wraps up this tale of romantic uncertainty, only to leave us wanting even more—from these characters and Liu alike.

February Omen
Mary Rose McClain, 2025, U.S., 5m
New York Premiere

February Omen

“If you eat meat it’s bad luck. If you see the meat without eat, that’s fine.” This is the superstition (or wisdom?) offered by director Mary Rose McClain’s grandmother, heard in hypnotic voice-over accompanied by a Can-esque score from Programmique. A marvel of compression, February Omen’s five lo-fi, high-texture minutes connect familial histories, carnal tastes, and metropolitan industrialization.

Carol & Joy
Nathan Silver, 2025, U.S., 39m
New York Premiere

Carol & Joy Courtesy of Morgan Connellee

Reuniting after last year’s Between the Temples, director Nathan Silver and star Carol Kane shift focus to the actress’ 98-year-old mother, Joy Kane—a music teacher and former dancer who lives with Carol on the Upper West Side, and who regales them (and us) with fascinating cultural histories and piano performances over the course of a single afternoon. Carol & Joy is a documentary replete with love, pain, and texture: a close-quarters view of artistic vocation, mother-daughter bonds, and two women’s journeys through one century and into another.

Turtle Sandwich
David Cardoza, 2025, U.S., 10m
World Premiere

Turtle Sandwich

A child runs across well-worn pavement while a subway races above, nearly apocalyptic in its roar—there is no doubt what city we’re in. But for all of Turtle Sandwich’s ground-level grit and classic schoolyard insults—plus some youth-versus-adult mischief that harkens back to silent one-reelers—David Cardoza’s video-game fantasies and meta touches create a more formally sophisticated affair.

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER
Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) is a nonprofit organization that celebrates cinema as an essential art form and fosters a vibrant home for film culture to thrive. FLC presents premier film festivals, retrospectives, new releases, and restorations year-round in state-of-the-art theaters at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. FLC offers audiences the opportunity to discover works from established and emerging directors from around the world with a passionate community of film lovers at marquee events including the New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films.  

Founded in 1969, FLC is committed to preserving the excitement of the theatrical experience for all audiences, advancing high-quality film journalism through the publication of Film Comment, cultivating the next generation of film industry professionals through our FLC Academies, and enriching the lives of all who engage with our programs.

Rolex is the Official Partner and Exclusive Timepiece of Film at Lincoln Center. 

Support for the New York Film Festival is also generously provided by Official Partner The New York Times; Supporting Partner Netflix; Contributing Partners Kino Film Collection from Kino Lorber Media Group, The Travel Agency: A Cannabis Store, Dolby, BritBox, New York Film Academy, the School of Visual Arts BFA Film, IMDbPro, Epson America, Inc., Manhattan Portage, and Thompson Central Park New York; Media Partners Variety, Deadline, WABC-TV, The Hollywood Reporter, The WNET Group, IndieWire, and The Envelope by the Los Angeles Times. Additional support is provided in part by the NYC’s Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. American Airlines is the Official Airline of Film at Lincoln Center. For more information, visit filmlinc.org and follow @TheNYFF on X, Instagram, and Bluesky.

August 5, 2025

The following is a press release from Film at Lincoln Center:

Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) announces the 34 films selected for the Main Slate of the 63rd New York Film Festival (NYFF63), taking place September 26 through October 13, 2025. 

Secure your tickets with Festival Passes, limited quantities on sale now. Single tickets go on sale September 18 at noon ET.

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center in partnership with Rolex, the New York Film Festival is an annual celebration of the most significant films from around the world. Since its inception in 1963, NYFF has played a pivotal role in shaping film culture, presenting a curated selection of films that define the year in cinema, with new works by acclaimed directors alongside emerging talents. 

This year’s Main Slate showcases films from 26 countries, among them two world, eight North American, and 13 U.S. premieres. Acclaimed films from festivals worldwide include Cannes prizewinners: Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (Palme d’Or); Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value (Grand Prix); joint Jury Prize winners Oliver Laxe’s Sirât and Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (Best Director, Best Actor); and Bi Gan’s Resurrection (Special Award). At this year’s Berlinale, Rose Byrne won the Silver Bear for best leading performance for Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and Radu Jude won the Silver Bear for best screenplay for Kontinental ’25. Of the Main Slate films, 11 are set to premiere at the 82nd Venice Film Festival across various sections—including Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Kent Jones’s Late Fame, and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice.

NYFF63 world premieres include Gavagai by Ulrich Köhler (In My Room, NYFF56), an astute drama in which a film adaptation of Medea becomes the center of cross-cultural tensions, and Closing Night selection Is This Thing On?, a keenly observed comedic drama by Bradley Cooper (Maestro, NYFF61 Spotlight Gala) about a couple navigating their recent separation. Filmmakers making their Main Slate debut are Mary Bronstein, Bradley Cooper, Kent Jones, Kahlil Joseph, Milagros Mumenthaler, Mark Obenhaus, Hlynur Pálmason, Pedro Pinho, Mascha Schilinski, and Francesco Sossai.

NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim stated: “​​Anyone who cares about film knows that it is an art in need of defending, like many of our core values today. Across all sections of the festival, the movies we have selected this year suggest that this safeguarding can take many guises: acts of rejuvenation and refusal, expressions of unease and joy, feats of imagination and commemoration. I am particularly struck by the diversity of approaches and forms among the films in this Main Slate, which affirms that the art of cinema is more than capable of thriving, even in difficult times.”

This year’s program explores a wide range of themes that reflect the complexities of the world today. Family dynamics are the focal points of Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Hlynur Pálmason’s The Love That Remains, Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3, Carla Simón’s Romería, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, and Hong Sangsoo’s What Does That Nature Say to You. A gamut of social and political concerns—from economic precarity to life under authoritarian rule—emerge in Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25, Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, and Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors, while Claire Denis’s The Fence, Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm, Lucrecia Martel’s Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks), and Lav Diaz’s Magellan revolve around colonial histories and legacies.

In a lineup that features dramas, comedies, documentaries, thrillers, and forays into horror and science fiction, several films test the limits and subvert the conventions of genre—like Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, and Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada—and several could be said to invent genres of their own, such as Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, Bi Gan’s Resurrection, and Oliver Laxe’s Sirât.

NYFF63 films are screened in theaters at Lincoln Center and at four venues across the city: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), AMC Bay Plaza Cinema (Bronx), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) (Brooklyn), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens). 

As previously announced, the Opening Night selection is the North American premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt; the North American premiere of Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother is the Centerpiece selection; and the world premiere of Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? is the Closing Night selection. Currents, Spotlight, Revivals, and Talks sections will be announced in the coming weeks—sign up for NYFF updates for the latest news.

The NYFF Main Slate selection committee is chaired by Dennis Lim, NYFF Artistic Director, and includes Florence Almozini, Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, and Rachel Rosen. Violeta Bava, Michelle Carey, Leo Goldsmith, and Antoine Thirion are NYFF program advisors.

NYFF63 is generously supported by Festival Co-Chairs Imelda and Peter Sobiloff and Nanna and Dan Stern; Vice-Chairs Susannah Gray and John Lyons, and Tara Kelleher and Roy Zuckerberg; and Supporters Hillary Koota Krevlin and Glenn Krevlin, and Ari Rifkin.

Secure your tickets with Passes, limited quantities on sale now. NYFF63 single tickets will go on sale to the general public on Thursday, September 18 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date. Become an FLC Member by August 29 to secure NYFF63 pre-sale access and discounted tickets year-round. NYFF63

Explore the legacy of the New York Film Festival since 1963 in a newly unveiled online archive, featuring Main Slate lineups, never-before-published photographs, and official posters from all past editions.

63rd New York Film Festival Main Slate

Opening Night: After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino)

Centerpiece: Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch)

Closing Night: Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper)

Below the Clouds (Gianfranco Rosi)

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph)

Cover-Up (Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus) 

The Currents (Milagros Mumenthaler)

Duse (Pietro Marcello)

The Fence (Claire Denis)

Gavagai (Ulrich Köhler)

A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow)

I Only Rest in the Storm (Pedro Pinho)

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)

Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach)

Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude)

Late Fame (Kent Jones)

The Last One for the Road (Francesco Sossai)

The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)

Magellan (Lav Diaz)

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)

Miroirs No. 3 (Christian Petzold)

No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)

Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks) (Lucrecia Martel)

Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs)

Resurrection (Bi Gan)

Romería (Carla Simón)

Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin)

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

Sirât (Oliver Laxe)

Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)

Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)

What Does That Nature Say To You (Hong Sangsoo)

63rd New York Film Festival Main Slate Films and Descriptions

Opening Night
After the Hunt
Luca Guadagnino, 2025, U.S., 135m
North American Premiere

After the Hunt. Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.

In his razor-sharp new drama, the prolific Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, NYFF55; Queer, NYFF62) plunges with refreshing abandon into the murky seas of contemporary morality—and gives Julia Roberts one of the most complex and gratifying starring roles of her career. Roberts embodies chilly, seemingly self-assured Yale philosophy professor Alma Olsson, whose comfortable professional career and domestic life with her mercurial husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) are thrown into chaos after her PhD candidate protégée Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses Alma’s longtime colleague and friend Hank (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault. As a result, the air of rarefied academic privilege on campus begins to dissolve, and Alma must navigate minefields of gender, sexuality, race, and institutional power, all while trying to reconcile her own difficult choices with the demons of her past. From a trenchant, tightly plotted script by Nora Garrett, and with the aid of a sensational cast (also including Chloë Sevigny as Kim, a colleague of Alma’s), Guadagnino teases out a genuine provocation with no easy answers, inquiring where our true selves lie when every decision we make is thrown into the court of public opinion. An Amazon MGM Studios release. Opening Night is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Centerpiece
Father Mother Sister Brother
Jim Jarmusch, 2025, U.S., 110m
North American Premiere

Father Mother Sister Brother. © Vague Notion / MUBI – photo credit: Yorick Le Saux

For years, Jim Jarmusch has written, directed, and produced delicate, character-driven films, including Stranger Than Paradise (NYFF22), Down by Law (NYFF24 Opening Night), Only Lovers Left Alive (NYFF51), and Paterson (NYFF54). Father Mother Sister Brother is a perceptive study in familial dynamics, a feature film carefully constructed in the form of a triptych. The three chapters all concern the relationships between adult children reconnecting or coming to terms with aging or lost parents, which take place in the present, and each in a different country. Siblings Jeff and Emily (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) check up on their hermetic father (Tom Waits) in rural New Jersey; sisters Lilith and Timothea (Vicky Krieps and Cate Blanchett) reunite with their guarded novelist mother (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin; and twins Skye and Billy (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) return to their Paris apartment to address a family tragedy. Father Mother Sister Brother is a kind of anti-action film, its subtle and quiet style carefully constructed to allow small details to accumulate—almost like flowers being carefully placed in three delicate arrangements. As always, Jarmusch brings his worlds to life with the essential assistance of his collaborators, including two masterful cinematographers, Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux, and the brilliant editor Affonso Gonçalves. A MUBI release.

Closing Night
Is This Thing On?
Bradley Cooper, 2025, U.S., 124m
World Premiere

Is This Thing On? Courtesy: Jason McDonald/Searchlight Pictures

In a pair of galvanizing, deeply honest performances, Will Arnett and Laura Dern play Alex and Tess Novak, whose marriage has reached an impasse. With amicable sorrow, the couple—parents of two young boys—mutually agree to split up. Yet in director Bradley Cooper’s keenly observed comic drama, their separation leads to unpredictable midlife self-reckonings, most dramatically in Alex’s wild career pivot to become a confessional stand-up comedian in New York City’s West Village, where he finds new direction and camaraderie. This seemingly outlandish scenario—in a script by Cooper, Arnett, and Mark Chappell inspired by the true story of British comedian John Bishop—is never played for easy laughs, while Cooper uses his penchant for naturalism to give the actors space to find their complicated centers. In his beautifully lived-in third feature following A Star Is Born and Maestro (NYFF61), Cooper confirms his dexterity for representing the complexities of human relationships, constructing a film that is both lacerating and sweet-souled, funny and tender. Is This Thing On? features a stacked, stellar supporting cast, including Andra Day, Christine Ebersole, Ciarán Hinds, Sean Hayes, Peyton Manning, and Amy Sedaris, as well as charming assistance from New York stand-up standbys such as Chloe Radcliffe, Reggie Conquest, and Jordan Jensen, supplying the film its downtown authenticity. A Searchlight Pictures release from Lea Pictures and Archery Pictures.

Below the Clouds / Sotto le nuvole
Gianfranco Rosi, 2025, Italy, 114m
Italian, Arabic, Japanese, and English with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Below the Clouds

The great Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi (Notturno, NYFF58) specializes in kaleidoscopic portraits of people living amid anxiety and uncertainty. Among his most striking and monumental works, his latest details with pointillist precision and unnerving beauty a region in Naples living under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius and above the simmering Campi Flegrei volcanic caldera, which has in recent years experienced increasingly frequent and alarming tremors. In this volatile environment, Rosi finds archeologists reckoning with both uncovered ancient artifacts and the wreckage of tomb raiders, squads of diggers descending into long abandoned tunnels, emergency centers already at breaking points, and a populace experiencing a generalized daily disquietude, fearful of an eruption like the one that buried Pompeii in 79 A.D. Linking modern and ancient life, Below the Clouds alights on a specific region yet feels connected to everyone’s contemporary moment—the contemplation of the unimaginable nestled within our daily existence.

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
Kahlil Joseph, 2025, U.S., 107m
New York Premiere

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions. Courtesy of Rich Spirit.

Visual artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph’s video installation BLKNWS debuted in galleries and museums across the country in 2019, immersing viewers in the imagined world of a television news network from a Black perspective. After expanding this concept into a short film, Joseph has developed it even further into a feature film, and the result is a celebration of Black life that reconceptualizes and remediates common, corporate notions of journalism. Joseph’s sprawling film is an uninterrupted gush of ideas, mixing newly shot footage and extant media, leaping from fantastical images to historical narratives, collapsing boundaries that often separate documentary and fiction. A multidimensional work of vision and ambition, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions offers an alternately riotous and meditative compendium of the Black experience. A Rich Spirit release.

Cover-Up
Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus, 2025, U.S., 117m
English, Vietnamese, and Arabic with English subtitles
New York Premiere

Cover-Up. Seymour Hersh in his office at the Washington bureau of The New York Times, 1975 – The New York Times/Redux

For the past six decades, Seymour Hersh has been at the front lines of political journalism in the United States. Hersh’s breakthrough reportage has brought to the public’s attention many of the most damning constitutional wrongdoings and cover-ups, from the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam to the CIA’s involvement in plots to assassinate foreign leaders to the Iraq invasion and systematic tortures at Abu Ghraib. In many cases, the revelations of his work have led to governmental reckonings and legal ramifications, yet Hersh, now 88 and surrounded by boxes of files from decades of tireless work, sees himself not as a crusader but as a citizen just doing his job. In this arresting documentary, Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, NYFF60) and Mark Obenhaus tell the wide-ranging story of Hersh (whose career has not been free of controversy itself). Though a decades-gestating project for the filmmakers, Cover-Up couldn’t have come at a more crucial moment, when freedom of the U.S. press is increasingly under fire by those in power.

The Currents / Las Corrientes
Milagros Mumenthaler, 2025, Switzerland/Argentina, 104m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

The Currents

While on a work trip in Switzerland, where she’s being fêted for her storied fashion career, designer Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) plunges herself, without warning, into an icy winter lake. After surviving the shocking ordeal, Lina returns to her hometown of Buenos Aires, yet a transformation has taken place within her, and she finds it impossible to readjust to her former life as a wife, mother, and artist, distancing herself from her husband (Esteban Bigliardi) and career. Acclaimed Argentinean filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler (Back to Stay) has constructed a compelling existential puzzle, a work of psychological interiority that, with its oblique narrative and complexly layered soundscape evoking a woman’s enigmatic dissociation, recalls the work of Lucrecia Martel and Todd Haynes, yet with its own singular emotional perspective and aesthetic sophistication.

Duse
Pietro Marcello, 2025, Italy, 123m
Italian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Duse

Bringing the same intellectual and muscular energy to the historical biopic as he did with his momentous Jack London adaptation Martin Eden (NYFF57), Pietro Marcello depicts the late career of legendary Italian actress Eleonora Duse, incarnated by the wondrously expressive Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. The diva emerges vulnerable yet undeterred from the cataclysm of World War I, taking the stage again in her sixties despite a tubercular condition and a knotty relationship with her resentful daughter (Noémie Merlant), even as world politics and the aesthetics of theater itself are on the verge of changing forever. Epitomizing the full-bodied emotional materiality of his subject, Marcello goes beyond the formal and structural limitations of the biographical film, examining how acting itself can be a reflection of modernity and how performing brought Duse closer to becoming a radical political being. As always, Marcello brings both great flourish and historical realism to his work, incorporating mesmerizing early-20th-century archival color footage into this fictionalized portrait of the life of the artistic mind.

The Fence / Le Cri des Gardes
Claire Denis, 2025, France, 92m
English and Yoruba with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

The Fence

The absorbing new drama from Claire Denis (Beau Travail, NYFF37) is centered around a fascinating, intractable tête-à-tête. On a white-run construction site in an acrid, dust-strewn town in West Africa, a local man named Albouny (the riveting Denis regular Isaach De Bankolé) has arrived to demand the immediate return of the dead body of his brother Nouofia, killed in a mysterious work accident. The site’s anxious foreman, Horn (Matt Dillon), protected behind the perimeter fence, yet ruffled by Albouny’s defiance and unflappability, is clearly hiding a terrible truth from the man. Set primarily over the course of one unrelenting night, Denis’s film, based on Bernard-Marie Koltès’s play Black Battles with Dogs, also drifts on the neurotic vibrations of Horn’s alienated younger wife (Mia McKenna-Bruce), just arrived from London, and his live-wire right-hand man (Tom Blyth), to whom Horn owes a secret debt. All these simmering tensions converge in Denis’s unpredictable and intimate film, with which the French director returns to the subjects of colonialism and racial segregation so central to her unparalleled filmography.

Gavagai
Ulrich Köhler, 2025, Germany/France, 91m
French, English, German, and Wolof with English subtitles
World Premiere

Gavagai

In this charged, unexpected metacinematic drama from German director Ulrich Köhler (In My Room, NYFF56), a radical new movie production of Medea, drastically altered from Euripides’s original play, becomes the center of a series of unresolvable contemporary tensions. Nourou (Jean-Christophe Folly) and Maja (Maren Eggert) embody Jason and Medea on-screen, tussling with the film’s high-anxiety director (Nathalie Richard) during the shoot in Senegal, all the while negotiating an adulterous romance off-set. Later, at the film’s premiere in Berlin, Nourou, unresolved in his personal and professional life, has a rattling run-in with a racist security guard, which throws his—and the film’s—world off its axis. Köhler specializes in cunning, tonally surprising films about cross-cultural disconnection, and Gavagai is his most ambitious and expansive film yet—a pinpoint-accurate account of moral crises and social biases, modern and ancient, internal and external. 

A House of Dynamite
Kathryn Bigelow, 2025, U.S., 112m
North American Premiere

A House of Dynamite. Courtesy of Netflix.

At a remote military outpost, an unidentified incoming missile is detected, setting in motion an escalating series of actions and reactions across all levels of the United States government. With her trademark dynamic kineticism, Kathryn Bigelow (Strange Days, NYFF33 Centerpiece) puts the viewer in the center of a crisis in which decisions must be made in limited time, based on incomplete and evolving information and untested protocols. Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim construct a frighteningly plausible scenario in which a multitude of dilemmas—practical and personal, bureaucratic and existential—overlap in real time and at a mounting rate. The film’s prismatic structure allows for a broad-scale thriller that entangles intimate dramas with an unfolding world-historic event, and the terrific ensemble cast, which includes Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, and Tracy Letts, conjures vivid characters with muscular efficiency, bringing emotional depth to this taut, thought-provoking exploration of an all-too-believable nightmare. A Netflix release.

I Only Rest in the Storm / O Riso e a Faca
Pedro Pinho, 2025, Portugal/Brazil/France/Romania, 211m
Portuguese and Creole with English subtitles
North American Premiere

I Only Rest in the Storm

The charming, well-meaning environmental engineer Sergio (Sérgio Coragem) has traveled from Lisbon to Guinea-Bissau to meet with locals and research the possibility of his European company constructing a road that will connect the city areas to rural villages. While drifting through his revelatory trip, Sergio tentatively makes friends and lovers, talks to people who either embrace or abhor the possible project, and falls into conversations and confrontations about his place in this world: friend or interloper, lover or enemy? Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Pinho’s epic yet scrappy—and sexually fluid—I Only Rest in the Storm is a playful and loose-limbed portrayal of the contemporary postcolonialist liberal mindset that cleverly cuts to the bone in one entertaining scene after another, and features an outstanding supporting performance by Cleo Diára (who won Best Actress in the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival) as a local businesswoman and bar owner who suffers no fools.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Mary Bronstein, 2025, U.S., 113m
New York Premiere

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Courtesy of A24.

The nightmarish stresses of motherhood and work are pushed to their absurdist extremes in Mary Bronstein’s stellar piece of cinematic anxiety, starring a bravura Rose Byrne as a woman on the verge of something far beyond a nervous breakdown. A therapist whose life has become one crisis after another, Linda (Byrne) and her young daughter (who requires a feeding tube due to a mysterious illness) have had to relocate to a motel following a cataclysmic ceiling leak in their house. Meanwhile, her own therapist and colleague (Conan O’Brien, unlike you’ve ever seen him) has reached his own boiling point, her toughest patient (Danielle Macdonald) is a needy bundle of nerves that’s spilling over into Linda’s personal life, and her belligerent husband (Christian Slater) is unhelpfully away on a business trip. Bronstein’s breathless, pressure-cooker visual approach and Byrne’s fearlessly committed performance (which earned her the Silver Bear at this year’s Berlinale) contribute to a full-throttle film that depicts life as a series of never-ending fires—without losing its sense of fanciful humor. An A24 release.

It Was Just an Accident / Un simple accident
Jafar Panahi, 2025, Iran/France/Luxembourg, 105m
Persian with English subtitles
New York Premiere

It Was Just an Accident. Courtesy of NEON.

Jafar Panahi (No Bears, NYFF60) reaffirms his status as one of this century’s great cinematic heroes with perhaps his bravest film yet, which won him the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Ever since he was arrested, imprisoned, and banned from making movies by the Iranian government 15 years ago, Panahi has found ways of producing films in secret and without official permission. Showing his political risk-taking as well as his confident command of craft, It Was Just an Accident is his most explicit attack on his country’s repressive regime, a cutting and darkly humorous thriller that concerns a mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who believes he has reencountered by chance the government intelligence officer, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), who had tortured him while under detainment. As Vahid enlists the services of acquaintances whose lives were also forever altered by Eghbal’s cruelties, the thirst for revenge and the sense of danger escalate—as do questions of moral choice and culpability. A NEON release.

Jay Kelly
Noah Baumbach, 2025, U.K./U.S./Italy, 132m
New York Premiere

Jay Kelly. Courtesy of Netflix.

In his most captivating film role in years, George Clooney is cast—fittingly—as the last great movie star. Jay Kelly is at a crisis point: uninspired by his work, reeling from the loss of his mentor, and tormented by a run-in with a haunting figure from his past, he does the unthinkable, backing out of a big new production at the 11th hour in order to run off to Europe and catch up with his college-bound daughter in France before attending a career tribute in Italy. Unable to entirely shed his Hollywood skin, he finds himself trailed by his entourage, including his long-suffering manager (played by a marvelously fragile Adam Sandler). At once introspective and raucous, the stellar character study Jay Kelly peeks at Hollywood narcissism with curiosity rather than judgment. Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story, NYFF57 Centerpiece) and co-writer Emily Mortimer walk a delicate balance between industry parody and heartfelt sentiment, moving in and out of Jay’s past and present, fantasy and reality, probing the professional, familial, and moral life of a man for whom “all my memories are movies”—and who may be harboring more regrets than he cares to admit. A Netflix release.

Kontinental ’25
Radu Jude, 2025, Romania, 109m
Romanian with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Kontinental ’25. Courtesy of 1-2 Special.

Following his recent triumphs Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (NYFF59) and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (NYFF61), Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude further confirms his status as the preeminent satirist of our contemporary sociopolitical miasma with this sly, gutting tale of a modern crisis of conscience. In the city of Cluj, located within the country’s Transylvania region, a bailiff named Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) evicts the homeless Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) from the unused cellar of a local house to make way for the construction of the Kontinental boutique hotel. Her fateful decision proves to have great consequences, and Jude tracks her subsequent guilt trip with merciless humanity, echoing Rossellini’s Europa ’51. Rather than rely on simplistic caricature, Jude tells this story of Eastern European economic expansion, berserk nationalism, and the inability to create meaningful change with crushing relatability. Jude won the Silver Bear for best screenplay at this year’s Berlinale. A 1-2 Special release.

Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks)
Lucrecia Martel, 2025, Argentina/U.S./Mexico/France/Netherlands/Denmark, 122m
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere

Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks)

In October 2009, Javier Chocobar, a member of the Indigenous Chuchagasta community in northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province, tried to defend himself and his people from being forcibly evicted from their land by a local landowner and two former police officers. As a result, the 68-year-old man was shot and killed, and two other community members were wounded. In her expansive and enlightening first feature documentary, the great Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (Zama, NYFF55) takes a sweeping approach to this tragic true story, triangulating the murder trial of the three men, the lives of Chocobar and his fellow Chuchagasta people, and the centuries-old, colonialist legacy of land and property theft across Latin America. With a ravishing, at times vertiginous visual approach to filming the natural beauty of the contested land, Martel pays cinematic tribute to people whom history has systematically tried to erase.

The Last One for the Road / Le Città di Pianura
Francesco Sossai, 2025, Italy/Germany, 100m
Italian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

The Last One for the Road

Aimlessly if coolly navigating the absurdities of middle age, Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) and Carlo (Sergio Romano) make for delightful company in Italian director Francesco Sossai’s genial, wistful hangout movie. The two best friends, who can never seem to make that “one last drink” truly the last, imbibe and bicker and trade anecdotes as they traverse the Venetian countryside, befriending an anxious architecture student, Giulio (Filippo Scotti), who’s cramming for an upcoming design exam. Imparting their screwball wisdom to Giulio, and even roping the younger man into some of their half-baked capers, Doriano and Carlo are welcome emissaries from an increasingly lost generation, disillusioned and adrift in our mercenary world yet holding on to the fleeting joys of life. Sossai has created a freeform, energetic comedy that echoes work by Aki Kaurismäki and Richard Linklater yet has its own beautiful sense of rhythm and revelation.

Late Fame
Kent Jones, 2025, U.S., 96m
North American Premiere

Late Fame. Courtesy of Late Fame LLC.

A wonderfully introspective Willem Dafoe lends his delicate gravitas to the role of Ed Saxberger, a once-upon-a-time New York poet who has worked at a post office for nearly four decades, his work now largely forgotten. After an eager and flattering young fan (Edmund Donovan) appears on his doorstep one night, Saxberger is welcomed into a new coterie of twentysomething admirers who hope to make him the central figure in an emerging literary salon. Intoxicated by the attention—and the presence of the wannabe tragedienne Gloria (a sinuous, Kurt Weill–crooning Greta Lee)—Saxberger nevertheless must reckon with the authenticity of this newfound circle of aspirants. Kent Jones’s thoughtful and marvelously witty second feature adapts Arthur Schnitzler’s recently rediscovered novella Late Fame (in a sly, hugely entertaining script by Oscar-nominated May December writer Samy Burch), updating the Austrian writer’s take on turn-of-the-century Vienna for a wistful yet unromantic look at a lost idea of downtown New York.

The Love That Remains / Ástin Sem Eftir Er
Hlynur Pálmason, 2025, Iceland/Denmark/Sweden/France, 109m
Icelandic, English, Swedish, and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

The Love That Remains. Courtesy of Janus Films.

Charting the gradual evolution of a family in the midst of an irreparable fracture, The Love That Remains is a poignant, crisply pointillistic domestic drama that observes life’s changes with humor and whimsy, set against the majestic, ever-shifting Icelandic landscape. Visual artist Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and fisherman Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason) were teenage sweethearts but have recently grown apart, and Magnús has moved out of the house. As long as the newly estranged parents put on a good face, the children—and their adorable sheepdog Panda (who won the prestigious Palme Dog award at Cannes)—seem to take the split in stride. Yet as Magnús becomes increasingly alienated from his domestic life, harsh reality can’t help but bubble to the surface. Hlynur Pálmason’s follow-up to his austere 19th-century drama Godland is a constantly surprising film with an immaculate sense of framing and pacing—and an evocative, dulcet piano score by Harry Hunt—dotted with idiosyncratic flights of fancy that never detract from the central emotional authenticity. A Janus Films release.

Magellan / Magalhães
Lav Diaz, 2025, Portugal/Spain/France/Philippines/Taiwan, 160m
Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Magellan. Courtesy of Janus Films.

Every astonishing visual composition carries historical and political weight in the monumental new film from singular Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz (Norte, The End of History, NYFF51). Gael García Bernal brilliantly subordinates his stardom to Diaz’s discerning camera, disappearing into the role of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who, at the start of the 16th century, navigated a crew to Southeast Asia after convincing the Spanish crown to fund his journey. Rather than retell the mythical, received narratives of the Age of Discovery, Diaz mounts an impressive and absorbing story of colonial conquest and obsession, depicting Magellan’s charted course to the Malayan Archipelago as a pitiless reckoning with human frailty and brutal violence as much as an evocation of overwhelming natural beauty. A Janus Films release.

The Mastermind
Kelly Reichardt, 2025, U.S., 110m
New York Premiere

The Mastermind. Courtesy of MUBI.

In early-1970s Framingham, Massachusetts, taciturn family man James (Josh O’Connor) makes the rash, largely inscrutable decision to orchestrate a heist at the local art museum, absconding with a selection of modern paintings—without much of a plan. This autumnal, restrained, and often quite funny anti-thriller from Kelly Reichardt (Showing Up, NYFF60) sets this low-key criminal enterprise against a Nixon-era backdrop of alienation and political disillusionment. As always, Reichardt’s impeccable craft is front and center: the film’s naturalism and remarkable period detail creating a portrait of unerring authenticity and psychological mystery. Whether driven by social apathy or artistic passion, James—effortlessly played by O’Connor with hangdog elegance—registers as a compelling update of the ’70s American male loner archetype for another dispiriting, directionless time. A MUBI release.

Miroirs No. 3
Christian Petzold, 2025, Germany, 86m
German with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Miroirs No. 3. Courtesy of 1-2 Special.

In the haunting new film from esteemed German director Christian Petzold (Transit, NYFF56), his regular star Paula Beer plays Laura, a pianist from Berlin who finds herself in a transitory state. After surviving a violent car crash that kills her boyfriend, Laura is immediately taken in by Betty (Barbara Auer), a mysterious middle-aged woman who lives alone in an isolated house in the countryside. Strangers to one another, the two women build a quiet, respectful life together, though the reemergence of Betty’s estranged husband and son sheds light on the tragic past that explains the murky present. The pleasurable enigma of Miroirs No. 3, named for a Ravel piano suite, returns Petzold to the metaphysical ambiguity of earlier films like Yella (2007) and the themes of doubling in his cherished Phoenix (2014), yet with a distinctive ethereality all its own: It’s an economical and beautifully crafted work about the mystery of human interaction. A 1-2 Special release. 

No Other Choice / 어쩔수가없다
Park Chan-wook, 2025, South Korea, 139m
Korean with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

No Other Choice. Courtesy of NEON.

In his diabolical new thriller, Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave, NYFF60) crafts a dark fable about the cutthroat nature of contemporary work culture and the domestic desperation for material comfort. In a fine tightrope-walk of a performance, Lee Byung-hun brings humor and likability to the tricky role of Man-soo, a middle-aged husband and father who has been laid off from the paper manufacturing company to which he has devoted decades of his life. After an extended and increasingly worrisome period of unemployment, Man-soo begins to take merciless measures toward solidifying his standing with a potential new employer, leading to wild—and ever more absurd—acts of violence, crafted by Park in his inimitable and extravagant pitch-black comic style. Adapted from the Donald E. Westlake novel The Ax, updated for our precarious moment in time, Park’s No Other Choice is enthralling all the way to its brilliant bitter pill of an ending. A NEON release.

Peter Hujar’s Day
Ira Sachs, 2025, U.S., 76m
New York Premiere

Peter Hujar’s Day. Courtesy of Janus Films.

The photographer Peter Hujar, whose images exist in an important lineage and dialogue with the work of groundbreaking gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz, forms the center of the latest movie by fearless independent American filmmaker Ira Sachs (Passages). Based on rediscovered transcripts from an unused 1974 interview by nonfiction writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall), in which she asked Hujar (Ben Whishaw) to narrate the events of the previous day in minute detail, Sachs’s film is a mesmerizing time warp, an illustration of the life of the creative mind, the quotidian and the imaginative at once, fully and lovingly inhabited by its two brilliant actors. With this engrossing and wholly unexpected film, Sachs shuttles us back to a specific moment in New York queer cultural history and a still-influential art scene that lives on in words as much as images. A Janus Films release.

Resurrection / 狂野时代
Bi Gan, 2025, China/France, 156m
Chinese with English subtitles
New York Premiere

Resurrection. Courtesy of Janus Films.

This phantasmagoric dream machine from visionary Chinese director Bi Gan (Long Day’s Journey Into Night, NYFF56) is an elusive yet monumental love letter to a century of cinema. Unfolding over five chapters that feature a dazzling array of styles, Resurrection is a cascade of imagery united by a luminous mythopoetic conceit: in a sci-fi-coded world where people have lost the desire to dream in the hopes of prolonging life, rogue “fantasmers” continue to stoke their imaginations and exist within unreality. From this magical premise, the film sends its ever-morphing protagonist (Jackson Yee) through a series of genres, from Méliès-inflected silent fantasy to wartime thriller to con-artist buddy picture to millennial vampire romance—the latter depicted in one of Bi’s customary, and ever astonishing, single takes. Even within genre parameters, the director never takes the road well-traveled, offering jolts and marvels around every corner. Resurrection is one of the most audacious and ambitious gifts for cinematic thrill-seekers in many a moon. A Janus Films release.

Romería
Carla Simón, 2025, Spain/Germany, 112m
Spanish, Catalan, and French with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Romería

Amidst the jagged cliffs and summery, sun-kissed shores of Vigo, on the Atlantic coast of Galicia in Spain, 18-year-old Marina (the arresting Llúcia Garcia) has arrived on a deeply personal mission. Having lost both of her parents at a very young age, the orphaned young woman has set off on a journey to meet her paternal grandparents and extended family for the first time. While connecting with her affectionate, teeming new clan, Marina also is forced to reconcile with the past, negotiating her idealized memories of her parents and difficult truths that have been long buried. Alternating between 2004 and the early 1980s, evoked in hallucinatory, grainy flashbacks, Romería achingly dramatizes the processes of creating new memories and holding onto fleeting ones. Carla Simón (Alcarràs, NYFF60) proves again with this delicate, naturalistic, and poignantly autobiographical film that she is an essential voice in international cinema.

Rose of Nevada
Mark Jenkin, 2025, U.K., 114m
U.S. Premiere

Rose of Nevada

The singular Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin (Enys Men, NYFF60) brings his distinctive and bold storytelling approach to his most expansive work yet. Again immersing the viewer in the uncanny environments of the small towns along the coast of Cornwall, Jenkin spins a sci-fi-tinged tale of dislocation and regeneration. In a tiny, sparsely populated fishing village, a boat that had been lost at sea 30 years ago, the Rose of Nevada, suddenly reappears portside, fully intact and without its long-missing crew. Two local neophyte fishermen desperate for work (George MacKay and Callum Turner) take jobs on the boat as it sets out for a good-luck return voyage. When they return, all is no longer what it once was. Shot on 16mm, this earthy, psychological portrait of a working-class community’s cyclical existence is an atmospheric plunge into the eerie.

The Secret Agent / O Agente Secreto
Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025, Brazil/France/Netherlands/Germany, 159m
Portuguese with English subtitles
New York Premiere

The Secret Agent. Courtesy of NEON.

The Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who has gifted us such breathtakers as Aquarius (NYFF54) and Bacurau (NYFF57), returns with a thrillingly unpredictable, empowering political fable about people swept up in forces beyond their control. A dynamic, shape-shifting epic set in Mendonça’s hometown of Recife during the late 1970s, The Secret Agent earned him the Best Director award at Cannes. Wagner Moura was also deservedly honored as Best Actor at the festival for his magnetic performance as a widowed former university researcher whose life has been violently upended by the greed and vengeance of a government bureaucrat. On the run and living under an alias during the country’s military dictatorship, he tries to escape, while also reconnecting with the young son he had to leave behind. Even this brief description cannot fully prepare the viewer for the zigzagging subplots and delights of Mendonça’s eccentric and affectionate ode to the movies and the Brazil of his youth—and to maintaining individuality amid abuses of power. A NEON release.

Sentimental Value / Affeksjonsverdi
Joachim Trier, 2025, Norway/France/Denmark/Germany, 134m
Norwegian and English with English subtitles
New York Premiere

Sentimental Value. Courtesy of NEON.

In Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his beloved The Worst Person in the World (NYFF59), Renate Reinsve burrows to the steely core of Nora Borg, an acclaimed stage actress going through the first rumblings of a personal crisis after the death of her mother. She and her devoted therapist sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), are suddenly forced to confront long-suppressed elements of their past when their estranged movie-director father, Gustav (a wonderfully restrained Stellan Skarsgård, conveying a world of regret in the smallest of gestures) returns with a script he has written for Nora. After she refuses the role, Gustav turns to an American movie star (Elle Fanning), further complicating his own attempt at reconciliation. Trier’s insightful and captivating adult drama, which won the Grand Prix at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, furthers the writer-director’s piercing exploration of the frayed ties that bind us to one another and to our creative selves. A NEON release.

Sirât
Oliver Laxe, 2025, France/Spain, 115m
Spanish and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Sirât. Courtesy of NEON.

The glorious and forbidding Moroccan desert provides the backdrop for this extraordinary psychological journey from Oliver Laxe (Fire Will Come, NYFF57), a Galician filmmaker of startling ambition. Sergi López plays middle-aged Luis, whose worry over the disappearance of his daughter Mar has brought him, along with his young son, to Morocco. He believes she has fallen in with a group of nomadic thrill-seekers who are in pursuit of the next big rave in the desert. Tagging along with them in a makeshift caravan in the hopes he will find Mar, Luis is pushed toward emotional and physical extremes that extend far past his everyday comprehension. Even beyond the pulsing techno soundtrack and the majestic desolation of the landscape, Sirât (the title referring to the Islamic term for the razor-thin bridge between heaven and hell) creates a sensory experience of audacity and shock that touches the sublime. Joint winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A NEON release.

Sound of Falling / In die Sonne schauen
Mascha Schilinski, 2025, Germany, 149m
German with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Sound of Falling. Courtesy of MUBI.

You can feel the presence of ghosts in the rooms and environs of a rural farmhouse in German filmmaker Mascha Schilinski’s highly accomplished multigenerational saga. Sound of Falling skips back and forth through time, alighting on moments of both horror and grace across a century in the lives of four women—adolescent and adult—inhabiting the same unsettled spaces. Using a fragmentary, collage-like approach that unites characters from different eras, from the turn of the 20th century to the post–World World II era to the years of GDR rule and on to the present, Schilinski treats history like a constant haunting. Both sobering and dreamlike, with moments of genuine tenderness, her film bears witness to cycles of trauma and creates a devastating indictment of historical patriarchal abuse. Above all, it confirms the arrival of a major new talent, whose visionary narrative technique creates a fresh and striking cinematic grammar. Joint winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A MUBI release. 

Two Prosecutors
Sergei Loznitsa, 2025, France/Germany/Netherlands/Latvia/Romania/Lithuania, 118m
Russian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Two Prosecutors. Courtesy of Janus Films.

The latest film from the great Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa (My Joy, NYFF48) is a scalpel-precise tale of the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy. Adapting a novel by Soviet writer and political prisoner Georgy Demidov, set in the Soviet Union in 1937, Loznitsa follows the attempts of an idealistic government-appointed prosecutor (Alexander Kuznetsov) to expose the mistreatment of a dissident Bolshevik writer who has been jailed and tortured without evidence of wrongdoing. As he gradually comes to realize, the lack of cause for the man’s imprisonment is hardly unique under Stalin’s regime, and the neophyte lawyer may be putting himself in danger by exposing his own moral righteousness. Loznitsa constructs his story with a patient yet unmistakable sense of mounting dread, focusing on the devastating minutiae that allows fascism to function in our world. A Janus Films release.

What Does That Nature Say to You / 그 자연이 네게 뭐라고 하니
Hong Sangsoo, 2025, South Korea, 108m
Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere

What Does That Nature Say to You. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.

Over the winding course of one languorous day, a good-natured thirtysomething poet, Donghwa (Ha Seongguk), visits the suburban home of his girlfriend, Junhee (Kang Soyi), and is introduced to her parents (Kwon Haehyo and Cho Yunhee) and sister (Park Miso) for the first time. Dazzled by the size of the home and the beauty of its rural environs, Seoul-dweller Donghwa bonds with the family, especially the benevolent patriarch, for whom family, tradition, and filial devotion seem paramount. Yet as the hours drift by—and, of course, the makgeolli flows—Donghwa’s anxieties gradually surface. Combining the casual familiarity of a meet-the-parents scenario with the lo-fi visual experimentation of his recent work like In Water (NYFF61), Hong Sangsoo’s latest keeps revealing new emotional layers, finally offering a rich examination of economic anxiety and contemporary alienation. A Cinema Guild release.

Secure your tickets with Festival Passes, limited quantities on sale now. Single tickets go on sale September 18 at noon ET.

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER
Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) is a nonprofit organization that celebrates cinema as an essential art form and fosters a vibrant home for film culture to thrive. FLC presents premier film festivals, retrospectives, new releases, and restorations year-round in state-of-the-art theaters at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. FLC offers audiences the opportunity to discover works from established and emerging directors from around the world with a passionate community of film lovers at marquee events including the New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films.  

Founded in 1969, FLC is committed to preserving the excitement of the theatrical experience for all audiences, advancing high-quality film journalism through the publication of Film Comment, cultivating the next generation of film industry professionals through our FLC Academies, and enriching the lives of all who engage with our programs.

Rolex is the Official Partner and Exclusive Timepiece of Film at Lincoln Center. 

Support for the New York Film Festival is also generously provided by Official Partner The New York Times; Supporting Partner Netflix; Contributing Partners Kino Film Collection from Kino Lorber Media Group, The Travel Agency: A Cannabis Store, Dolby, BritBox, New York Film Academy, the School of Visual Arts BFA Film, IMDbPro, Epson America, Inc., Manhattan Portage, and Thompson Central Park New York; Media Partners Variety, Deadline, WABC-TV, The Hollywood Reporter, The WNET Group, IndieWire, and The Envelope by the Los Angeles Times. Additional support is provided in part by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. American Airlines is the Official Airline of Film at Lincoln Center.

For more information, visit filmlinc.org and follow @TheNYFF on X, Instagram, and Bluesky.

August 8, 2024

The following is a combination of press releases from Film at Lincoln Center:

Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) announces the 32 films that comprise the Main Slate of the 62nd New York Film Festival (NYFF), taking place September 27–October 14 at Lincoln Center and in four partner venues across the city: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) (Brooklyn), The Bronx Museum (Bronx), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens).

Secure your seats with Festival Passes, limited quantities on sale now. Single tickets go on sale September 17 at noon ET.

This year’s Main Slate features films across 24 countries, 18 directors making their NYFF Main Slate debut, celebrated films from festivals worldwide, and two World, five North American, and 16 U.S. premieres. Films from festivals worldwide include Cannes prizewinners Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (Grand Prize), Sean Baker’s Anora (Palme d’Or), Roberto Minervini’s The Damned (Best Director, Un Certain Regard, shared with Rungano Nyoni), Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour (Best Director), Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Best Director, Un Certain Regard, shared with Roberto Minervini), and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Special Prize). At this year’s Berlinale, Mati Diop’s Dahomey won the Golden Bear; Hong Sangsoo’s A Traveler’s Needs received the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize; No Other Land, directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor, took the Panorama Audience Award and the Berlinale Documentary Award; and Philippe Lesage’s Who by Fire won the Grand Prize of the Generation section.

“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world,” said Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, New York Film Festival. “The most notable thing about the films in the Main Slate—and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks—is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality. They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in, and reimagine the world.”

World premieres from two uncompromising U.S. directors will be featured: Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury, a nonfiction portrait of would-be presidential assassin Sara Jane Moore dramatized against the background of 1970s political unrest and militancy; and Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, a documentary on the persistence of independent journalism in Putin’s Russia during the period leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Beyond these two timely films, the festival lineup directly and indirectly addresses a range of socio-political concerns from the legacy of war and colonialism to the impact of a globalized economy to contemporary anxieties over authoritarianism and surveillance.

Of special note, two esteemed directors will each bring two films to the festival: Hong Sangsoo’s 22nd and 23rd Main Slate appearances with A Traveler’s Needs and By the Stream; and following Wang Bing’s U.S. premiere of Youth (Spring) at NYFF61, the remaining chapters of the “Youth” trilogy: Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming), which will have respective world premieres at the Locarno Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival. FLC also welcomes the return of many acclaimed filmmakers, among them David Cronenberg with The Shrouds; Alain Guiraudie with Misericordia; Mike Leigh with Hard Truths; and Paul Schrader with Oh, Canada.

Directors making their NYFF Main Slate debut are Brady Corbet, Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias, Payal Kapadia, Philippe Lesage, Carson Lund, Pia Marais, Roberto Minervini, Rungano Nyoni, Mohammad Rasoulof, RaMell Ross, Neo Sora, Trương Minh Quý, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Yeo Siew Hua, and the collective of Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor. De los Santos Arias, Kapadia, Minervini, Sora, Trương, and Tsangari have previously shown their work in other sections of NYFF; Lesage, Marais, Ross, and Yeo have been featured in New Directors/New Films.

As previously announced, the Opening Night selection is RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys; Pedro Almodóvar’s 15th NYFF selection, The Room Next Door, is the Centerpiece; and Steve McQueen’s eighth NYFF selection, Blitz, is Closing Night. Currents, Revivals, Spotlight, and Talks sections will be announced in the coming weeks—sign up for NYFF updates for the latest news.

The NYFF Main Slate selection committee is chaired by Dennis Lim, NYFF Artistic Director, and includes Florence Almozini, Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, and Rachel Rosen.

NYFF62 is generously supported by Co-Chairs Almudena and Pablo Legorreta, Imelda and Peter Sobiloff, and Nanna and Dan Stern; and Vice-Chairs Susannah Gray and John Lyons, and Tara Kelleher and Roy Zuckerberg.

All NYFF62 documentaries are presented by HBO®.

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival is an annual showcase of the best in world cinema. Since 1963, NYFF has shaped film culture and continues an enduring tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The 62nd edition of the festival takes place September 27–October 14, 2024.

Secure your seats with Festival Passes, limited quantities on sale now with discounts through August 20. NYFF62 single tickets will go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, September 17 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date. Become an FLC Member by August 13 to secure pre-sale access. NYFF62 press and industry accreditation is now open through August 19. 

62nd New York Film Festival Main Slate

Opening Night
Nickel Boys
Dir. RaMell Ross

Centerpiece
The Room Next Door
Dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Closing Night
Blitz
Dir. Steve McQueen

All We Imagine as Light
Dir. Payal Kapadia

Anora
Dir. Sean Baker

April
Dir. Dea Kulumbegashvili

The Brutalist
Dir. Brady Corbet

By the Stream
Dir. Hong Sangsoo

Caught by the Tides
Dir. Jia Zhangke

Dahomey
Dir. Mati Diop

The Damned
Dir. Roberto Minervini

Eephus
Dir. Carson Lund

Grand Tour
Dir. Miguel Gomes

Happyend
Dir. Neo Sora

Hard Truths
Dir. Mike Leigh

Harvest
Dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari

Misericordia
Dir. Alain Guiraudie

My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow
Dir. Julia Loktev

No Other Land
Dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor

Oh, Canada
Dir. Paul Schrader

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Dir. Rungano Nyoni

Pepe
Dir. Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias

The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Dir. Mohammad Rasoulof

The Shrouds
Dir. David Cronenberg

Stranger Eyes
Dir. Yeo Siew Hua

Suburban Fury
Dir. Robinson Devor

Transamazonia
Dir. Pia Marais

A Traveler’s Needs
Dir. Hong Sangsoo

​​Việt and Nam
Dir. Trương Minh Quý

Who by Fire
Dir. Philippe Lesage

Youth (Hard Times)
Dir. Wang Bing

Youth (Homecoming)
Dir. Wang Bing

62nd New York Film Festival Main Slate Films and Descriptions

Opening Night
Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross, 2024, U.S., 140m

Rare is the film of a major book that maintains the power and precision of its source material while also generating its own singular aesthetic. Yet RaMell Ross’s extraordinary realization of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2019 novel, about two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida, achieves just this. In breakout performances that cut to the bone, Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson play Elwood and Turner, whose close friendship helps sustain their hope even as the horrors mount around them at the Nickel Academy, which becomes a microcosm of American racism in the mid-20th century. Ross, whose unforgettable Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (Closing Night of New Directors/New Films, 2018) portrayed an Alabama community in moments of revelatory intimacy, has here fashioned a film of equal daring and intensity, buoyed by expressive, shallow-focus cinematography by Jomo Fray (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt), pinpoint-precise editing by Nicholas Monsour (NOPE), and deeply felt supporting performances from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Hamish Linklater, and Daveed Diggs. Inspired by actual events, this harrowing tale comes to vivid life via an ingenious visual approach that brilliantly adapts the novel’s exercise in subjectivity. Ross’s Nickel Boys sets the beauty of the natural world against the cruel realities of American racism, and confirms its maker’s status as a visionary cinematic artist. An Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios release.

Centerpiece
The Room Next Door
Pedro Almodóvar, 2024, Spain, 106m
U.S. Premiere

Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a best-selling writer, rekindles her relationship with her friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war journalist with whom she has lost touch for a number of years. The two women immerse themselves in their pasts, sharing memories, anecdotes, art, movies—yet Martha has a request that will test their newly strengthened bond. Pedro Almodóvar’s finely sculpted drama, his first English-language feature, is the unmistakable work of a master filmmaker, a hushed and humane portrayal of the beauty of life and the inevitability of death, graced with incandescent performances by Moore and Swinton that tap the very essence of being. Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s treasure of a novel, What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar has exquisitely reframed his career-long fascination with the lives of women for an American vernacular, capturing Manhattan and upstate New York with enraptured affection. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Closing Night
Blitz
Steve McQueen, 2024, U.K., 114m
North American Premiere

Blitz, an authentic and astonishing recreation of London during its blitzkrieg by the Germans during World War II, pushes the artistry of Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, NYFF51) to ever more impressive levels. Working on a vast scale, McQueen sets things at human eye level, telling his original tale from the parallel perspectives of working-class single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her 9-year-old son, George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), as they become separated within the labyrinth of a city under siege. Alternately overwhelming and tender, McQueen’s dazzling film offers a multicultural portrait of 1940s London too infrequently seen on screens. While Ronan and Heffernan emotionally match one another beat for beat, the supporting cast, including Kathy Burke, Benjamin Clémentine, Harris Dickinson, Stephen Graham, Hayley Squires, and Paul Weller, is uniformly superb, fleshing out a film that feels positively Dickensian in its scope and storytelling. An Apple Original Films release.

All We Imagine as Light
Payal Kapadia, 2024, France/India/Netherlands/Luxembourg, 118m
Malayalam and Hindi with English subtitles

The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated with a vivid, humane richness by Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)—and a newly retired coworker Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on prosaic moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is pursued by a courtly doctor; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside resort with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actors with an unforced expressivity and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

Anora
Sean Baker, 2024, U.S., 138m
English and Russian with English subtitles

This year’s rambunctious Palme d’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival is a pure shot of frenetic pleasure, a New York odyssey that is the most immersive and accomplished comic adventure yet from American original Sean Baker (The Florida Project, NYFF55; Red Rocket, NYFF59). In a thrilling, star-making performance, Mikey Madison plays Annie, a tough-as-nails exotic dancer from Brighton Beach suddenly thrust into the lap of luxury when she’s whisked away on a whirlwind romance with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), an obscenely wealthy young customer at her strip club. However, Ivan turns out to be the spoiled scion of Russian oligarchs, and Annie’s wild ride is anything but your average rags-to-riches story. Baker always takes a good-natured, sociological approach to his subject matter and milieu, and here he has created an authentic 21st-century screwball comedy that tackles sex, love, class, and money with matter-of-fact directness. A NEON release.

April
Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024, France/Georgia/Italy, 134m
Georgian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili follows her striking debut feature Beginning (NYFF58), which told the story of a wife and mother persecuted for her religious beliefs in a provincial village, with this tenebrous, provocative drama about the precarious social position of a woman living in an isolated community. When a newborn baby dies after an otherwise routine delivery, obstetrician Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) falls under suspicion for negligence, her standing in the small town further jeopardized by people’s knowledge that she also provides illegal abortion services to local women. Shot by Arseni Khachaturan (Bones and All), balancing long-take realism and nightmarish expressionism, April is a complex and disquieting depiction of a caregiver in crisis, rich with haunting, metaphorical imagery that feels emanated from its maker’s subconscious.

The Brutalist
Brady Corbet, 2024, U.S., 215m (incl. 15m intermission)
English, Hungarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Italian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

In this towering vision from American director Brady Corbet (Vox Lux), an accomplished Hungarian Jewish architect and World War II survivor named László Toth (Adrien Brody) reconstructs his life in America, reconnecting with family in Pennsylvania. While awaiting news of his wife’s relocation from Budapest, fate leads the Bauhaus-instructed genius into the orbit of the volatile Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an obscenely wealthy captain of industry, who leads him to both professional success and personal chaos. Co-written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold, this richly detailed recreation of postwar America is alternately hopeful and nightmarish in its portrayal of immigrant living, accruing in meaning and power as it builds to its overwhelming final passages. Interweaving a provocative tapestry of ideas around privilege, money, religious identity, architectural aesthetics, and the persistence of historical trauma, The Brutalist is an absorbing, brilliantly acted American epic that reminds us the past is always present. Also starring Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Isaach De Bankolé, Stacy Martin, and Alessandro Nivola. 

By the Stream
Hong Sangsoo, 2024, South Korea, 111m
Korean with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Successful former director Chu Sieon (Kwon Haehyo), now working quietly as a bookshop owner, has arrived at a university to direct a short theater piece after its student director has been let go from the project. He appears at the invitation of his niece, Jeonim (Kim Minhee), an artist and teacher whom he hasn’t seen in 10 years. Living with regrets about decisions made at this very university decades earlier, Chu Sieon both rebuilds his family bond and forges a new one with the admiring Professor Jeong (Cho Yunhee). Hong Sangsoo’s latest portrait of people discovering emotional kinship and recharging their creative selves is wondrous in its simplicity yet expansive in feeling. By the Stream is a deeply affectionate rendering of the constant process of self-actualization, whether in youth or late middle-age, and features one of Hong’s most poignant scenes to date, in which Chu Sieon and the student actors share their hopes and promises for the future. A Cinema Guild release.

Caught by the Tides
Jia Zhangke, 2024, China, 111m
Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

The preeminent dramatist of China’s rapid 21st-century growth and social transformation, Jia Zhangke has taken his boldest approach to narrative yet with his marvelous Caught by the Tides. Assembled from footage shot over a span of 23 years—a beguiling mix of fiction and documentary, featuring a cascade of images taken from previous movies, unused scenes, and newly shot dramatic sequences—Caught by the Tides is a free-flowing work of unspoken longing, carried along more by music than dialogue as it looms around the edges of a poignant love story. The film mostly adheres to the perspective of Qiaoqiao (Jia’s immortal muse Zhao Tao) as she wanders an increasingly unrecognizable country in search of long-lost lover Bin (Li Zhubin), who left their home city of Datong seeking new financial prospects. The always captivating Zhao carries the film with her delicate expressiveness, while Jia constantly evokes cinema’s ability to capture the passage of time and the persistence of change: of people, landscapes, cities, politics, ideas. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

Dahomey
Mati Diop, 2024, France/Senegal/Benin, 67m
French with English subtitles

The African kingdom of Dahomey, which ruled over its region at the west of the continent until the turn of the 20th century, saw hundreds of its splendid royal artifacts plundered by French colonial troops in its waning days. Now, as 26 of these treasures are set to return to their homeland—now within the Republic of Benin—filmmaker Mati Diop documents their voyage back. As with her layered, supernaturally tinged Atlantics (NYFF57), Diop takes a singular approach to contemporary questions around belonging in our postcolonial world, transforming this rich subject matter into a multifaceted examination of ownership and exhibition, and employing multiple points of view, including—most strikingly—those of the artifacts themselves as they sail in darkness over the ocean to their rightful home. Alternating images of nocturnal melancholy and debates among students at Benin’s University of Abomey-Calavi about what should be done with the objects, Dahomey brilliantly negotiates a lost past and an unsure present. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival. A MUBI release.

The Damned
Roberto Minervini, 2024, Italy/U.S./Belgium, 88m
U.S. Premiere

A regiment of battle-fatigued Union soldiers makes its way west, forging ahead to survey the forbidding landscape of the Northwest frontier, in this transporting, existential Civil War drama from Italian-born director Roberto Minervini. The maker of What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (NYFF56) and Stop the Pounding Heart (New Directors/New Films 2014), gripping, idiosyncratic portraits of struggle on the margins of American life, Minervini applies his accomplished minimalist naturalism to the period war film, forgoing genre markers for an absorbing plunge into undying questions of morality and American identity. Punctuated by images of jarring violence and eerie beauty, and effectively cast with a troupe of compelling non-professional performers with weather-beaten faces, The Damned engages in the emotional and moral quandaries of fighting a homeland war whose purpose grows hazier as it trudges on. Winner of the Best Director Award in the 2024 Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section.

Eephus
Carson Lund, 2024, U.S./France, 98m
North American Premiere

For his gracefully accomplished debut feature, Carson Lund has fashioned perhaps the most elegiac baseball movie yet, a poignant celebration of a recent American past that already feels as though it has slipped away. Against an autumnal Massachusetts backdrop, sometime in the 1990s, the film lovingly nestles in with a pair of amateur recreation league teams as they play one last game at their beloved Soldiers Field before it’s torn down and paved over for the construction of a middle school. An afternoon of brilliant blue sky quietly fades into October twilight as the players battle and bond, trade barbs and memories, stretching their game out to extra innings, in no hurry to leave this hallowed space. Lund’s tranquil souvenir of a film captures the singular beauty of the sport itself. Recalling the work of Robert Altman and Richard Linklater, but with a touch of Tsai Ming-liang, Eephus (its title referring to a curveball so slow it confuses the batter) is a film about the passage of time—both the hours of the day and one era fading into another. A Music Box Films release.

Grand Tour
Miguel Gomes, 2024, Portugal/Italy/France, 128m
Portuguese with English subtitles

In this fanciful and high-spirited cinematic expedition, the uncommonly ambitious Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes (Tabu, NYFF50; Arabian Nights, NYFF53) takes a journey across East Asia, skipping through time and countries with delirious abandon to tell the tale of an unsettled couple from colonial England and the world as it both expands and closes in around them. It’s 1918, and Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) has escaped the clutches of beckoning marriage, leaving his bemused fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), in indefatigable pursuit. Edward gives chase from Mandalay to Bangkok to Shanghai and beyond, while Gomes responds with a splendid and enthralling series of scenes that use a magic form of cinema to situate us in these places both then and now, keeping us at a knowingly exotic traveler’s distance while also immersing us in rhythm, texture, and emotional reality. Whether black-and-white or color, zigzagging or meditative in tone, scripted or captured as documentary, Grand Tour is splendid, moving, and human-scaled. Winner of the Best Director prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. A MUBI release.

Happyend
Neo Sora, 2024, Japan/U.S., 113m
Japanese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Contemporary global anxieties over the gradual slide into governmental totalitarianism find an original and touching outlet in this resonant drama about youth culture in Japan. Neo Sora, making his fiction feature debut following his elegant music tribute Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (NYFF61), sets his film in a Tokyo high school sometime in the near future. Here, two best friends since childhood, Kou (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), run afoul of their disciplinarian principal (Shiro Sano), who has installed a draconian surveillance system after being the target of an elaborate prank. As the boys try to figure out how to align themselves within the increasingly oppressive education system, larger external forces summon further threats, including constant looming natural disasters. Sora’s absorbing and humane film tackles universal political fears, the tenuous bonds of friendship, and questions of individual will.

Hard Truths
Mike Leigh, 2024, U.K./Spain, 97m
U.S. Premiere

Mike Leigh returns to a contemporary milieu for the first time since Another Year (NYFF48) for this raw, uncompromising domestic drama that continues the great British filmmaker’s inquiries into the possibility for happiness and the limits of human connection. In a gutsy, excoriating performance, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, NYFF34) absorbs herself completely into the role of Pansy, a middle-aged, working-class woman whose emotional and physical health problems have metastasized into a profound and relentless anger that’s become toxic for everyone around her, including her husband, grown son, doctors, and even strangers on the street. Raging against every aspect of her domestic life and fearful of the world beyond, Pansy only finds potential solace in the unwavering love of her sister, Chantelle (a magnificent, gracious Michele Austin). Bringing his customary, thrilling eye for the details of human behavior and the complexities of social interaction, Leigh has created in close collaboration with his extraordinary cast a rigorous and unflinching look at a life in freefall. A Bleecker Street release.

Harvest
Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024, U.K./U.S./Germany/France, 131m
English and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, who deconstructed human behavior within bounded communities in Attenberg and Chevalier, sets her sights on entirely new environs in Harvest, which takes place in a remote village in medieval England. Adapted from the acclaimed novel by British writer Jim Crace, Tsangari’s film stars Caleb Landry Jones as Walter Thirsk, the former childhood friend and manservant of the village’s weak-willed landowner, Master Kent (Harry Melling). Marked by superstition and the scapegoating of outsiders, the town’s denizens fall under new threat after Kent’s iron-fisted city cousin comes into possession of the land, with new plans for agricultural profit. Shot in the sun-dappled Scottish countryside with natural light by cinematographer Sean Price Williams, Tsangari’s most ambitious work to date is both carnal and cerebral, a multifaceted reflection on man’s relationship to the land, rich in atmospherics and thematic resonance.   

Misericordia
Alain Guiraudie, 2024, France, 104m
French with English subtitles

The teasingly entwined ambiguities of love and death continue to fascinate Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake, NYFF51), who returns with a sharp, sinister, yet slyly funny thriller. Set in an autumnal, woodsy village in his native region of Occitanie, his latest follows the meandering exploits of Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), an out-of-work baker who has drifted back to his hometown after the death of his beloved former boss, a bakery owner. Staying long after the funeral, the seemingly benign Jérémie begins to casually insinuate himself into his mentor’s family, including his kind-hearted widow (Catherine Frot) and venomously angry son (Jean-Baptiste Durand), while making an increasingly surprising—and ultimately beneficial—friendship with an oddly cheerful local priest (Jacques Develay). In Guiraudie’s quietly carnal world, violence and eroticism explode with little anticipation, and criminal behavior can seem like a natural extension of physical desire. The French director is at the top of his game in Misericordia, again upending all genre expectations. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow
Julia Loktev, 2024, U.S., 322m
Russian with English subtitles
World Premiere

American filmmaker Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet, NYFF49), born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent journalism in Putin’s Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. With her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist for TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, Loktev ends up immersing herself with a group of young women fighting to ensure the vocalization of dissent and outspoken criticism of the country—even as they are branded by the government as “foreign agents,” their careers and lives increasingly at risk as the country creeps toward war. Structured in five chapters, Loktev’s film, the climactic days of which were filmed in Moscow during the first week of the invasion, when most independent journalists fled the country, is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety, as well as a vital depiction of the eternal hope that so many in Russia hold for living in a democratic state. Screening in two parts: Chapters 1–3 (198m), Chapters 4–5 (124m).

No Other Land
Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, 2024, Palestine/Norway, 95m
Arabic, English, and Hebrew with English subtitles

This eye-opening, vérité-style documentary, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors over the course of five years, provides a harrowing account of the systematic onslaught of destruction experienced by Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli military. Headed by Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham (also two of the film’s directors), the collective commits itself to filming and protesting the demolitions of homes and schools and the resulting displacement of their inhabitants, which were carried out to make way for Israeli military training ground. In addition to the indelible footage of destruction and expulsion captured by its undaunted witnesses, No Other Land serves as a moving portrait of friendship between Adra and Abraham, who form a philosophical and political alliance despite the drastic differences in their abilities to exist freely in this world. Winner of multiple awards including the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film at the 2024 Berlinale.

Oh, Canada
Paul Schrader, 2024, Canada, 95m

In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a celebrated political documentarian who has reached the end of his life. Wracked with cancer, Leonard has agreed to appear in a film by a former protégé (Michael Imperioli) in the hopes of setting the record straight about himself. Cinema becomes a confessional space as Leonard, accompanied by his stalwart wife and former student, Emma (Uma Thurman), excavates his own past, facing down regrets and guilt, and interrogating his own career, personal life, and political courage. Constructed with nonlinear flashbacks featuring Jacob Elordi as a young Leonard, the film passes in and out of different time periods, back to the 1960s, matching the slippery consciousness of its storyteller. Adapted from the book Foregone by Russell Banks, Paul Schrader’s emotionally naked drama feels like a direct address to the viewer, a filmmaker’s reckoning with his formidable status and persona. A Kino Lorber release.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Rungano Nyoni, 2024, Zambia/U.K./Ireland, 98m
Bemba and English with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

A middle-aged man’s sudden death brings about a reckoning with the past for an extended Zambian family in Rungano Nyoni’s scalding drama. Balancing domestic realism and expressionistic absurdity with precision and constant surprise, Nyoni, in the follow-up to her feature debut, I Am Not a Witch, commandingly delineates the contours of a community caught between tradition and modernity. Nyoni’s film centers on Shula (a furious and touching Susan Chardy), whose stoical response to finding her uncle’s body on the street in the middle of the night hints at the many emotional fissures that will lead to the exposure of difficult truths long repressed. The film’s compositional rigor, inventive sound design, and unexpected narrative turns and digressions confirm Nyoni as a distinctive new voice in international cinema. Winner of the Best Director prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section. An A24 release.

Pepe
Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias, Dominican Republic/Namibia/Germany/France, 2024, 123m
Afrikaans, German, Spanish, and Mbukushu with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

In 1993, after the death of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, the wild array of exotic pets he kept in his menagerie were shipped off to zoos and other preserves. His hippopotamuses, however, escaped, fending for themselves, reproducing, and becoming the target of government sterilizers and poachers. Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias (Cocote, New Directors/New Films 2018) takes a fascinating, highly unorthodox approach to this strange but true tale, which is told from the perspective of a sentient hippo, Pepe, at the moment of its death. We hear the animal’s thoughts as they’re spoken aloud by a raspy narrator, as the film skips across time and continents, from Pepe’s home country of Namibia to the Rio Magdalena in Colombia, where Pepe has escaped; shuffles modes of storytelling; and alternates between nonfiction and fantasy. In its sympathetic inquiry and aesthetic muscularity, Pepe poses provocative questions about the ever-shifting ecological stakes of life on earth and the nature of being. 

The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024, Iran/Germany/France, 166m
Farsi with English subtitles

A target of Iran’s hardline conservative government for his films’ criticism of the state, director Mohammad Rasoulof fled his home country to avoid an eight-year prison sentence, though he hadn’t finished editing his latest film yet. His searing drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig won a Special Prize from the jury and three other awards on its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is every bit as urgent and gripping as its real-life backstory would portend: longtime government worker Iman (Missagh Zareh) has just received a major promotion to the role of judge’s investigator, to the hopeful delight of his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani); at the same moment, a series of student protests against the government have exploded in the streets, stoking the sympathies of their independent-minded daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). The growing wedge between progressive children and traditional parents intensifies through a series of unsettling events that put Iman’s future in jeopardy. Both paranoia thriller and domestic drama, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is above all an epic of anti-patriarchal political conviction. A NEON release.

The Shrouds
David Cronenberg, 2024, France/Canada, 119m
U.S. Premiere

In an eerie, deceptively placid near-future, a techno-entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While Karsh is still reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger) from cancer—and falling into a peculiar sexual relationship with his wife’s sister (also Kruger)—a spate of vandalized graves utilizing his “shroud” technology begins to put his enterprise at risk, leading him to uncover a potentially vast conspiracy. Written following the death of the director’s wife, the new film from David Cronenberg is both a profoundly personal reckoning with grief and a descent into noir-tinged dystopia, set in an ominous world of self-driving cars, data theft, and A.I. personal assistants. Offering Cronenberg’s customary balance of malevolence and wit, The Shrouds is a sly and thought-provoking consideration of the corporeal and the digital, the mortal and the infinite.

Stranger Eyes
Yeo Siew Hua, 2024, Singapore, 126m
Chinese with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Young married Singaporean couple Junyang (Chien-Ho Wu) and Peiying (Anicca Panna) must confront the unimaginable when one morning their baby daughter goes missing from the playground. As the police begin their investigation, Junyang and Peiying receive an unsettling package at their doorstep: surreptitious video footage of their daily lives, taken before and after the child’s disappearance. Soon, their voyeur neighbor Wu (Lee Kang-sheng, the Taiwanese star of Tsai Ming-liang’s films, in a delicate, multilayered performance) falls under suspicion, revealing multiple secret inner lives among a group of interconnected characters. From this gripping set-up, writer-director Yeo Siew Hua constructs an unpredictable thriller that is as compelled by the mysteries of the human heart as it is by the ambiguities of living in a constant surveillance culture.

Suburban Fury
Robinson Devor, 2024, U.S., 115m
World Premiere

On September 22, 1975, 45-year-old Sara Jane Moore took a revolver out of her purse and fired two shots at President Gerald Ford on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco’s Union Square. This failed political assassination was destined to become a strange historical footnote, yet Moore is revealed as an extraordinary subject in this expansive, fascinating new documentary by the protean Robinson Devor (The Woman Chaser, NYFF37). Having served more than 30 years of a life prison sentence, Moore tells her own story, from FBI informant to would-be assassin, all of which Devor dramatizes against the backdrop of the era’s prevalent political unrest and militancy, of Attica, the Black Panthers, the U.S.-backed Chilean coup, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. A pugnacious and unapologetic interview subject, Moore holds the center of a fleet and compelling nonfiction drama with the feel of a 1970s thriller.

Transamazonia
Pia Marais, 2024, France/Germany/Switzerland/Taiwan/Brazil, 112m
English and Portuguese with English subtitles
North American Premiere

In the eerie quiet of the vast, verdant Amazon jungle, a young girl stirs to life. Rescued by a member of the local Indigenous tribe, the child, Rebecca, is the only survivor of a plane crash. Years pass, and Rebecca (Helena Zengel) has become something of a local celebrity after her father (Jeremy Xido), an American missionary, has cast the teenager as a faith healer capable of miracles. Just as Rebecca is beginning to have a will of her own, doubting her father and the role in which she’s been cast, another crisis emerges when illegal loggers encroach on the land, threatening the livelihoods of the local tribe, and forcing emotional, familial, and racial reckonings. South Africa–born director Pia Marais has fashioned a mesmerizing, entrancingly photographed moral tale with no easy answers that is also a singular coming-of-age fable.

A Traveler’s Needs
Hong Sangsoo, 2024, South Korea, 90m
English, French, and Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Isabelle Huppert reunites with Hong Sangsoo for their third delightful outing, this time starring as a nomadic Frenchwoman named Iris who drifts into the lives of a disconnected group of people in a Seoul suburb. In need of money, she has taken up giving French lessons, although she has no teaching experience to speak of. Cutting an ethereal figure in a straw hat, flowered sundress, and green cardigan, Iris puzzles the locals with her unorthodox methods and unyielding love for the Korean rice wine makgeolli. Iris’s effect on those around her is at once familial, romantic, and pedagogical, leading to a succession of gently amusing moments of cultural confusion and curiosity. Hong’s endearing, enigmatic observational comedy is a gentle exploration of human motivation and the surprising connections between people despite—or because of—language barriers. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Berlinale. A Cinema Guild release.

​​Việt and Nam
Trương Minh Quý, 2024, Philippines/France/Singapore/Italy/Germany/Vietnam, 129m
Vietnamese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Two young men emerge from the stygian darkness of a cave. They are in the bowels of the earth working as coal miners, but Việt and Nam are also lovers, enjoying moments of physical embrace kept secret from the rest of the world, before one of them embarks on a dangerous emigration to Laos. From this personal drama, captured with sensual detail and mesmeric eroticism, Vietnamese filmmaker Trương Minh Quý digs even deeper to excavate the memories and legacies of a nation. Set at the turn of the 21st century, Trương’s film resounds with echoes of the country’s war decades earlier, as Nam’s mother takes them on a pilgrimage to try and discover where his father was killed as a soldier. Shot in a hypnotic style on 16mm film—and banned in its home country—Việt and Nam is a remarkable work of quiet expressivity about two men with unsettled pasts and indeterminate futures. A Strand Releasing release.

Who by Fire
Philippe Lesage, 2024, Canada/France, 161m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multigenerational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted coming-of-age drama from Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage (Genesis, New Directors/New Films 2019). Ostensibly a merry reunion between well-known film director Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter) and his longtime friend and former collaborator Albert Gary (Paul Ahmarani), the vacation gradually becomes something far more complex and less stable, especially with the combustible admixture of Albert’s teen son’s best friend, Jeff (Noah Parker), and Albert’s self-asserting daughter Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré). Long-simmering middle-aged resentments surface, set against the anxieties of the young, all captured sensitively by Lesage, who in recent years has proven unparalleled in evoking the psychological contours of teenagers finding their paths through treacherous emotional landscapes. Featuring thrillingly choreographed dinner sequences of mounting tension, Who by Fire confirms Lesage as a major contemporary filmmaker, with its assured tonal negotiation of the naturalistic and the oneiric, the joyous (especially an epic dance interlude to The B-52s) and the ominous.

Youth (Hard Times)
Wang Bing, 2024, France/Luxembourg/Netherlands, 220m
Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Continuing the observational nonfiction saga that began with Youth (Spring) (NYFF61), Wang Bing returns to the Chinese district of Zhili, where more than 300,000 migrant workers from rural provinces are employed in clothing workshops. In this enveloping second part of the Youth trilogy, shot between 2015 and 2019, Wang deepens his vérité portrait of a generation struggling to survive on meager wages amidst a nation’s economic expansion, emphasizing the distrustful, increasingly combative relationship between workers and management. Wang’s epic yet compressed documentary is a singular rendering of young people who have become so focused on “making a living” that they have no time for joy or rest. Says one of the film’s many subjects: “You have no rights, so what’s the use of having money?” Despite these grim realities, Wang’s film provides hope in its depiction of workers who may find their collective voice. The final part of the trilogy, Youth (Homecoming), also screens in this year’s NYFF. An Icarus Films release.

Youth (Homecoming)
Wang Bing, 2024, France/Luxembourg/Netherlands, 160m
Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Wang Bing concludes his monumental Youth trilogy in expansive fashion, giving ever wider scope to the lives of migrant workers in Zhili’s textile factories, which the filmmaker recorded over the course of five years. Centered around New Year’s break, when the workers are planning to visit their families in remote hometowns to celebrate the festivities, Homecoming functions as a sweeping portrait of contemporary rural China, incorporating images of tightly packed trains and buses climbing treacherous mountainside roads, and joyous interludes, including wedding celebrations for workers Shi Wei and Fang Lingping, into its scenes of factory life. Wang’s cyclical account of young people caught in constant survival mode comes to a poignant close here, giving definitive shape and meaning to his enormous act of observation. The middle part of the trilogy, Youth (Hard Times), also screens in this year’s NYFF. An Icarus Films release.

Secure your seats with Festival Passes, limited quantities on sale now. Single tickets go on sale September 17 at noon ET.

Film at Lincoln Center announces Luca Guadagnino’s Queer as the Spotlight Gala of the 62nd New York Film Festival, making its U.S. Premiere on October 6. The adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s novel, scripted by Justin Kuritzkes, stars Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville, Michael Borremans, Andra Ursuta, and David Lowery. NYFF62 single tickets for the general public go on sale September 17 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members.

Become an FLC Member by August 13 to secure NYFF62 pre-sale access!

Written in the early 1950s yet not published until 1985, William S. Burroughs’s Queer has come to be considered a canonical work in the career of the Beat Generation author and a cornerstone of transgressive gay literature. In his wildly ambitious adaptation, Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, NYFF55) expertly evokes the book’s post–World War II time period and cinematically translates Burroughs’s iconoclasm with panache. In a transformative role, Daniel Craig immerses himself into Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee, a habitual heroin user luxuriating in freedom and desiccation among a disconnected group of gay American expatriates in Mexico City in the late 1940s. When enigmatic, preppy ex-military kid Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) catches Lee’s eye, he swoons into a headlong love affair, commencing an odyssey that will take them all the way to the Ecuadorian jungle in pursuit of the ultimate high. Buoyed by go-for-broke performances from Craig and Starkey, and rollicking, unexpected supporting turns from Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman, Queer is a dazzling showcase for many in Guadagnino’s stable of collaborators, including Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and music composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It’s a film that finds Guadagnino in his most formidable, gutsiest mode yet, a universal love story featuring expressionistic flights of fancy, gratifying moments of psychedelic surrealism, and surprising tenderness. 

Queer is a Fremantle film produced by The Apartment, a Fremantle company, and Frenesy film company; produced by Fremantle North America in collaboration with Cinecittà Spa and Frame by Frame.

“I am so privileged and elated to present a movie of mine for the third time at NYFF, Queer in particular,” said Guadagnino. “It is a very personal movie about the inescapable quest for being recognized in the gaze of another through the lens of the great William Burroughs.”

“Luca Guadagnino is one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile filmmakers, and one of its biggest risk-takers,” said Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, New York Film Festival. “Queer is his most fearless, inventive, and surprising film, one that brings its subcultural world to brilliant life and creates the role of a lifetime for a tremendous Daniel Craig.”

Luca Guadagnino was born in Palermo, Italy, on August 10, 1971. He is a director, screenwriter, and producer of several films, including I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, Call Me by Your Name, Suspiria, Bones And All, and Challengers. FLC has celebrated several of the acclaimed director’s films: I Am Love was selected for the 39th New Directors/New Films, and NYFF selections include Call Me by Your Name (NYFF55), which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Bones and All (NYFF60), winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.  

Explore all announced NYFF62 films. Spotlight, Currents, Revivals, and Talks sections will be announced soon–sign up for NYFF updates for the latest news.

The NYFF Main Slate and Spotlight Selection Committee is chaired by Dennis Lim, NYFF Artistic Director, and includes Florence Almozini, Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, and Rachel Rosen.

NYFF62 is generously supported by Co-Chairs Almudena and Pablo Legorreta, Imelda and Peter Sobiloff, and Nanna and Dan Stern; and Vice-Chairs Susannah Gray and John Lyons, and Tara Kelleher and Roy Zuckerberg.

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival is an annual showcase of the best in world cinema. Since 1963, NYFF has shaped film culture and continues an enduring tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The 62nd edition of the festival takes place September 27–October 14, 2024.

Queer tickets will go on sale to the General Public on Tuesday, September 17 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members prior to this date. Become an FLC Member by August 13 to secure NYFF62 pre-sale access and discounted tickets year-round.

August 8, 2023

The following is a press release from Film at Lincoln Center:

Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) announces the 32 films that comprise the Main Slate of the 61st New York Film Festival (NYFF), taking place September 29–October 15 at Lincoln Center and in venues across the city.

Secure your seats with Festival Passes, limited quantities on sale now. Single tickets go on sale September 19 at noon ET.

“The unsettled state of the industry is an unavoidable talking point these days, but my hope is that our festival, as it has done through its 61-year history, will serve as a reminder that the art of cinema is in robust health,” said Dennis Lim, Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival. “The filmmakers in this year’s Main Slate are grappling with eternal questions—about how movies relate to the world, about what it means to make art from life, about the most interesting ways to approach the contemporary moment and the historical past—and the answers they have proposed are thrilling in their variety, ingenuity, and urgency. We can’t wait for our audience, so vital to the festival experience, to discover these 32 new films.”

This year’s Main Slate showcases films produced in 18 different countries, featuring new titles from renowned auteurs, exceptional work from returning NYFF directors as well as those making their NYFF debut, and celebrated films from festivals worldwide including Cannes prizewinners: Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall; Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest; Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days; Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses; and Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves. At the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, Angela Schanelec’s Music was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay and Bas Devos’s Here was awarded best film in the Encounters section and the FIPRESCI prize.

Appearing in the NYFF Main Slate for the first time are Annie Baker, Bas Devos, Felipe Gálvez, Jonathan Glazer, Andrew Haigh, Raven Jackson (an NYFF57 FLC Artists Academy alum), Michael Mann, Rodrigo Moreno, Paul B. Preciado, Wang Bing, and Zhang Lu; additional returning NYFF filmmakers include Lisandro Alonso (FLC 2014 Filmmaker in Residence), Marco Bellocchio, Bertrand Bonello, Catherine Breillat, Sofia Coppola, Víctor Erice, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Agnieszka Holland, Hong Sangsoo, Radu Jude, Yorgos Lanthimos, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Martín Rejtman, and Alice Rohrwacher (FLC 2016 Filmmaker in Residence).

A special addition to this year’s Main Slate is the North American premiere of a newly unearthed and restored short directed by legendary filmmaker Agnès Varda and featuring Pier Paolo Pasolini while both were in town for the 4th New York Film Festival in 1966. It will precede two Main Slate features: La Chimera and Pictures of Ghosts.

As previously announced, the Opening Night selection is Todd Haynes’s May December; Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is the Centerpiece; and Michael Mann’s Ferrari will close NYFF61. Currents, Revivals, Spotlight, and Talks sections will be announced in the coming weeks—sign up for NYFF updates for the latest news.

All NYFF61 documentaries are presented by HBO®.

The New York Film Festival will offer festival screenings in all five boroughs of New York City in partnership with Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) (Brooklyn), the Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx), Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem (Manhattan), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens). Each venue will present a selection of films throughout the festival; a complete list of films and showtimes will be announced later this month.

The NYFF Main Slate selection committee, chaired by Dennis Lim, also includes Florence Almozini, Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, and Rachel Rosen.

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema and takes place September 29–October 15, 2023. An annual bellwether of the state of cinema that has shaped film culture since 1963, the festival continues an enduring tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. 

Secure your seats with Festival Passes, limited quantities on sale now with discounts through August 17. NYFF61 single tickets will go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, September 19 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date. Become an FLC Member by August 15 to secure pre-sale access. 

61st New York Film Festival Main Slate

Opening Night
May December
Dir. Todd Haynes

Centerpiece
Priscilla
Dir. Sofia Coppola

Closing Night
Ferrari
Dir. Michael Mann

About Dry Grasses
Dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Dir. Raven Jackson

All of Us Strangers
Dir. Andrew Haigh

Anatomy of a Fall
Dir. Justine Triet

The Beast
Dir. Bertrand Bonello

La Chimera
Dir. Alice Rohrwacher

Close Your Eyes
Dir. Víctor Erice

The Delinquents
Dir. Rodrigo Moreno

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
Dir. Radu Jude

Eureka
Dir. Lisandro Alonso

Evil Does Not Exist
Dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Fallen Leaves
Dir. Aki Kaurismäki

Green Border
Dir. Agnieszka Holland

Here
Dir. Bas Devos

In Our Day
Dir. Hong Sangsoo

In Water
Dir. Hong Sangsoo

Janet Planet
Dir. Annie Baker

Kidnapped
Dir. Marco Bellocchio

Last Summer
Dir. Catherine Breillat

Music
Dir. Angela Schanelec

Orlando, My Political Biography
Dir. Paul B. Preciado

Perfect Days
Dir. Wim Wenders

Pictures of Ghosts
Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho

Poor Things
Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

La Práctica
Dir. Martín Rejtman

The Settlers
Dir. Felipe Gálvez

The Shadowless Tower
Dir. Zhang Lu

Youth (Spring)
Dir. Wang Bing

The Zone of Interest
Dir. Jonathan Glazer

61st New York Film Festival Main Slate Films & Descriptions

Opening Night
May December
Todd Haynes, 2023, U.S., 113m
North American Premiere

Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a popular television star, has arrived in a tight-knit island community in Savannah. Here, she will be doing intimate research for a new part, ingratiating herself into the lives of Gracie (Julianne Moore), whom she’ll be playing on-screen, and her much younger husband, Joe (Charles Melton), to better understand the psychology and circumstances that more than 20 years ago made them notorious tabloid figures. As Elizabeth attempts to get closer to the family, the uncomfortable facts of their scandal unfurl, causing difficult, long-dormant emotions to resurface. From the sensational premise of first-time screenwriter Samy Burch’s brilliantly subtle script, Todd Haynes (Safe; Carol, NYFF53) has constructed an American tale of astonishing richness and depth, which touches the pressure and pleasure points of a culture obsessed equally with celebrity and trauma. It’s a feat of storytelling and pinpoint-precise tone that is shrewd in its wicked embrace of melodrama while also genuinely moving in its humane treatment of tricky subject matter. Boasting a trio of bravura, mercurial performances by Moore, Portman, and Melton, May December is a film about human exploitation, the elusive nature of performance, and the slipperiness of truth that confirms Todd Haynes’s status as one of our consummate movie artists. A Netflix release.

Centerpiece
Priscilla
Sofia Coppola, 2023, U.S., 110m
North American Premiere

Never has there been a more obsessed-over American pop icon than Elvis Presley, yet no one knew him more tenderly during his superstar years than Priscilla Ann Wagner, whose own story as Elvis’s romantic partner and only wife has rarely been told from her perspective. Director Sofia Coppola, who in her remarkable filmography has so often returned to intimate portraits of women living complicated lives behind closed doors, has found a subject exquisitely tailored to her interests. As portrayed with extraordinary poise and strength by Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla finally becomes the center of her narrative. Coppola follows her love affair with Elvis (an equally revelatory, larger-than-life Jacob Elordi), from her early years as a teenage army brat stationed in West Germany to her surreal arrival at Graceland, which becomes both her home and prison. With her customarily precise attention to texture and detail, Coppola has created one of her most stirring, vivid films, a tribute to a woman who was living in the public eye before she had truly experienced the world. Featuring evocative, moody cinematography by Philippe Le Sourd and original music by Phoenix. An A24 release.

Closing Night
Ferrari
Michael Mann, 2023, U.S., 125m
North American Premiere

Michael Mann (The Insider) brings his astonishing command of technique and storytelling to bear on this emotional, elegantly crafted dramatization of the life of the legendary car manufacturer and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari at a professional and personal fulcrum. It’s 1957, and the marriage of Enzo (Adam Driver, in an artfully internalized performance) and Laura (Penélope Cruz, a ferocious revelation) has begun to irrevocably fracture as a result of his philandering and the tragic recent death of their young son. Their unsettled domestic world is on a collision course with his work life as Enzo faces a pair of major turning points: financial pressure to increase productivity, which means going against his long-standing desire to only produce race cars, and preparations for the treacherous cross-country open-road Mille Miglia race. Dovetailing these narrative strands, Mann effortlessly shifts gears between elegiac and spectacular, climaxing in an exhilarating and terrifying race across the Northern Italian landscape—a visual and aural wonder of revving machinery against bucolic splendor—that ranks with the greatest set pieces of Mann’s career. Aided by a magnificent cast, which also includes Shailene Woodley, Gabriel Leone, Patrick Dempsey, and Jack O’Connell, and glorious on-location shooting in Ferrari’s hometown of Modena, Mann has constructed a marvel of classical cinema. A NEON release. 

About Dry Grasses
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2023, Turkey, 197m
Turkish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

In a village nestled within the wintry landscape of the East Anatolia region of Turkey, an art teacher named Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) is struggling through what he hopes to be his final year at an elementary school. Already tiring of the unforgiving environment, where he has been assigned by the government’s public education system, Samet is further disillusioned and frustrated after a young girl in his class, Sevim, appears to accuse him of inappropriate behavior. The only light on the horizon for Samet is his growing friendship with—and clear attraction to—a teacher from a nearby school, Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a sharp, politically engaged woman unafraid to put the self-involved Samet in his place for his general apathy and narcissism. The latest deeply philosophical drama from Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, NYFF49) is a work of elegant, novelistic filmmaking, rigorously unpacking questions of belief versus action, the tangible versus the enigmatic, and who we wish to be versus how we live. A centerpiece conversation between Samet and Nuray—capped off by a provocative metacinematic flourish—ranks with Ceylan’s greatest sequences, and Dizdar, who won the Best Actress prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, commands every second she’s on screen. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Raven Jackson, 2023, U.S., 97m 

One of the most visually striking, profoundly moving American movie making debuts in years, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is an arresting immersion into a young woman’s inner world, filmed and edited with an extraordinary tactility and attention to the tiniest detail. This impressionistic journey skips ahead and back through decades to tell the story of Mack, whose upbringing in rural Mississippi is touched by grace, dotted with heartbreak, and always carried aloft by the surrounding natural beauty. As she ages, she loses loved ones and gains others, while making decisions that change the course of her life, and that of her beloved sister. Relying on sounds and images to tell her story, and employing minimal dialogue, Jackson has created something breathtakingly quiet and ultimately transporting—a spiritual tribute to the moments, feelings, and connections that make a life. An A24 release.

All of Us Strangers
Andrew Haigh, 2023, U.K., 105m

British director Andrew Haigh, whose 2011 feature breakthrough Weekend is among the most widely beloved queer romances of the 21st century, has returned with an expertly modulated, emotionally overwhelming love story suspended in a metaphysical realm. Adam (Andrew Scott), a melancholy screenwriter living alone in a newly built, nearly empty high-rise on the outskirts of London, meets and tentatively begins a passionate relationship with the more extroverted Harry (Paul Mescal), his apparent only neighbor in the building. At the same time, Adam begins another, parallel journey, venturing out to the city’s suburbs to confront his troubled past and perhaps reconcile his unsettled present. Adapted from a 1987 novel by Taichi Yamada, All of Us Strangers is uncommonly perceptive about the desires, fears, and traumas of a specific generation of gay men while extending into the universal—or perhaps the cosmic—in its depiction of familial love and estrangement. And in a quartet of superb performances, Scott, Mescal, Jamie Bell, and Claire Foy pierce straight to the heart. A Searchlight Pictures release.

Anatomy of a Fall
Justine Triet, 2023, France, 150m
French and English with English subtitles

The winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s drama is a riveting procedural and a delicate inquiry into the impossibility of an ultimate truth in human relationships. When the husband of famous novelist Sandra Voyter (played by Toni Erdmann’s Sandra Hüller) is found dead on the ground outside their chalet in the French Alps, authorities suspect that she might have been responsible, as the impact and position of his body suggest a push rather than a fall. This leads to a murder trial that puts every aspect of their marriage under impossible scrutiny, and whose outcome might hinge on the perspective of their vision-impaired 11-year-old son. Triet’s fiercely intelligent, emotionally devastating film dissects the ways we create subjective narratives for ourselves and others and questions the insufficiency of language to describe the essential mysteries each of us possesses. At its core is the brilliant Hüller, whose Sandra is articulate, open, and utterly inscrutable. A NEON release.

The Beast
Bertrand Bonello, 2023, France, 146m
English and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

A filmmaker consistently unafraid to wade through the weird miasma of contemporary life, Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama; Coma, NYFF60) works from the outside in, dramatizing the psychological toll of the political and cultural world around us. Here he has created a dynamic and disturbing parable that jumps between three different time periods (1910, 2014, and 2044) to diagnose our acute—and perhaps eternal—feelings of estrangement and alienation. Using Henry James’s haunting 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle” as his film’s provocative inspiration, Bonello tells the story of a young woman (Léa Seydoux) who undergoes a surgical process to have her DNA—and therefore memories of all her past lives—removed. In so doing, she realizes her fate has long been intertwined, for better and worse, with a young man (George MacKay). Touching on modern anxieties of AI and incel culture, which may recur throughout history as commonly as love and hate, The Beast, like all good science-fiction, asks essential questions about the ever-shifting status of humanity itself.

La Chimera
Alice Rohrwacher, 2023, Italy, 135m
Italian with English subtitles

With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and magical realism, Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro, NYFF56) conjures a marvelous entertainment set in a rural Italy eternally caught between the ancient and the modern. Josh O’Connor (The Crown) stars as Arthur, a ne’er-do well Englishman, handsomely rumpled and recently out of prison, who returns to a rural town in central Italy where he hesitantly reconnects with a ragtag group of tombaroli (tomb raiders), for whom he uses his uncanny powers of divination to locate graves that date back to the Etruscan period and teem with antiquities of immense value to collectors and museums. Yet the melancholy Arthur has other ghosts on his mind, including his long-lost love Beniamina, who haunts his memory like her own ghostly civilization. Featuring gorgeous rough-hewn textures from the great cinematographer Hélène Louvart and outstanding supporting work from Isabella Rossellini, Carol Duarte, and Alba Rohrwacher, La Chimera is a dreamlike descent into a majestically tattered world right beneath our own. A NEON release.

Close Your Eyes
Víctor Erice, 2023, Spain, 169m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Spanish director Víctor Erice’s fourth film in 50 years, Close Your Eyes is the culmination of one of the most legendary careers in modern cinema, following the masterpieces The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, and The Quince Tree Sun (NYFF30). In this elegiac personal epic about time, memory, and, of course, the movies, an aging filmmaker named Miguel (Manolo Solo) is reluctantly pulled back into a decades-old mystery connected to his final, unfinished work, titled The Farewell Gaze. During production, his leading actor and close friend, Julio (Jose Coronado), vanished and was never heard from again; in the process of trying to track him down so many years later, Miguel must come to terms with his own past, his present life, and the irrevocably changed processes of his art form. Featuring captivating performances from a cast that also includes Ana Torrent (Beehive’s unforgettable child star) in a moving role as Julio’s grown daughter, Close Your Eyes is a poignant, summative work that finds original ways to remind viewers of the moving image’s ability to reach across time.

The Delinquents
Rodrigo Moreno, 2023, Argentina, 183m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

A heist picture unlike any other, The Delinquents upends genre expectations with a gentle yet deftly constructed existentialist fable. Timid bank clerk Morán (Daniel Elías), fed up with his dead-end middle-management job, decides one day to simply walk into the vault, pack a bag with enough cash to cover his salary until retirement age, and saunter out. Knowing he has been inevitably caught on security camera, Morán plans on turning himself in, but not before passing the stash along to his coworker Román (Esteban Bigliardi), now an accomplice who agrees to hold onto the money until Morán gets out of prison. From this gripping premise, Argentinean writer-director Rodrigo Moreno spins an endlessly surprising tale that moves into increasingly idyllic territory, adding layer upon layer to the twinned stories of these two men’s lives, and inquiring what it means to be free in a world of monetary satisfaction. A MUBI release.

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
Radu Jude, 2023, Romania, 163m
Romanian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

As he proved with his scandalous, scathing political comedy Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (NYFF59), Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude is among the most radical filmmakers working today and one of the few unafraid to diagnose the absurd evils and moral blind spots that make contemporary living what it—unfortunately—is. In his latest film, Jude again explodes conventional boundaries of narrative and form, this time charting a lacerating course through one day in the life of a severely overworked film production assistant, Angela, who drives around Bucharest on her latest gig: filming work accident victims auditioning to be in a safety equipment video for a German multinational corporation. At the same time, the sleep-deprived Angela upkeeps her own side project—a face-filtered, trash-talking, right-wing alter ego with more than 20,000 viewers that serves as the film’s perverse Greek chorus. Intercutting all this with footage from Romanian director Lucian Bratu’s feminist 1981 film Angela Moves On, following the travels of a female cab driver around the city’s same sights and locations, Jude initiates a conversation with his country’s past and present, while engaging in a meta-commentary about the ability of the captured image to exploit, and to contort the truth.

Eureka
Lisandro Alonso, 2023, Argentina/France/Portugal, 146m
English, Portuguese, and Lakota with English subtitles
North American Premiere

The protean Argentinean director Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad, NYFF39; Jauja, NYFF52) continues to shapeshift, delight, and challenge with his marvelous and immersive new film, which takes the viewer on an unexpected journey through three stories set in wildly different terrain, each of them reflecting lives haunted by the specter of colonialist violence. In the first, Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni guest-star in a black-and-white neo-Western pastiche following a taciturn gunslinger seeking revenge in a lawless frontier town. In the second section, in a different kind of law-and-order narrative, set during the present day in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, we accompany a Native American cop (Alaina Clifford) on her nighttime patrols, revealing a community troubled by addiction and poverty, but also, because of the cop’s good-hearted basketball coach niece (Sadie Lapointe), touched by transcendence. Finally, the film travels to the magnificent Brazilian rainforest of the 1970s, where Indigenous workers pan for gold while articulating their dream lives. Cleverly transitioning between segments without hand-holding the viewer, Alonso has created an improbably unified aesthetic experience that leaves it up to us to make the connections among its transient worlds.

Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2023, Japan, 105m
Japanese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Deep in the forest of the small rural village Harasawa, single parent Takumi lives with his young daughter, Hana, and takes care of odd jobs for locals, chopping wood and hauling pristine well water. The overpowering serenity of this untouched land of mountains and lakes, where deer peacefully roam free, is about to be disrupted by the imminent arrival of the Tokyo company Playmode, which is ready to start construction on a glamping site for city tourists—a plan, which Takumi and his neighbors discover, that will have dire consequences for the ecological health and cleanliness of their community. The potent and foreboding new film from Oscar-winning director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, both NYFF59) is a haunting, entirely unexpected cinematic experience that reconstitutes the boundaries of the ecopolitical thriller. Intensified by a rapturous, ominous score by Eiko Ishibashi, this mesmeric journey diverges from country-vs-city themes to straddle the line between the earthy and the metaphysical. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

Fallen Leaves
Aki Kaurismäki, 2023, Finland, 81m
Finnish with English subtitles

Sweet-souled in story, scalpel-sharp in filmmaking precision, this enchanting love story from Finnish virtuoso Aki Kaurismäki circles around two financially strapped Helsinkians who keep finding and losing one another in a world that seems to be falling apart. Evoking such dark-comic romances from his early career such as Shadows in Paradise and Ariel (NYFF27), the sardonic yet exquisitely melancholic Fallen Leaves devotes its wry, humane gaze to grocery clerk Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and construction laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), who commence an on-again, off-again relationship of extreme tentativeness, while seeking employment and stability. As with the greatest of Kaurismäki’s films, everyday details register as grand, meaningful cinematic gestures. This filmmaker has scrupulously carved another fictive universe out of a handful of specific, vivid locations, yet Fallen Leaves very much takes place in the world we’re living in, which makes its surrender to hope all the more affecting. Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. A MUBI release.

Green Border
Agnieszka Holland, 2023, Poland/Czech Republic/France/Belgium, 146m
Polish, Arabic, English, and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

A Syrian family leaves the violence of their country behind, hoping to cross from Belarus into Poland and then onto the safe haven of Sweden. But, like so many lost souls, they end up caught in a political maelstrom, demonized by the Polish government and press and used as pawns in an inhumane, deadly border game. This harrowing, urgent drama from the veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa; Spoor, NYFF55) constructs an intricate account of the contemporary global humanitarian crisis, expanding out to encompass the interconnected lives of security patrol officers, activist lawyers, and civilians who put themselves on the line for strangers. With the sobering and sometimes shocking Green Border, Holland reaffirms both her unyielding commitment to political filmmaking and the ability of immersive storytelling to illuminate the darkest corners of the world.

Here
Bas Devos, 2023, Belgium, 82m
Dutch, French, Romanian, and Mandarin with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Stefan, a migrant construction worker living in Brussels, is planning a trip home to his mother in Romania. In preparing for his voyage, he reconnects with local family members over gifted bowls of homemade soup, interacts with strangers, and discovers a revivifying commune with nature. This all leads him to an unexpected connection with Shuxiu, a Chinese-Belgian bryologist, who’s studying the local moss. The gradual cultivation of this friendship—beautifully performed by actors Stefan Gota and Liyo Gong—motivates this hushed, emotionally resonant film about the power of observation, of people often deemed socially invisible, and of the larger green world surrounding us. In his lovely and tranquil fourth feature, Belgian filmmaker Bas Devos (Ghost Tropic) has created a work that finds transcendence in the simplest human encounters and the most radiant of cinematic gestures. Winner of the Best Film prize in the Berlin International Film Festival’s Encounters competition. A Cinema Guild release.

In Our Day
Hong Sangsoo, 2023, South Korea, 83m
Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere

For his 30th feature film, Hong Sangsoo has crafted a slippery yet captivating inquiry into the search for meaning, connection, and artistic satisfaction. In Our Day alternates two seemingly unrelated stories: in the first, a disillusioned former actress named Sangwon (Hong regular Kim Minhee) who has left her profession behind and is recharging at the apartment of her longtime friend Jung-soo (Song Sunmi); in the second, a middle-aged poet, Hong Uiji (Ki Joo-bong), who has become a cult figure for a new generation of young readers, is being visited by a student (Park Miso) making a documentary about him and a young man (Ha Seong-guk) drilling him with questions about the meaning of it all—which makes it difficult for the artist to refrain from drinking, even though his doctors have sworn him off alcohol. From these two disparate strands, Hong delightfully evokes a world rich with enigma and possibility, in which the most seemingly minute detail (the whereabouts of a cat, the spiciness of a noodle dish) has outsized repercussions and asking life’s big questions often brings us back to square one. A Cinema Guild release.

In Water
Hong Sangsoo, 2023, South Korea, 61m
Korean with English subtitles
North American Premiere

A youthful trio has convened off-season on the desolate yet beautiful Jeju Island. The director, leading actress, and cinematographer are preparing to shoot a film, yet the subject matter remains unclear. While potential professional and romantic jealousies simmer in the background, Hong Sangsoo instead prioritizes the contingencies of artmaking and inspiration, as the film-within-the-film’s first-time director (Shin Seokho) gradually discovers the melancholy centerpiece of his self-funded passion project. Characteristically small yet enormously touching, Hong’s latest treasure happens upon a simple aesthetic conceit that pays dividends: the image is mostly out of focus, lending each frame a delicate, smudgy impressionistic quality. As the young director’s movie gradually makes itself clear on screen, so does Hong’s vision of the often all-consuming pursuit for artistic meaning. A Cinema Guild release.

Janet Planet
Annie Baker, 2023, U.S., 113m

It’s the summer before Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) starts sixth grade, and she is spending the lazy months with her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), in their home in the woods. As the months drift by, the bespectacled, taciturn girl, fiercely observant, watches Janet and three enigmatic adults who drift in and out of their lives, whether romantic interests or reconnected friends. Set in 1991 rural Western Massachusetts, the superb debut film from Pulitzer Prize­–winning playwright Annie Baker is a work of surreal tranquility that moves at a different, lost pace of life, and which perceives heartbreak just as Lacy is beginning to grasp the world and her place in it. Baker has created a film about a mother and daughter quite unlike any other, heightening the viewer’s senses and expressing oceans of feeling with the smallest gestures. Nicholson and Ziegler perform their roles with an inspiring lack of sentimentality, and the wondrous supporting cast includes Elias Koteas, Sophie Okonedo, and Will Patton. An A24 release.

Kidnapped
Marco Bellocchio, 2023, Italy, 134m
Italian and Hebrew with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

In 1858 Bologna, a 6-year-old named Edgardo Mortara was seized by authorities of the papal state, taken away from his Jewish parents, and placed in the care of the Church. Believed to have been baptized in the cradle under odd circumstances, the child would be claimed as a Catholic. His mind erased of his family’s religious heritage and beliefs, Edgardo was, unbeknownst to him, at the center of an international firestorm that led directly to the Italian people’s rejection of the Pope’s rule amidst the tumultuous Risorgimento. In this sumptuously mounted film from treasured octogenarian director Marco Bellocchio, the Mortara case becomes an extraordinary, nearly operatic historical drama. Kidnapped is at once a personal, human-scale narrative of a family in crisis, following parents who will do anything to retrieve their child from the clutches of a ruthless theocratic government, and a wide-scope portrait of a country on the cusp of revolution. A Cohen Media Group release.

Last Summer
Catherine Breillat, 2023, France, 104m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

One of the world’s most consistently provocative filmmakers for nearly 50 years, Catherine Breillat proves with her incendiary, compelling new drama that she is not through toying with viewers’ comfort levels. In Last Summer, Léa Drucker stars as Anne, a lawyer who specializes in cases of sexual consent and parental custody. Seemingly happily married to kind-hearted businessman Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) with adopted twin daughters, Anne inexplicably finds herself drawn to Pierre’s estranged 17-year-old son Théo (Samuel Kircher) after the boy returns home to live with them. Embarking on a passionate affair with the teenager, Anne all too willingly thrusts herself into a maelstrom of attraction, intimidation, and manipulation. Breillat’s incisive screenplay—cannily altered from the Danish erotic thriller Queen of Hearts on which it’s based—elegantly surveys the situation’s extreme power dynamics while giving the brilliant Drucker the chance to create a character who exists entirely within her own moral boundaries. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

Music
Angela Schanelec, 2023, Germany/France/Greece/Serbia, 105m
Greek and English with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Leading contemporary German filmmaker Angela Schanelec (I Was at Home, But…, NYFF57) is singularly adept at creating dramas of unexpected catharsis via the most oblique narrative strategies. Her latest film, Music, pushes this approach to new levels of emotionality. Using abstract gestures and broad narrative ellipses, yet still managing to plumb the depths of its characters’ complicated traumas, Music tells the story of a young man and woman unknowingly united by the same violent death. Brought together by fate and horrible irony, Ion (Aliocha Schneider) and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer) first meet in prison, where he’s an inmate and she’s a guard; they kindle a romance fomented by passion for classical music and opera, followed by marriage and children. Yet as in all tragedies, the past returns to haunt them. Inspired by the Oedipus myth, Schanelec has created an alternately austere and vivid portrait of grief and redemption through art told with her distinctive compositional rigor. A Cinema Guild release.

Orlando, My Political Biography
Paul B. Preciado, 2023, France, 98m
French with English subtitles

Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando is both historical anchor and hopeful North Star of writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s first film, a sweeping yet intimate documentary that takes a panoramic look at past and present trans lives. Preciado’s literate, charming conceptual approach casts 26 trans and non-binary people as different versions and evocations of Woolf’s famous gender nonconformist, using the book as a starting point to talk about both the social and metaphorical meanings of transness and how Woolf’s reflections on the body untethered from both time and gender normativity remain radical. Fleet and visually inventive, Preciado’s film is finally a robust polemical inquiry into contemporary trans personhood and political disenfranchisement that points the way toward a possible utopia. Winner of four prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival, including the Teddy Award. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

Perfect Days
Wim Wenders, 2023, Japan/Germany, 124m
Japanese with English subtitles

As in his finest movies, Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, NYFF22) here locates the magnificence in the everyday, casting the incomparable Koji Yakusho as the taciturn, good-natured Hirayama, who goes about his solitary hours working as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Interacting on his rounds with a variety of city denizens whose eccentricities put his gentle nature into even more delightful relief, the middle-aged Hirayama becomes the quiet hero of his own story, doing his menial work without complaint, bemused yet often enchanted at the younger folk orbiting him, and delighted by the natural wonders poking out from the corners of the always changing cityscape. Hirayama is a creature very much of the present, devoted to a daily routine that is nearly monastic—until it is disrupted by someone from his past. Working in concert with Wenders’s documentarian eye, Yakusho, who won the Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, makes his character’s every movement magnetic. A NEON release.

Pictures of Ghosts
Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2023, Brazil, 93m
Portuguese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

The life of a true cinephile is one constantly haunted by the dead, as the history of the movies is a corridor of ghosts. Brazilian filmmaker and unrepentant cinema obsessive Kleber Mendonça Filho’s new documentary serves as a poignant testament to the liminal state of movie love, telling, in three chapters, the story of his cinematic world—namely the city of Recife, where his youthful film education took place. At theaters like the Veneza and the São Luiz, Mendonça discovered a popular art form that would change his life; today, with the landscape of the city altering drastically, he surveys its empty rooms now pregnant with memories. This moving and playful film, as much about the architectural and social structures of a city as about the movies that inspire and haunt us, honors the personal spaces that are also the communal lifeblood of our urban centers. A Grasshopper Film release.

Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023, U.S./U.K./Ireland, 141m

In his boldest vision yet, iconoclast auteur Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, NYFF53; The Favourite, NYFF56) creates an outlandish alternate 19th century on the cusp of technological breakthrough, in which a peculiar, childlike woman named Bella (Emma Stone) lives with her mysterious caretaker, the scientist and surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Violently rambunctious, with a growing and unquenchable desire for sexual gratification, Bella turns every social propriety on its head. The shocking truth about her state, soon revealed, doesn’t stop Godwin’s gentle young apprentice (Ramy Youssef) from falling in love with her. After a rakish, libertine lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) whisks her away to see the world, Bella comes to understand her place in it, allowing us to bear witness to her journey of self-actualization. At once poignant and grotesque, Poor Things, based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is a punkish update of the Frankenstein story that becomes a deeply feminist fairy tale about women taking back control of their own bodies and minds. A Searchlight Pictures release.

La Práctica
Martín Rejtman, 2023, Argentina/Chile/Portugal, 89m
Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Leading light of the New Argentine Cinema, Martín Rejtman returns with his first film in nearly a decade (following Two Shots Fired, NYFF52), a shrewd deadpan comedy that provides further evidence that few directors are as adept at dramatizing the absurdity of the mundane. Gustavo (Esteban Bigliardi), an Argentinean yoga instructor living in Chile, has recently separated from his wife, which leaves him essentially without an apartment and complicates keeping his business afloat. Adding injury to insult, he’s dealing with a torn meniscus, a meddling mother, a new client who might be a thief and another who gets amnesia during a session. A flirtation with a former student, Laura (Camila Hirane), brings promise for the future. Directed and acted with wry precision, the entrancing La Práctica is a sardonic yet loving immersion into a world in which wellness retreats and physical and spiritual self-improvement naturally exist side-by-side with romantic and professional neuroses.

The Settlers
Felipe Gálvez, 2023, Chile, 100m
Spanish with English subtitles

A tale of brutal colonialist violence set against the sweeping, mountainous backdrop of Chile at the turn of the 20th century, Felipe Gálvez’s handsomely mounted, emotionally wrenching adventure plays off conventions of the American Western while becoming its own haunting work of cinematic historical exploration. The film follows the journey of three men—an officer of the British army, a mercenary from the American Southwest, and a Chilean mixed-race marksman and tracker to guide the two outsiders—hired by a tyrannical landowner to scout the boundaries of his vast property and execute a new trade route. The true nature of their dispatch, however, comes into focus: to rid the area of its indigenous tribes. With its evocative period setting and arresting landscapes, The Settlers is a vivid, immersive experience, featuring an indelible final passage that reminds us the past is always present. A MUBI release.

The Shadowless Tower
Zhang Lu, 2023, China, 144m
Mandarin with English subtitles
North American Premiere

A novelist and literature professor turned movie director who has been quietly building an impressive filmography for the past 20 years, the 61-year-old Zhang Lu has now constructed an elegiac film about middle-age—its confusions and complications, as well as its beauty and grace. Set in Beijing’s Xicheng district, The Shadowless Tower (its title referring to a 13th-century Buddhist temple known to locals for its odd shape and noteworthy lack of shade) follows the compelling, distinctly human rhythms of Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing), an aging divorcé who has abandoned his love of poetry writing to become a food critic. Estranged from his disgraced father (hauntingly inhabited by legendary Fifth Generation Chinese filmmaker Tian Zhuangzhuang) and only occasionally there for his adorable young daughter, who is being watched by his sister and brother-in-law, Gu feels unmoored from life. When, on a work gig, he emotionally connects with a fiercely independent 25-year-old photographer (the marvelous Huang Yao), he suddenly finds himself confronting his unsettled past and destabilized present. Zhang strikes a delicate balance between abstract feeling and the satisfactions of storytelling in this expansive, uncommonly sensitive portrait of contemporary living and the radiancy that can exist in both the sunlit streets and the darkest margins. A Strand Releasing release.

Youth (Spring)
Wang Bing, 2023, France/Luxembourg/Netherlands, 215m
Chinese regional dialects with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

The latest epic work of observational nonfiction from Wang Bing furthers the filmmaker’s ongoing chronicle of the economic, social, and personal upheavals happening across a transforming China. Deepening the intimacy with which he captures communities of people living amidst financial struggle and toiling for little money in exploitative conditions, Youth (Spring) is a remarkable account of rural migrant workers employed in textile factories in Zhili, a town outside Shanghai. Over the course of five years, Wang follows various groups of people, most of them in their twenties, as they labor over their clothes-making, interact in the cramped dormitories where they live after hours, bargain (often fruitlessly) for better wages, and create emotional bonds and relationships with one another. As the title suggests, this film is specifically about the lives of the young, forcefully and humanely depicting—with its director’s customary patience and unassuming formal rigor—the consequences of the country’s rapid growth on the minds and bodies of a new generation of workers. An Icarus Films release.

The Zone of Interest
Jonathan Glazer, 2023, U.K./U.S./Poland, 105m
German and Polish with English subtitles

In his chilling, oblique study of evil, British director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) situates the viewer at the center of frighteningly familiar banality. It’s summer in the mid-1940s, and a German family merrily idles by a river. Father Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and mother Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) tuck their kids in bed at night. They entertain family and guests in their vast backyard garden on the weekends. In the mornings, she oversees chores with a cadre of housekeepers and cooks; he goes to work as head Commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Their domestic life is paradisiacal. Yet over the wall abutting their home, we can see smokestacks, and at night we hear screams and occasional gunshots. Loosely inspired by the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, Glazer has created a singular, unsettlingly timeless representation of inhumanity and our capacity for indifference in the face of atrocity, filmed and edited with aptly cold precision and punctuated with an ominous score by Mica Levi. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. An A24 release.

Precedes La Chimera and Pictures of Ghosts:
Pier Paolo Pasolini – Agnès Varda – New York – 1967
Agnès Varda, 2022, France, 3m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
In 1966, two legendary filmmakers, in town for the 4th New York Film Festival, took a walk through Times Square. Armed with 16mm color film, Agnès Varda captured Pier Paolo Pasolini. A year later, she edited the footage and recorded his brief commentary track, discussing the uses of documentary filmmaking, Christianity, and the nature of reality. The elements were only discovered in 2021 and restored by Cine-Tamaris, in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata, to their lustrous expressivity.

Secure your seats with Festival Passes, limited quantities on sale now. Single tickets go on sale September 19 at noon ET.

August 9, 2022

The following is a press release from Film at Lincoln Center:

Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) announces the 32 films that comprise the Main Slate of the 60th New York Film Festival (NYFF), taking place September 30–October 16, 2022, at Lincoln Center and in venues across the city.

“If there is one takeaway from this year’s Main Slate, it is cinema’s limitless capacity for renewal,” said Dennis Lim, artistic director, New York Film Festival. “Collectively, the films in the program suggest that this renewal takes many forms: breathtaking debuts, veterans pulling off new tricks, filmmakers of all stripes seeking new and surprising forms of expression and representation. We love the range and eclecticism of this group of films and are excited to share it with audiences.”

This year’s Main Slate showcases films produced in 18 different countries, featuring new titles from renowned auteurs, exceptional work from returning NYFF directors as well as those making their NYFF debuts, and celebrated films from festivals worldwide, including Cannes prizewinners: Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon; Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave; Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness; and Charlotte Wells’s debut feature film, Aftersun. Carla Simón’s Alcarràs was awarded the Golden Bear at the 72nd Berlinale Festival, and Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes took the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and the l’Oeil d’Or for best documentary at Cannes.

Appearing in the NYFF Main Slate for the first time are Margaret Brown, Davy Chou (New Directors/New Films 2017), Laura Citarella (ND/NF 2015), Alice Diop (ND/NF 2021 and Art of the Real 2022), Mark Jenkin (ND/NF 2019), Marie Kreutzer, Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji, and Cyril Schäublin (ND/NF 2015). Hong Sangsoo marks his 18th and 19th film festival selections with The Novelist’s Film and Walk Up; additional returning NYFF filmmakers include Todd Field, Mia Hansen-Løve, Joanna Hogg, Pietro Marcello, Cristian Mungiu, Jafar Panahi, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Kelly Reichardt, Paul Schrader, Albert Serra, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Frederick Wiseman.

As previously announced, the Opening Night selection is Noah Baumbach’s White Noise; Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is the Centerpiece; and, marking his first appearance in the festival, Elegance Bratton’s narrative debut The Inspection will close NYFF60. James Gray’s Armageddon Time will be the NYFF 60th anniversary screening event, celebrating the enduring spirit of New York City and the New York Film Festival. Currents, Revivals, Spotlight, and Talks sections will be announced in the coming weeks.

As part of its 60th anniversary celebration, the New York Film Festival will offer festival screenings in all five boroughs of New York City in partnership with Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) (Brooklyn), the Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx), Maysles Documentary Center (Harlem), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens). Each venue will present a selection of films throughout the festival; a complete list of films and showtimes will be announced later this month.

Please note: Masks are required for all staff, audiences, and filmmakers at all times at FLC indoor spaces. Proof of full vaccination is not required for NYFF60 audiences at FLC indoor spaces, but full vaccination is strongly recommended. Visit filmlinc.org/safety for more information. For health & safety protocols at partner venues, please visit their official websites.

The NYFF Main Slate selection committee, chaired by Dennis Lim, also includes Eugene Hernandez, Florence Almozini, K. Austin Collins, and Rachel Rosen. Regina Riccitelli is the NYFF programming coordinator, and Violeta Bava, Michelle Carey, Leo Goldsmith, and Gina Telaroli serve as festival advisors. Matt Bolish is the producer of NYFF.

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema and takes place September 30–October 16, 2022. An annual bellwether of the state of cinema that has shaped film culture since 1963, the festival continues an enduring tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. 

Festival Passes are available in limited quantities with discounts through this Friday, August 12. NYFF60 single tickets, including those for partner venue screenings, will go on sale to the General Public on Monday, September 19 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date. Save 20% on FLC Memberships through August 16 with the code SUMMER22. Support of NYFF benefits Film at Lincoln Center in its nonprofit mission to promote the art and craft of cinema.

FLC invites audiences to celebrate this milestone anniversary by reflecting on their NYFF experiences with our NYFF Memories survey and by taking part in our Letterboxd Watch Challenge.

The 60th New York Film Festival Main Slate

Opening Night

White Noise

Dir. Noah Baumbach

Centerpiece

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Dir. Laura Poitras

Closing Night

The Inspection

Dir. Elegance Bratton

NYFF 60th Anniversary Celebration

Armageddon Time

Dir. James Gray

Aftersun

Dir. Charlotte Wells

Alcarràs

Dir. Carla Simón

All That Breathes

Dir. Shaunak Sen

Corsage

Dir. Marie Kreutzer

A Couple

Dir. Frederick Wiseman

De Humani Corporis Fabrica

Dir. Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Decision to Leave

Dir. Park Chan-wook

Descendant

Dir. Margaret Brown

Enys Men

Dir. Mark Jenkin

EO

Dir. Jerzy Skolimowski

The Eternal Daughter

Dir. Joanna Hogg

Master Gardener

Dir. Paul Schrader

No Bears

Dir. Jafar Panahi

The Novelist’s Film

Dir. Hong Sangsoo

One Fine Morning

Dir. Mia Hansen-Løve

Pacifiction

Dir. Albert Serra

R.M.N.

Dir. Cristian Mungiu

Return to Seoul

Dir. Davy Chou

Saint Omer

Dir. Alice Diop

Scarlet

Dir. Pietro Marcello

Showing Up

Dir. Kelly Reichardt

Stars at Noon

Dir. Claire Denis

Stonewalling

Dir. Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka

TÁR

Dir. Todd Field

Trenque Lauquen

Dir. Laura Citarella

Triangle of Sadness

Dir. Ruben Östlund

Unrest

Dir. Cyril Schäublin

Walk Up

Dir. Hong Sangsoo

The 60th New York Film Festival Main Slate Films & Descriptions

Opening Night

White Noise

Noah Baumbach, 2022, U.S., 135m

North American Premiere

In one of the year’s most gratifyingly ambitious American films, Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) has adapted Don DeLillo’s epochal postmodern 1985 novel, White Noise, long perceived as unfilmable, into a richly layered, entirely unexpected work of contemporary satire. Adam Driver heartily embodies Jack Gladney, an ostentatious “Hitler Studies” professor and father of four whose comfortable suburban college town life and marriage to the secretive Babette (Greta Gerwig, perfectly donning a blonde mop of “important hair”) are upended after a horrifying nearby accident creates an airborne toxic event of frightening and unknowable proportions. In a tightrope walk of comedy and horror, Baumbach captures the essence of DeLillo’s cacophonous pop-philosophical nightmare on unbounded consumerism, ecological catastrophe, and the American obsession with death. Impeccably matching DeLillo’s and Baumbach’s similarly percussive form of stylized dialogue, White Noise is wonderfully abrasive and awe-inspiring, a precisely mounted period piece entirely befitting our modern, through-the-looking-glass pandemic reality. A Netflix release. Campari® is the presenting partner of Opening Night.

Centerpiece

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Laura Poitras, 2022, U.S., 116m

In her essential, urgent, and arrestingly structured new documentary, Academy Award®–winning filmmaker Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) weaves two narratives: the fabled life and career of era-defining artist Nan Goldin and the downfall of the Sackler family, the pharmaceutical dynasty greatly responsible for the opioid epidemic’s unfathomable death toll. Following her own personal struggle with opioid addiction, Goldin, who rose from the New York “No Wave” underground to become one of the great photographers of the late 20th century, put herself at the forefront of the battle against the Sacklers, both as an activist at art institutions around the world that had accepted millions from the family and as an advocate for the de-stigmatization of drug addiction. Illustrated with a rich trove of photographs by Goldin, who mesmerizingly narrates her own story, including her dysfunctional suburban upbringing, the loss of her teenage sister, and her community’s fight against AIDS in the eighties, Poitras’s film is an enthralling, empowering work that stirringly connects personal tragedy, political awareness, and artistic expression.

Closing Night

The Inspection

Elegance Bratton, 2022, U.S., 93m

U.S. Premiere

Known for his affecting and dynamic documentary Pier Kids, about homeless queer and transgender youth in New York, and the Viceland series My House, on underground competitive ballroom dancing, filmmaker and photographer Elegance Bratton has made his ambitious narrative debut, a knockout drama based on his own experiences as a gay man in Marine Corps basic training following a decade of living on the streets. In a breathtaking first cinematic starring role, Tony and Emmy–nominated actor Jeremy Pope is run through an emotional and physical gauntlet as a young man dealing with the intimidation of a sadistic sergeant (Bokeem Woodbine), his desire for a sympathetic superior (Raúl Castillo), and his complicated feelings toward the mother who rejected him (a revelatory Gabrielle Union). Bratton’s film is a nuanced portrait of American masculinity and evocation of the military during the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era, as well as a forceful, electric work of autobiography. An A24 release.

NYFF 60th Anniversary Celebration

Armageddon Time

James Gray, 2022, U.S., 114m

The most personal film yet from James Gray (The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z) is also one of his greatest, an exquisitely detailed and deeply emotional etching of a time and place: Queens, 1980. Set against the backdrop of a country on the cusp of ominous sociopolitical change, Armageddon Time follows Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a sixth grader who dreams of becoming an artist. At the same time that Paul builds a friendship with classmate Johnny (Jaylin Webb), who’s mercilessly targeted by their racist teacher, he finds himself increasingly at odds with his parents (Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway), for whom financial success and assimilation are key to the family’s Jewish-American identity. Paul feels on firmest ground with his kind grandfather (a marvelous Anthony Hopkins), whose life experiences have granted him a weathered compassion. Rejecting easy nostalgia for a more difficult, painful form of recall, Gray’s film—shot with intimate naturalism by Darius Khondji—is a perceptive and humane coming-of-age story that does what only cinema can do, elevating the smallest moments into the greatest drama. A Focus Features release.

Aftersun

Charlotte Wells, 2022, U.K., 98m

In one of the most assured and spellbinding feature debuts in years, Scottish director Charlotte Wells has fashioned a textured memory piece inspired by her relationship with her dad, taking place over the course of a brooding weekend at a coastal resort in Turkey. The charismatic Paul Mescal and naturalistic newcomer Francesca Corio fully inhabit Calum and Sophie, a divorced father and his daughter often mistaken for brother and sister, who share a close and loving bond that creates an entire world unto itself. Wells employs an unusual and gorgeous aesthetic that brings us into the interior space of this parent and child, even as she judiciously withholds details, an approach that finally grants the film a singular emotional wallop. Aftersun reimagines the coming-of-age narrative as a poignant, ultimately ungraspable chimera, informed by the present as much as the past. Winner of the French Touch Prize of the Jury at this year’s Cannes Festival. An A24 release.

Alcarràs

Carla Simón, 2022, Spain/Italy, 120m

Catalan and Spanish with English subtitles

North American Premiere

Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale Festival, Carla Simón’s follow-up to her acclaimed childhood drama Summer 1993 is a ruminative, lived-in portrait of a rural family in present-day Catalonia whose way of life is rapidly changing. The Solé clan live in a small village, annually harvesting peaches for local business and export. However, their livelihood is put in jeopardy by the looming threat of the construction of solar panels, which would necessitate the destruction of their orchard. From this simple narrative, pitting agricultural tradition against the onrushing train of modern progress, Simón weaves a marvelously textured film that moves to the unpredictable rhythms and caprices of nature and family life. A MUBI release.

All That Breathes

Shaunak Sen, 2022, India/U.K./USA, 94m

Hindi with English subtitles

High above bustling New Delhi, birds of prey known as black kites have for years routinely been falling from the skies due to injuries sustained from pollution or manja, the dangerous cotton threads of paper kites that slice through their wings. For decades, brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad—who believe in the interconnectedness of human and animal life—have taken it upon themselves to save the birds, which the general city population largely sees as nuisances despite their essential role in the city’s ecosystem. In is hypnotic, poignant, and beautifully crafted documentary, New Delhi–based filmmaker Shaunak Sen immerses himself with Saud and Shehzad for a portrayal of their struggle to make change that doubles as a diagnosis of a city rocked by turmoil. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary (World Cinema) at Sundance and the L’OEil d’or for Best Documentary at Cannes. A Sideshow and Submarine Deluxe release in association with HBO Documentary Films.

Corsage

Marie Kreutzer, 2022, Austria, France, Germany 113m

German, French, English, Hungarian with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

In a perceptive, nuanced performance, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) quietly dominates the screen as Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who begins to see her life of royal privilege as a prison as she reaches her 40th birthday. Marie Kreutzer boldly imagines Elizabeth’s cloistered, late-19th-century world within the Austro-Hungarian Empire with both austere realism and fanciful anachronism, while staying true and intensely close to the woman’s private melancholy and political struggle amidst a crumbling, combative marriage and escalating scrutiny. Star and director have together created a remarkable vision of a strong-willed political figure whose emergence from a veiled, corseted existence stands for a Europe on the cusp of major, irrevocable transformation. An IFC Films release.

A Couple

Frederick Wiseman, 2022, U.S., 63m

French with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

Countess Sophia Behrs married Leo Tolstoy when she was 18 and he was 34. They were husband and wife for 48 years, had 13 children, and she outlived him by nine years. Yet their relationship, among the most discussed and written about in literary history, was anything but harmonious, as Sophia, an artist in her own right—a photographer, memoirist, and editor—was constantly forced to negotiate her happiness with her husband’s infidelities. Inspired by Sophia’s story, legendary American documentarian Frederick Wiseman has made a film based on Sophia’s diaries and letters from Leo to Sophia, structured as a series of monologues delivered with magnificent poise and gathering intensity by star and co-writer Nathalie Boutefeu, pillowed by graceful images of natural beauty from the film’s bucolic French setting. Wiseman’s captivating one-woman portrait presents a remarkably contemporary rendering of a marriage. A Zipporah Films release.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica

Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2022, France/Switzerland/U.S., 117m

French with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere
In their thrilling new work of nonfiction exploration, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, best known for such aesthetically and ethnographically revelatory films as Leviathan and Caniba, burrow deeper than ever, using microscopic cameras and specially designed recording devices to survey the wondrous landscape of the human body. More transfixing than clinical, the film, shot in hospitals in and around Paris, eschews the normal narrative parameters for medical documentation in favor of a rigorously detached, expressionistic look at our tactile yet essentially unknowable flesh and viscera. With its unshakable images of biopsies, cesarean delivery, endoscopic procedures, and the little-seen crevices inside all of us, De Humani Corporis Fabrica both demystifies and celebrates life and death. A Grasshopper Film and Gratitude Films release.

Decision to Leave

Park Chan-wook, 2022, South Korea, 138m

Korean and Chinese with English subtitles

Busan detective Hae-joon finds that he’s increasingly obsessed with a puzzling new case: a middle-aged businessman has mysteriously fallen to his death during a rock climbing expedition. Upon discovering photos of his abused wife, a Chinese national named Seo-rae (Tang Wei), Hae-joon begins to suspect it wasn’t an accident, all the while becoming emotionally and erotically drawn to her. From this Hitchcockian situation, director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) weaves a swelling, expanding, ever more complex tale about a possible black widow and the investigator who just might be fashioning his own web. One of Park’s most enveloping and accomplished thrillers, which earned him the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Decision to Leave is a constantly surprising, elegantly constructed film that builds in power to a truly haunting denouement. A MUBI release.

Descendant

Margaret Brown, 2022, U.S., 109m

In 1860, decades after the U.S. banned the practice of kidnapping and importing humans for enslavement, yet five years before the 13th amendment emancipated the nation’s already enslaved people, a ship named the Clotilda docked in Mobile, Alabama. There, it unloaded more than one hundred African souls before it was ordered destroyed and sunk to eradicate evidence. Freed in 1865, yet unable to return to their homeland, the survivors founded Africatown—a testament to their strength which persists today despite the town’s governmental neglect and economic disparity. This long submerged history symbolizes a nation’s forgotten atrocities in this poignant and cathartic documentary from nonfiction veteran Margaret Brown (The Order of Myths). Reckoning with the legacy of this history and giving voice to the descendants of these enslaved people, Brown’s intricately drawn film tells an urgent tale of community revitalization, environmental action, and racial justice. A Netflix release.

Enys Men

Mark Jenkin, 2022, U.K., 91m

U.S. Premiere
In 1973, on an uninhabited, windswept, rocky island off the coast of Cornwall in southwest England, an isolated middle-aged woman (Mary Woodvine) spends her days in enigmatic environmental study. When she’s not tending to the moss-covered stone cottage in which she lodges, her central preoccupation is a cluster of wildflowers at cliff’s edge, their subtle changes noted in a daily ledger. Yet she’s also increasingly haunted by her own nightmarish visitations, which seem both summoned from her own past and brought up from the very soil and ceremonial history of this mysterious place. Shot on enveloping, period-evocative 16mm,  this eerie, texturally rich experience from Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin conjures works of classic British folk horror but remains its own strange being, a genuine transmission from a weird other world. A NEON release.

EO

Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022, Poland/Italy, 86m

Polish, Italian, English, French with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

At age 84, legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski (The Deep End, Moonlighting) has directed one of his spryest, most visually inventive films, following the travels of a peripatetic donkey named EO. After being removed from the only life he’s ever known in a traveling circus, EO begins a journey across the Polish and Italian countryside, experiencing cruelty and kindness, captivity and freedom. Skolimowski imagines the animal’s mesmerizing journey as an ever-shifting interior landscape, marked by absurdity and warmth in equal measure, putting the viewer in the unique perspective of the protagonist. Skolimowski has constructed his own bold vision about the follies of human nature, seen from the ultimate outsider’s perspective. A Sideshow and Janus Films release.

The Eternal Daughter

Joanna Hogg, 2022, U.K./U.S., 96m

One gloomy night, a middle-aged filmmaker and her elderly mother arrive at a fog-enshrouded hotel in the English countryside. An ominously brusque clerk, an apparent lack of other guests, and disturbing sounds from the room above theirs bode a less-than-welcome arrival. Yet all is not what it seems on this increasingly emotional trip into the past for these two women, one of whom has definitely been here before. Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir), among today’s foremost filmmakers, uses this Victorian gothic scenario for an entirely surprising, impeccably crafted, and, finally, overwhelming excavation of a parent-child relationship and the impulse toward artistic creation. And Tilda Swinton, in a performance of rich, endless surprise, turns in one of the most remarkable acting feats in her astonishing career. An A24 release.

Master Gardener

Paul Schrader, 2022, U.S., 107m

North American Premiere

Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) takes great care and pride in his work as the longtime head horticulturist at Gracewood Gardens, the historic estate of the demanding, imperious Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). An enclosed, scrupulously run world of its own, Gracewood has been in the Haverhill family for generations, and Norma trusts no one other than Narvel to continue its traditions. However, a threat of change is harkened by the arrival of Norma’s troubled grand-niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), whose presence sets off a chain reaction of events that catalyze Narvel into coming to terms with his own shocking past. Following First Reformed and The Card Counter, Paul Schrader continues his dramatic renaissance with an equally effective, startling tale about dormant violence and the possibility of regeneration.

No Bears

Jafar Panahi, 2022, Iran, 107m

Farsi, Azerbaijani, Turkish with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

One of the world’s great cinematic artists, Jafar Panahi has been carefully crafting self-reflexive works about artistic, personal, and political freedom for the past three decades, and his risk-taking output has never slowed down even amidst his globally condemned treatment by the Iranian government. Now, as the international film community vehemently denounces Panahi’s summer 2022 arrest, this time for his vocal support of a fellow artist’s independence, he has gifted us all with a new film, and it’s another virtuosic sleight of hand. In No Bears, as in many of his recent titles, he centers himself, having relocated temporarily to a rural border town to remotely oversee the making of a new film in Tehran, the story of which comes to sharply mirror disturbing events that begin to occur around him. In these parallel yet cross-hatching narratives, Panahi keeps pulling the narrative rug out from under the viewer as he confronts tradition and progress, city and country, spiritual belief and photographic evidence, and the human desire to escape from oppression.

The Novelist’s Film

Hong Sangsoo, 2022, South Korea, 92m

Korean with English subtitles

North American Premiere

For his playful and gently thought-provoking 27th feature, Hong Sangsoo takes on the perspective of a prickly middle-aged novelist, Junhee (Lee Hyeyoung, the magnetic star of Hong’s In Front of Your Face). After revisiting an old friend who now runs a bookshop outside of Seoul, she embarks on a restorative journey that leads her to a chance encounter with a famous actress and former movie star (Kim Minhee); the two make an instant connection that stokes both women’s dormant creative impulses. Within this simple, loose-limbed premise, Hong locates a deep well of emotional truth, and poses a bounty of questions about the necessities and expectations of art-making, leading to a poignant, entirely unexpected, mode-shifting climax. A Cinema Guild release.

One Fine Morning

Mia Hansen-Løve, 2022, France, 112m

French with English subtitles

Few filmmakers are as adept at exploring the contours of modern love and grief as Mia Hansen-Løve (Bergman Island), whose intensely poignant and deeply personal latest drama stars Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a professional translator and single mother at a crossroads. Her father (Pascal Greggory), rapidly deteriorating from a neurological illness, will soon require facility care, and her new lover (Melvil Poupaud) is a married dad whose unavailability only seems to draw her nearer to him, despite—or because of—the fact that she’s going through an overwhelming time in her life. Hansen-Løve, so finely observant of the small nuances of human interaction, creates, in harmonious concert with a magnificent Seydoux, a complicated portrait of a woman torn between romantic desire and familial tragedy that is a marvel of emotional and formal economy. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Pacifiction

Albert Serra, 2022, France/Spain/Germany/Portugal, 162m

French with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra reconfirms his centrality in the contemporary cinematic landscape with this mesmerizing portrait of a French bureaucrat (a monumental Benoît Magimel) drifting through a fateful trip to a French Polynesian island with increasing anxiety. Pacifiction charts the various uneasy relationships that develop between Magimel’s autocratic yet avuncular High Commissioner, De Roller, and the Indigenous locals (including nonprofessional actor Pahoa Mahagafanau in a hypnotic breakthrough as De Roller’s trusted right hand and maybe lover) who operate essentially under his faux-benevolent thumb, many of whom we meet at a resort that caters to the prurient exoticism of foreign tourists. Serra’s gripping, atmospheric thriller is a slow-building fever dream that lulls before catching us by surprise with the depths of its darkness, a film that allows its incisive social commentary about the remnants of colonialism to surface through quiet observation and aesthetic audacity. A Grasshopper Film and Gratitude Films release.

R.M.N.

Cristian Mungiu, 2022, Romania/France, 125m

Romanian with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

Cristian Mungiu, whose bravura films such as 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days and Beyond the Hills dramatize the tensions of a modern Romania still beholden to dangerous traditions, returns with a gripping, mosaic-like portrait of a rural Transylvanian town riven by ethnic conflicts, economic resentment, and personal turmoil. Matthias (a glowering Marin Grigore) has returned to the village after an altercation at his job in a German slaughterhouse, only to find that his estranged wife has grown more distant and his young son has stopped talking after witnessing something disturbing in the forest near their home. Meanwhile his former lover, Csila (Judith State), with whom he hopes to rekindle an affair, has become involved in an escalating controversy when her local bread factory hires Sri Lankan migrants. These strands converge in increasing combustibility, building to an unsettling climax and a bravura town hall sequence that ranks with Mungiu’s best work. An IFC Films release.

Return to Seoul

Davy Chou, 2022, France/Germany/South Korea/Belgium, 115m

English, French, and Korean with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

Freddie (Park Ji-Min), a young French woman, finds herself spontaneously tracking down the South Korean birth parents she has never met while on vacation in Seoul. From this seemingly simple premise, Cambodian-French filmmaker Davy Chou spins an unpredictable, careering narrative that takes place over the course of several years, always staying close on the roving heels of its impetuous protagonist, who moves to her own turbulent rhythms (as does the galvanizing Park, a singular new screen presence). Chou elegantly creates probing psychological portraiture from a character whose feelings of unbelonging have kept her at an emotional distance from nearly everyone in her life; it’s an enormously moving film made with verve, sensitivity, and boundless energy. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Saint Omer

Alice Diop, 2022, France, 118m

French with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

Rama (Kayije Kagame), a successful journalist and author living in Paris, has come to Saint Omer, a town in the north of France, to attend the trial of a young Senegalese woman, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), who allegedly murdered her baby daughter. Although she admits to killing the child, she cannot or will not provide motivation, claiming it was a kind of sorcery out of her control. Rama’s plan to write about Laurence in a book inspired by the Medea myth increasingly unravels as she becomes overwhelmed by the case, and reckons with memories of her immigrant mother as well as her own impending motherhood. In her consummate fiction feature debut, Alice Diop (We) constructs an arresting yet highly sensitive, superbly acted film of constantly revealing layers. Saint Omer is at once a tense courtroom drama, a work of abstracted psychological portraiture, an inquiry into human agency, and a provocative examination of the limits of myth and cross-cultural knowledge.

Scarlet

Pietro Marcello, 2022, France/Italy/Germany, 103m

French with English subtitles

North American Premiere

Pietro Marcello, one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile talents, follows his dramatic breakthrough Martin Eden with an enchanting period fable based on a beloved 1923 novel by Russian writer Alexander Grin. Beginning as the tale of a sensitive brute (Räphael Terry) who returns home from World War I to his rural French village to discover his wife has died and that he must take care of their baby daughter, Juliette, the film blossoms into a pastoral portrait of Juliette as a free-spirited young woman (Juliette Jouan) reckoning with a local witch’s prophecy for her future and falling for the modern man (Louis Garrel) who literally drops from the sky. In his first film made in France, Marcello proves again he is as comfortable in the realm of folklore as he is in creative nonfiction, delicately interweaving realist drama, ethereal romance, and musical flights of fancy.

Showing Up

Kelly Reichardt, 2022, U.S., 108m

North American Premiere
Continuing one of the richest collaborations in modern American cinema, director Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women) reunites with star Michelle Williams for this marvelously particularized portrait of a sculptor’s daily work and frustrations in an artists’ enclave in Portland. Lizzy (Williams) struggles to put the finishing touches on her latest pieces for a gallery show, all the while juggling admin work at the local art school; dealing with the neglect of her well-meaning landlord (a funny and nuanced Hong Chau), who also happens to be a rising-star conceptual artist; and tending to the emotional wellbeing of her increasingly fragmented family. Christopher Blauvelt’s patient camerawork, Reichardt’s precise cutting, and Williams’s physically transformative performance coalesce to create something remarkable in Showing Up, a delicately humorous drama of the experience of being a creative person that avoids all clichés that plague films about artists. An A24 release.

Stars at Noon

Claire Denis, 2022, France, 137m

English and Spanish with English subtitles

North American Premiere

A dissolute young American journalist (Margaret Qualley) and an English businessman (Joe Alwyn) with ties to the oil industry meet by chance while on different, mysterious assignments in modern-day Nicaragua. The two tumble into a whirlwind romance despite knowing little about each other’s true professional identities—all while abstract forces close in on them as they desperately try to book it out of a country that won’t seem to let them leave. Stars at Noon, based on the 1986 novel by Denis Johnson, represents a new mode for director Claire Denis, a contemporary thriller suffused with political intrigue and languid eroticism, moving entirely to the tactile rhythms of its actors, especially rising star Qualley, who gives a live-wire performance of fervid spontaneity and mercurial passion. Winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. An A24 release.

Stonewalling

Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka, Japan, 148m

Hunanese with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

For more than a decade, Beijing-based wife-and-husband team Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka have been making films about the lives of young people in China—in many cases “left-behind children,” or those whose parents are forced to leave their families to find jobs in cities. Expanding their project, their gripping, humane yet uncompromising latest, shot with a precise formal economy by Otsuka (who also serves as cinematographer), focuses on a year in the life of Lynn, a flight-attendant-in-training whose plans to finish college are thrown into doubt when she discovers she’s pregnant. Not wanting an abortion (a decision she hides from her callow, absent boyfriend, away on modeling and party-hosting gigs), she hopes to give the child away after carrying it to term, while staying afloat amidst a series of dead-end jobs. As incarnated by the filmmakers’ quietly potent recurring star Yao Honggui, Lynn—whose story continues after being the center of the filmmakers’ acclaimed The Foolish Bird (2007)—is both a fully rounded character and the vessel for an urgent critique of a modern-day social structure that has few options for women in need of care.

TÁR

Todd Field, 2022, U.S., 157m

The charisma and emotional precision of Cate Blanchett are put to astounding use in this deft showcase for the actor’s nearly musical artistry, a stinging portrait of a world-famous orchestra conductor’s gradual unraveling that is the first film in sixteen years from director Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children). A Focus Features release.

Trenque Lauquen

Laura Citarella, 2022, Argentina, 250m (presented in two parts)

Spanish with English subtitles

North American Premiere

In her dazzling and enormously pleasurable new opus, Laura Citarella takes the viewer on a limitless, mercurial journey through stories nested within stories set in and around the Argentinean city of Trenque Lauquen (“Round Lake”) and centered on the strange disappearance of a local academic named Laura (Laura Paredes). Through initial inquiries by two colleagues—older boyfriend Rafael and a driver named Ezequiel with whom she had grown secretly close—we learn about her recent discoveries, including a new, unclassified species of flower and a series of old love letters hidden at the local library, which may help them track her down. Yet as flashbacks and anecdotes pile up, we—and the film’s intrepid investigators—begin to realize that this intricately structured tale is larger and stranger than we could have imagined. Citarella, a producer of the equally remarkable shape-shifting epic La Flor, has confidently crafted a series of interlocked romantic, biological, and ecological mysteries that create parallels between past lives and present dangers, invoke the rapture of obsessive pursuit, and salute the human need to find personal freedom and happiness. Trenque Lauquen is told in 12 chapters spread across two feature films.

Triangle of Sadness

Ruben Östlund, 2022, Sweden/France/UK/Turkey/Germany, 147m

Cinematic mischief maker Ruben Östlund liberally applies his customary playfulness to the wide canvas of his wildly ambitious, frequently hilarious latest film, which won the Swedish director his second Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Kicking off as a satirical romance, following the bickering, money-soured relationship between two hot young models (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean), the three-part film escalates into increasing absurdity after they are invited on a luxury cruise, where they rub elbows with the super-rich, as well as a disheveled and disillusioned, Marx-spouting sea captain (Woody Harrelson). To tell more would ruin the Buñuelian twists of this poison-dipped farce on class and economic disparity, which doesn’t skewer contemporary culture so much as dunk it in raw sewage. A NEON release.

Unrest

Cyril Schäublin, 2022, Switzerland, 93m

Swiss German, Russian and French with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

A film of immense delicacy and precision, Cyril Schäublin’s complexly woven timepiece is set in the hushed environs of the Swiss watchmaking town of Saint-Imier in the 1870s. In this unlikely place, a youthful Pyotr Kropotkin, who would become a noted anarchist and socialist philosopher, experiences a quiet revolution, finding himself inspired by the buzzing activity of the town’s denizens, from the photographers and cartographers surveying its people and land; to the growing anarchist collective at the local watermill, raising funds for strikes abroad; to the organizing workers at the watch factory, whose craft is depicted with exacting detail and devotion. Schäublin’s abstracted, geometric visual approach reinforces the singularly contemplative nature of his project: this is a film about time—its tyranny as well as its comforts—and how it relates to work, leisure, and the larger processes that shape history. A KimStim release.

Walk Up

Hong Sangsoo, 2022, South Korea, 97m

Korean with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

Hong Sangsoo uses a delicately radical structure in his latest exploration of the complexities of relationships, growing older, and artistic pursuit. Successful middle-aged filmmaker Byungsoo (Kwon Haehyo) drops by to visit and introduce his daughter to an old friend, Mrs. Kim (Lee Hyeyoung), the owner of a charming apartment building that houses a restaurant on the ground floor. After Mrs. Kim tries to persuade him to move into one of the walk-up units, the film and Byungsoo’s future take a series of unexpected turns, as the various floors of the apartment come to contain different stages of his romantic and professional lives—or perhaps they’re different realities? Hong’s playfully existential drama consistently surprises, asking provocative, unresolvable questions about desire, illusion, and satisfaction and what we need—and take—from one another as we seek our own answers. A Cinema Guild release.

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER

Film at Lincoln Center is dedicated to supporting the art and elevating the craft of cinema and enriching film culture.

Film at Lincoln Center fulfills its mission through the programming of festivals, series, retrospectives, and new releases; the publication of Film Comment; and the presentation of podcasts, talks, special events, and artist initiatives. Since its founding in 1969, this nonprofit organization has brought the celebration of American and international film to the world-renowned Lincoln Center arts complex, making the discussion and appreciation of cinema accessible to a broad audience and ensuring that it remains an essential art form for years to come.

Support for the New York Film Festival is generously provided by Official Partner Campari®; Benefactor Partners Netflix and Citi; Supporting Partners Bloomberg Philanthropies, Topic Studios, and Hearst, Contributing Partners Dolby, Turner Classic Movies (TCM), MUBI, NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, Manhattan Portage, and Unifrance; and Media Partners Variety, The WNET Group, and Shutterstock. American Airlines is the Official Airline of Film at Lincoln Center.

August 24, 2021

The following is a press release from Film at Lincoln Center:

Film at Lincoln Center announces Currents for the 59th New York Film Festival (September 24 – October 10, 2021). 

“Currents is the section of the festival that attests to cinema’s continued capacity for reinvention,” said Dennis Lim, NYFF Director of Programming. “The features and shorts in this year’s program take many forms—everything from reimagined fables to archival experiments—and you’ll find some of the most personal films in the festival here, as well as some of the most political. We hope that audiences will share the sense of surprise and discovery that we experienced in putting together this lineup.” 

The Currents section includes 15 features and 36 short films, representing 27 countries, and complements the Main Slate, tracing a more complete picture of contemporary cinema with an emphasis on new and innovative forms and voices. The section presents a diverse offering of short and feature-length productions by filmmakers and artists working at the vanguard of the medium. The Opening Night selection is Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes’s (Arabian Nights, NYFF53) The Tsugua Diaries, a beguiling pandemic-era tale about three housemates in lockdown—one of several films in the section responding to the current health crisis through varying lenses; others include Shengze Zhu’s A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces, a meditation on urban spaces before and after the COVID outbreak, and Denis Côté’s Social Hygiene, an absurdist comedy in which characters exchange barbs from a humorous distance. 

A pair of features make their world festival premieres: Eléonore Yameogo, An van. Dienderen, and Rosine Mbakam’s Prism, which explores how racism remains entrenched in film culture via the biases of movie camera lighting; and pioneering film essayist Artavazd Peleshian’s Nature, an uncanny montage of humanity’s harmony and conflict with the natural world. Other nonfiction highlights include Wang Qiong’s reflection on her fractured family and China’s one-child policy in All About My Sisters; Vincent Meessen’s Just a Movement, a portrait of artist, Marxist, and anti-colonialist organizer Omar Blondin Diop; Jean-Gabriel Périot’s chronicle of the French working class over the past 70 years, Returning to Reims; Rhayne Vermette’s evocative film illustrating her native Manitoba and the Métis community, Ste. Anne; and Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing, which won the Cannes Golden Eye award for best documentary. Also screening are Kyoshi Sugita’s impressionistic poetry adaptation, Haruhara-san’s Recorder; Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s folkloric fiction feature debut, The Tale of King Crab; NYFF56 Projections alum Ted Fendt’s 16mm-shot Outside Noise; Kiro Russo’s South American cityscape, El Gran Movimiento; and Claire Simon’s hybrid film, I Want to Talk About Duras, a portrait of experimental filmmaker Marguerite Duras as recalled by her partner. Simon, Meessen, Périot, Zhu, and Rigo de Righi & Zoppis have previously shown work in the annual FLC festival Art of the Real. 

Currents also showcases eight shorts programs, with work from notable new talents including two new films by British artist and filmmaker Morgan Quaintance; the latest work in a trilogy of experimental narrative shorts by Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand; a mesmerizing in-camera collage by the Mexican Indigenous filmmaking collective Los Ingrávidos; a ruminative essay on colonial traces in archival photographs from Philippine filmmaker Shireen Seno; Virgil Vernier with his thought provoking examination of the 2005 riots in Parisian suburbs; as well as artist Tiffany Sia’s incisive video essay on the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

Artists returning to NYFF this year include Kevin Jerome Everson, whose May June July documents the summer of 2020; Matías Piñeiro, collaborating with Galician co-director Lois Patiño for their beguiling film Sycrorax; Ericka Beckman, whose work was featured in a retrospective program in NYFF56; Tomonari Nishikawa with a new live projection performance for 16mm; and NYFF59 Main Slate filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Additional returning filmmakers include Allison Chhorn, Zachary Epcar, Eliane Esther Bots, Luise Donschen, Shun Ikezoe, Richard Tuohy, Vika Kirchenbauer, Ross Meckfessel, Guillermo Moncayo, and Aykan Safoğlu.

The Currents selection committee, chaired by Dennis Lim, includes Florence Almozini, Aily Nash, and Tyler Wilson. Nash and Wilson are the head shorts programmers for NYFF. Shelby Shaw and Madeline Whittle are programming assistants for short films, and Almudena Escobar López, Manny Lage-Valera, Marius Hrdy, Vikram Murthi, Maxwell Paparella, and Mariana Sánchez Bueno are submissions screeners. Violeta Bava, Michelle Carey, Leo Goldsmith, Rachael Rakes, and Gina Telaroli serve as NYFF program advisors.

NYFF59 will feature in-person screenings, as well as select outdoor and virtual events. In response to distributor and filmmaker partners and in light of festivals returning and theaters reopening across the country, NYFF will not offer virtual screenings for this year’s edition. 

Proof of vaccination will be required for all staff, audiences, and filmmakers at NYFF59 venues. Additionally, NYFF59 will adhere to a comprehensive series of health and safety policies in coordination with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and state and city medical experts, while adapting as necessary to the current health crisis. Visit filmlinc.org/safety for more information. 

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema and takes place September 24 – October 10, 2021. An annual bellwether of the state of cinema that has shaped film culture since 1963, the festival continues an enduring tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. 

NYFF59 tickets will go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, September 7 at noon ET, with early-access opportunities for FLC members and pass holders prior to this date. Experience all of Currents with an All-Access Pass, available for $140. Learn more here. Support of the New York Film Festival benefits Film at Lincoln Center in its nonprofit mission to promote the art and craft of cinema.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

Currents Features

Opening Night
The Tsugua Diaries
Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, 2021, Portugal, 102m
Portuguese and Romanian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

The rigorous process of moviemaking meets the torpor of pandemic life in this beguiling new film co-directed by Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes (Arabian Nights, NYFF53). A daily journal that unfolds in revelatory reverse order, this playful rug-puller begins by surveying the mundane routines of three housemates (Carloto Cotta, Crista Alfaiate, and João Nunes Monteiro) living in rural peace during the COVID lockdown: impromptu dance parties, cleaning, building a backyard butterfly house. Soon, we discover that there’s more going on beyond the limits of the camera frame. Cockeyed, funny, and slyly meta-cinematic, The Tsugua Diaries, lovingly shot on 16mm, demonstrates the possibility of artistic creation out of sheer will.

All About My Sisters
Wang Qiong, 2021, USA, 175m
Mandarin with English subtitles
North American Premiere

In her astonishing feature debut, Wang Qiong documents with unflinching and harrowing honesty her own fractured family, gradually revealing the personal and psychological effects of China’s one-child policy on the individual, the family unit, and women in society at large. At the center of the film is her sister, Jin, who remains profoundly affected by her biological parents’ abandonment of her as a baby after attempting to abort her. Adopted by her aunt and uncle, Jin resumed living with her birth parents as a teenager, yet the family remains embroiled in a legacy of trauma. Filming over the course of seven years, Wang moves far beyond the diaristic, capturing moments of vulnerability, joy, pain, and anguish with insight and delicate artistry; in excavating her own difficult history, she establishes herself as a major new voice in nonfiction cinema. An Icarus Films release.

El Gran Movimiento / The Great Movement
Kiro Russo, 2021, Bolivia/France/Qatar/Switzerland, 85m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Expanding on the hybrid narrative of his remarkable 2016 film Dark Skull, Kiro Russo has mounted a monumental, gently mystical portrait of the contemporary central South American cityscape and those who work within its bowels and environs. Set in the alternately harsh and beautiful terrain of La Paz, Bolivia and its surrounding rural areas, El Gran Movimiento follows a young miner as he looks for work alongside his friends, even as he begins to descend into a mysterious sickness. With its marvelous long-lens zoom work and increasingly dynamic, rhythmic editing, Russo’s film is a hypnotic journey into a psychological space that touches upon the supernatural.

Haruhara-san’s Recorder
Kyoshi Sugita, 2021, Japan, 120m
Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Kyoshi Sugita creates an evocative portrait of a young woman’s interior world through impressionistic action rather than psychology. Though we learn little about her, the central character, played by Chika Araki, is marvelously present: she rents an apartment on her own, gets a job in a café, and begins to find peace after a recent tragic event. Fixing his patient camera on meetings with friends, family, and strangers, lunches and teatime, and occurrences both mundane and mystical, Sugita alights upon surprising, inexplicable, and frequently moving moments that hint at the spiritual in everyday life. Adapted from a tanka (a short poem) by Naoko Higashi, Sugita’s film, which won the Grand Prize at FIDMarseille, employs the cinematic form to express the otherwise inexpressible.

I Want to Talk About Duras
Claire Simon, 2021, France, 95m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere

French director Claire Simon, a prolific maker of fiction and documentary films, unites the two forms in her surprising latest, a precise, enveloping portrait of the complex romantic relationship between epochal experimental novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras and her much younger, homosexual partner, Yann Andréa. Dramatized as a pair of dialogues based entirely on transcripts from a 1982 interview between Andréa (played on screen by Swann Arlaud) and journalist Michèle Manceaux (Emmanuelle Devos, an expert interrogator and a mesmerizing listener), Simon’s film underlines the sexual imbalances and power plays that defined their fraught love life while maintaining the mysteries and ambiguities that marked Duras’s singular artistic corpus. 

Just a Movement
Vincent Meessen, 2021, Belgium/France, 110m
Mandarin, French, and Wolof with English subtitles

In the late ’60s, Niger-born Marxist intellectual Omar Blondin Diop became a central organizer and communicator of anti-colonialist political theory as a student in France and as a researcher in Senegal. Diop died at the age of 26 in prison after being arrested by the Senegalese government, his suspicious death considered by many to be a likely assassination. He’s left an impression on generations of audiences with his appearance as a Maoist revolutionary in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise, and it is this film that serves as the backbone text, providing aesthetic and thematic inspiration for Vincent Meessen’s freewheeling yet highly disciplined documentary—a film about its own making as much as it is a visual evocation and recapitulation of Diop’s political philosophies.

Nature
Artavazd Peleshian, 2020, France/Germany/Armenia, 63m
World Festival Premiere

Legendary Armenian visual essayist Artavazd Peleshian’s first feature film in nearly 30 years is an epic return to his major theme: humanity in harmony and conflict with the natural world. Sublime and terrifying, the forces of Nature are captured in a relentless montage of found disaster videos—of capsizing icebergs, inky black dust clouds, ferocious winds, pitiless floodwaters. Rendered in stark black and white and subject to the distinctive mode of montage that Peleshian has developed over six decades, these images take on an uncanny mix of timelessness and immediacy, imparting an overwhelming experience of nature’s vast, destructive processes of regeneration, and of humanity’s precarious existence amid constantly unfolding catastrophe.

Screening with:

2 Pasolini
Andrei Ujică, 2021, France, 10m
Italian with English subtitles
World Premiere
Andrei Ujică’s 2 Pasolini follows the Italian auteur and his theological advisor, Don Andrea Carraro, on a trip through 1960s Palestine to scout locations for his 1964 biblical masterpiece The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Through candid archival footage and surprising juxtapositions, the film tracks both Pasolini’s journey and Christ’s—across the desert, to the shores of a raging sea, and beyond.

A Night of Knowing Nothing
Payal Kapadia, 2021, France/India, 96m
Bengali and Hindi with English subtitles

Through a series of letters read aloud to an absent lover, we learn about the fears, desires, and philosophical identity of a young woman named L, a student at the Film and Television Institute of India. Through these words, and via the documentary images collected by her and her peers of contemporary Indian youths engaged in university life, writer-director Payal Kapadia has constructed a brilliantly fragmentary work of witnessing. A Night of Knowing Nothing—winner of the Golden Eye award for best documentary at this year’s Cannes Film Festival—is a testament to the inseparability of life, film, politics, and dreams, while functioning as an essential portrait of the ongoing struggle for resistance from discrimination. 

Outside Noise
Ted Fendt, 2021, Germany/South Korea/Austria, 61m
German and English with English subtitles
North American Premiere

The latest feature from Philadelphian micro-independent treasure Ted Fendt (Classical Period, NYFF56) finds the filmmaker, writer, projectionist, and translator in a contemplative mode, shooting for the first time abroad. With his customary mix of narrative restraint and intellectual curiosity, Fendt follows a small group of young women through Berlin and Vienna over the course of several months, particularly Daniela, who has just returned from traveling in New York and is dealing with a bout of insomnia. Shot on 16mm and glowing with natural light, Outside Noise—co-written by Fendt and his two lead actors, Daniela Zahlner and Mia Sellmann—is an authentic depiction of the tremors and pleasures of the in-between years of our early thirties.

Prism
Eléonore Yameogo, An van. Dienderen, and Rosine Mbakam, 2021, Belgium, 78m
French and English with English subtitles
World Premiere

Among the many ways that racism is deeply entrenched in our film culture is a technical one: the lighting for movie cameras has always been calibrated for white skin, with other production tools reflecting the same bias throughout cinema history. Three filmmakers collectively explore the literal, theoretical, and philosophical dimensions of that reality in this discursive, playful, and profound work of nonfiction. In a series of thematically linked, provocative discussions and interrogations, Eléonore Yameogo from Burkina Faso, Belgian An van. Dienderen, and Rosine Mbakam from Cameroon chart the making of their own film, while exploring the cinematic construction of whiteness and how this relates to power, privilege, and the myth of objectivity. An Icarus Films release.

Returning to Reims
Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2021, France, 83m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere

In just over 80 minutes, filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot provides a fleet, thorough, and incisive sociological examination of the French working class over the past 70 years. Loosely adapting Didier Eribon’s 2009 memoir Returning to Reims, in which the author’s journey back to his hometown in northern France became a reckoning with his family’s history and politics, Périot weaves his own nonfiction tapestry, using decades’ worth of artfully deployed archival footage, film clips, and TV news reports to illustrate the rise, fall, and hopeful rebirth of the country’s proletariat, as well as how social identity is gradually constructed. Narrated by Adèle Haenel and structured in two distinct halves—the personal and the political—Periot’s sensationally edited film is an urgent reminder that the moral health of a nation is dependent on how it treats its citizens.

A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces
Shengze Zhu, 2021, USA, 87m
Without dialogue, featuring Chinese and English text
U.S. Premiere

Documentarian Shengze Zhu, who was born and raised in China and studied filmmaking in the United States, contrasts mid-pandemic surveillance video of Wuhan’s empty streets with footage she’d captured before the COVID outbreak in this becalmed, wordless meditation on the vulnerability and resilience of urban spaces. Interspersed with her exquisitely composed images of life and hope along the Yangtze River are pieces of on-screen text translating the poignant, sometimes wrenching letters written to loved ones affected by illness and death. A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces is a work of dissolution and regeneration, architecture and landscape, a portrait of a city and a world in transition.

Social Hygiene
Denis Côté, 2021, Canada, 76m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

The versatile and mischievous Quebecois filmmaker Denis Côté (A Skin So Soft, NYFF55) has made an absurdist comedy that’s incidentally perfect for the pandemic era. Constructed as a series of frank and often hilarious repartees between an insolent petty thief named Antonin and a succession of largely fed-up women—who range from sister to wife to lover to tax collector—Côté’s film situates its characters in elegant outdoor tableaux in the Quebec countryside, keeping a safe, proper, and humorous distance from one another as they verbally parry and thrust in static long takes. Unexpectedly traversing time, with characters appearing in either period or contemporary dress depending on the context of their conversation, Social Hygiene is a sly reminder that our present-day culture of moral confrontation was ever thus.

Ste. Anne
Rhayne Vermette, 2021, Canada, 80m
English and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

In her evocative, collage-like 16mm film, Rhayne Vermette immerses the viewer in the sounds, textures, and atmosphere of her native Manitoba to limn the outer edges of a twilight-toned narrative centering on a long-missing young woman’s unexpected return to her indigenous Métis community. Unbeholden to temporal or structural boundaries, Vermette uses Renée’s reappearance as the anchor point for a work of dreams and memory. Shot over the course of 14 months, incorporating scripted and improvised elements, Ste. Anne is as much a fragmentary portrait of the seasons as it is about the people whose lives are dictated in part by nature’s flow.

The Tale of King Crab
Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, 2021, Italy/Argentina/France, 99m
Italian and Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere

This rich, engrossing fiction feature debut from documentary filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis takes storytelling itself as its subject. Based on a legendary figure about whom the filmmakers first heard while making their previous collaboration, 2015’s Il Solengo, this rousing, bifurcated tale follows the improbable adventures of Luciano (a bewitching Gabriele Silli), a village outcast in late-19th-century rural Italy. In the film’s first half, set in the countryside near Rome, his life is undone by alcohol, forbidden love, and an escalating quarrel with a local aristocrat; in the second, Luciano is in the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego, hunting for a mythic treasure with the help of a compass-like crab. Rigo de Righi and Zoppis have created a highly unconventional narrative of redemption, alternating images of grandeur and folkloric idiosyncrasy. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.

Currents Shorts

Program 1: Acts of Seeing 

Day Is Done
Zhang Dalei, 2021, China, 24m
Mandarin with English subtitles
North American Premiere

A miniature portrait of a family’s multiple generations, Day Is Done follows a young film student—on the eve of his departure to study in Russia—as he accompanies his parents on a rare visit to his grandfather in Inner Mongolia. Delicately observed and minutely detailed, Zhang’s film captures the subtle harmonies and discordances of the different generations occupying, for a brief time, the same space and the same moment of calm.

38
Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand, 2021, USA, 23m
World Premiere

Vivid interruptions of sound and images fragment the psychic landscape of a 38-year-old woman who becomes obsessed with the social media presence of the young woman who broke up her relationship. The latest entry in Chew and Durand’s ongoing examination of the embodied experience of our hybrid online-IRL existence, 38 mines contemporary life’s nuanced exchanges between longing and looking, voyeurism and the desire to be seen.

ELLE
Luise Donschen, 2021, Germany, 14m
English and Japanese with English subtitles
World Premiere

Hovering between the commonplace and the mysterious, ELLE follows a father and daughter on an early spring visit to the Kyoto Botanical Gardens. At once highly formal and thrumming with life, the liminal space of the Garden becomes the stage for a series of fleeting encounters, which director Luise Donschen explores with a precise sensitivity to the seen and the unseen.

Sycorax
Lois Patiño and Matías Piñeiro, 2021, Spain/Portugal, 21m
Portuguese and Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Mother of Caliban and imprisoner of Ariel, Sycorax remains offstage for the duration of The Tempest, dismissed by Prospero as an evil sorceress. In this collaboration between Lois Patiño and Matías Piñeiro, she becomes the central subject, as a director (played by Piñeiro regular Agustina Muñoz), with the help of local women from a village in the Azores, attempts to give a face and voice to this silenced character. 

Program 2: Critical Mass

Do Not Circulate
Tiffany Sia, 2021, Hong Kong, 17m
World Premiere

The timeline and vertical aspect ratio of social media set the formal parameters for Tiffany Sia’s essay film, which follows the image trail of a single event in Hong Kong from the 2019 protests. Reckoning with this event, a relentless voiceover reframes archival media salvaged in the midst of disappearance and erasure, drawing upon a traumatic media memory, summoning ghosts and occult forces alongside disinformation and rumor.

Dreams Under Confinement
Christopher Harris, 2020 USA, 3m

Frenzied voices on the Chicago Police Department’s scanner call for squad cars and reprisals during the 2020 uprising in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as Google Earth tracks the action through simulated aerial views of urban spaces and the vast Cook County Department of Corrections, the country’s third-largest jail system. In Christopher Harris’s Dreams Under Confinement, the prison and the street merge into a shared carceral landscape.

In Flow of Words
Eliane Esther Bots, 2021, Netherlands, 22m
Bosnian, Croatian, English, and Serbian with English subtitles
North American Premiere

In Eliane Esther Bots’s film, three interpreters for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia share their experiences with translating the testimony of witnesses and victims of genocide. But how can an interpreter—who is so physically and vocally central to the tribunal’s proceedings—remain an objective medium for testimony? How can they provide a simple conduit for meaning, stripped of the original voice’s incommunicable sounds of grief, sympathy, and anger?

All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes
Haig Aivazian, 2021, Lebanon, 18m
English, Arabic, and French with English subtitles
Provocatively scrambling geography and chronology, Haig Aivazian’s densely associative montage writes a history of illumination as it intersects with the technological evolution of state and police control. From New York to Paris to Beirut, from the origins of whale oil lanterns to the era of predictive policing, this video assemblage accounts for the use of light and visibility in the service of social management, and creates space for a counter-optics of opacity and resistance.

Kindertotenlieder
Virgil Vernier, 2021, France, 27m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Through television news bulletins, Kindertotenlieder revisits the 2005 riots in France, sparked by the deaths of two teenagers from the Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sur-Bois, who were killed during a police chase. Here, the static formal conventions of TV news—vox pop interviews, B-roll of burning cars, outraged neighbors—slowly reveal a subtler narrative beneath the surface: one of neglect, oppression, and ethnic and class divisions.

Program 3: Free Form

Personality Test
Justin Jinsoo Kim, 2021, South Korea/USA, 8m
Korean with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A walk in the woods, an encounter with an animal, a body of water. On the soundtrack, a woman’s voice responds to an internet personality quiz, while grainy, inkjet printouts—animated and collaged by the filmmaker—approximate the imagined scenes. Distortions in the reproduction of word and picture accompany the blur of memory and fantasy, past experience and desire.

Dog Star Descending
Aykan Safoğlu, 2020, Germany/Turkey, 12m
German with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Images and objects warp under the scrolling gaze of a scanner bed. Photographs, shredded and reassembled, spark reminiscences in the artist’s voiceover, which relates the intertwined stories of a family trip to the island of Imbros and of his education at a bilingual German-Turkish public school. The coiling timeline of present experience overlaps with other stories detailing the complex intersection of these two cultures, and of personal and intergenerational memories.

Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse
Pablo Martín Weber, 2020, Argentina, 22m
Spanish with English subtitles

Pablo Martín Weber’s video essay forges a link between the creative abundance of computer imaging and artificial intelligence and the speculative cosmologies of Philip Henry Gosse, a 19th-century naturalist and advocate for science. Just as Gosse became obsessed with reconciling the geological record with the Biblical account of the Earth’s creation, Weber attempts to understand the digital image’s new world of infinitely malleable data.

(No Subject)
Guillermo Moncayo, 2021, France/Colombia, 29m
Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A film about a zookeeper and his renewed relationship with his estranged daughter is fragmented and interrupted by the filmmaker’s own voice, reading an email to his sister about the roots of this story in their own shared history with an absent father. Through memory, dreams, and fiction, (No Subject) probes the various ways of representing the past in order to process and break free of it.

Program 4: Still Life

THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER
Vika Kirchenbauer, 2021, Germany, 15m
U.S. Premiere

THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER. Courtesy of Vika Kirchenbauer.

A collage of ephemera both personal and public, The Capacity for Adequate Anger traverses the distance between present and past in an examination of the artist’s relationship to class identity. Through voiceover and flashes of imagery—family photographs; the ’90s media representation of AIDS; Marie Antoinette; a gender-ambiguous anime character—Kirchenbauer’s autobiographical video contemplates the sociological dimensions of emotions from shame to envy to rage, and what forms of political agency they make possible or impede.

A Human Certainty
Morgan Quaintance, 2021, UK, 21m
U.S. Premiere
Voices from the past haunt A Human Certainty, whose entangled threads link its multifarious narratives of suffering: a recent break-up; the romantic sweep of mid-century pop music; Weegee’s crime-scene photography; and images taken by the artist’s grandmother, a spirit medium, on her travels in Asia and Africa. Here, Quaintance’s montage becomes a codec for assembling these disparate threads, and for making sense of mortality and loss in all its forms.

Home When You Return
Carl Elsaesser, 2021, USA, 30m
World Premiere
Superimposing the stories of two women—the filmmaker’s late grandmother and the amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin—Home When You Return explores the psychogeographies of mourning through a variety of modes, from documentary to melodrama. Emptied and put up for sale following its matriarch’s passing, the family home becomes the site of a winding tour through polymorphic representations of the past in media and memory.

Program 5: Pattern Language

Cutting the Mushroom
Mike Crane, 2021 USA, 22m
World Premiere
An email correspondence between the filmmaker and a mysterious online art dealer in the Baltic develops into a strangely intimate exchange about art and authenticity, media of questionable provenance, digressive Wikipedia research, and—to borrow the title of Hans Richter’s 1947 film—dreams that money can buy. 

Estuary
Ross Meckfessel, 2021, USA, 12m
World Premiere

Inescapable forces intersect in Ross Meckfessel’s Estuary when the increasingly unreal landscape of everyday life is invaded by the hyperreality of computer graphics and AI social-media influencers. The analog and the digital vie and blend with each other as Nature, dissected and repackaged, reemerges in pixel form.

The Canyon
Zachary Epcar, 2021, USA, 15m
The boxy architecture and cordoned greenery of luxury housing developments populate a series of uniform urban spaces, which Zachary Epcar depicts as a sequence of precise frames, stock gestures, and preprogrammed phrases, drifting into entropy. What wayward flows, what eruptions of energy, can be found beneath the flat surfaces and grid-like structures of The Canyon?

Reach Capacity
Ericka Beckman, 2020, USA, 15m
U.S. Premiere
In Reach Capacity, the rapacious world of the urban real-estate market takes on the form of a playfully obsessive, yet violently deterministic system. Combining mechanical musical numbers, digital objects, and board-game parameters, Ericka Beckman converts lower Manhattan into a giant Monopoly board upon which real-estate speculators and contracted labor compete for dominance in a programmatic dance. To see the future, follow the money.

Program 6: Camera Lucida

Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical
Rhea Storr, 2020, UK, 10m
World Premiere

Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical. Courtesy of Rhea Storr.

The music, movements, and oral histories of Junkanoo—a distinctive Bahamian cultural medium in the form of a street carnival—set the rhythm of Rhea Storr’s video. Located in this vernacular tradition is an emergent Black radical imagination, one that envisions an Afrofuturism of the present, which the film reworks and remixes.

Strange Object
Miranda Pennell, 2020, UK, 15m
U.S. Premiere
Aerial photographs from 1920 of a colonized territory in the Horn of Africa provide the material for Miranda Pennell’s essay film, a meditation on image-making, erasure, and the writing of history. The abstract patterns, blurry forms, and disorienting scales of these photographs and their warped transposition into descriptive text testify to an expansive project of imperial capture, a doubling of the world in imagery and language.

To Pick a Flower
Shireen Seno, 2021, Philippines, 17m
North American Premiere
Shireen Seno’s video essay explores the transformation and commodification of nature through archival photographs from the American colonial occupation of the Philippines in the first half of the 20th century. These images testify to what the voiceover calls “the sticky relationship between humans and nature and their entanglements with empire”—an ambivalent dependence on natural resources that drives the colonial project and implicates photography, with its concurrent processes of preservation, transmutation, and destruction.

South
Morgan Quaintance, 2020, UK, 28m
Superimposing the working-class movements of Chicago’s South Side in the 1960s and South London in the 1980s, South draws upon alternative media archives and cultural ephemera to form a creative diasporic geography of anti-racism and liberation—one that poses the question of how to forge relations and solidarity across time, cultural divisions, and intra-class antagonisms.

Program 7: New Sensations

May June July
Kevin Jerome Everson, 2021, USA, 8m
North American Premiere
Kinetic and fragmentary, May June July is a document of the summer of 2020, distilled through Kevin Jerome Everson’s distinctively contrapuntal audiovisual assemblage. It is also a dance film: the camera enacts balletic encounters, first with a roller-skater in the street against a sonic background of protest chants and drumming, then among flowers and fireflies against the inky black of night.

Grandma’s Scissors
Erica Sheu, 2021, Taiwan/USA, 6m
U.S. Premiere
Guided by the words of her grandmother, the filmmaker explores the synesthetic properties of memory. Images give way to haptic experience via a range of textures—of sea, celluloid, paper, and pencil traces, of raindrops drifting in and out of focus—linking the arts of textiles and montage into a shared artisanal tradition.

Blind Body
Allison Chhorn, 2021, Australia, 15m
Khmer with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
As abstract shapes come into focus, dim memories surface. With Blind Body, Allison Chhorn offers an impressionistic portrait of her grandmother Kim Nay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. Partially blind, Kim spends her days in a mostly sonic and textural world, in which the sound of rain, the voices of Khmer radio, and distant birdsong summon the sensations of a lost homeland.

If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever)
Hope Strickland, 2021, UK, 8m
North American Premiere
Wake and soil, skin and voice: Hope Strickland’s film locates a legacy of slavery and colonial exploitation beneath the archive’s official chronicle, in the deep historical memory of the body. If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever) sings an alternate history of resistance—familial, elemental, and sensuous.

What is it that you said?
Shun Ikezoe, 2021, Japan, 20m
Japanese with English subtitles
World Premiere
The sun’s path outside the window. The slow cycle of the seasons. A dead cat found behind a curtain. A neighbor yelling while dreaming. Images, sounds, spoken and written text try to correspond, gently interrupting each other. Shun Ikezoe’s What is it that you said? tracks the quiet movement of light and time, marking the progress of a year of small movements and intimate, imperfect exchanges.

In and Out a Window
Richard Tuohy, 2021, Australia, 16mm, 13m
U.S. Premiere
The literal frame of a window overlooking a small garden becomes the scene through which Richard Tuohy’s film exploits the myriad plastic potentialities of the cinematic frame. Immersive and stroboscopic, In and Out a Window offers its own variations on cinema’s mechanical segmentations of space and time, opening up a portal to undiscovered dimensions and new phenomenologies.

Night Colonies
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021, Thailand, 14m
Thai with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Night Colonies is a microscopic rumination on the unobserved passage of time. Humming fluorescent lights illuminate a bedroom at night, drawing Chiang Mai’s subtropical nightlife into a tiny, intimate, and temporary cohabitation—a buzzing and bustling ecosystem of insects and lizards, nested within the human domestic space.

Program 8: Vibrant Matter

earthearthearth
Daïchi Saïto, 2021, Canada, 35mm, 30m
U.S. Premiere
The hand-processed celluloid of earthearthearth explodes with oranges, purples, and aquamarines, transforming the sweeping desert mountain ranges of the Andes into a world of green-gold dawns, vermilion sands, and dense, granular atmospheres. Accompanied by an undulating improvised soundtrack by Jason Sharp, Saïto’s film depicts an alien, irradiated world that is at once interior, cosmic, and fiercely material.

Tonalli
Los Ingrávidos, 2021, Mexico, 16m
U.S. Premiere
Drawing on the ancient Nahuatl concept of the animating soul or life force, Tonalli engages the ritualistic powers of the cinema, summoning fire, flowers, and many moons into a frenetic and mesmerizing in-camera collage. Here, amid thickly swirling images and textured abstractions, the gods of creation and fertility manifest, dissolving into iridescent colors and dense, corporeal rhythms.

Fictions
Manuela de Laborde, 2021, Mexico/Germany, 16mm, 22m
North American Premiere
Fictions conjures representations as if imagined from the perspective of the plant world. ‘Lithic’ lifeforms made out of ceramic and organic matter were filmed in motion by a mobile of film cameras. Layered in Laborde’s superimpositions, these objects become performers alongside other images—sunlight through jungle flora, scintillating film grain—interacting in their own fictive world of pulsating matter.

Six Seventy-Two Variations, Variation 1
Tomonari Nishikawa, 2021, USA, 16mm, 25m
World Premiere
In this live projection performance for 16mm film, Tomonari Nishikawa explores the material specificity of the cinematic apparatus through a real-time manipulation of its physical elements. Scratching directly onto the emulsion of a looping filmstrip in the midst of projection, Nishikawa creates animated abstractions in a pattern of horizontal lines, and also generates the film’s score, a percussive throbbing of noise.

August 19, 2021

The following is a press release from Film at Lincoln Center:

Film at Lincoln Center announces Spotlight for the 59th New York Film Festival (September 24 – October 10, 2021). The Spotlight section is NYFF’s showcase of the season’s most anticipated and significant films. Early ticket access to Spotlight selections and more are available with a NYFF59 Festival Pass, available through this Sunday, August 22 only.

“Our Spotlight section is a new part of our reshaped New York Film Festival, a place that this year encompasses a range of cinema, new and old,” said Eugene Hernandez, Director of the New York Film Festival. “Of the new work, we’re showcasing a selection of anticipated films (and talent) from recent festivals (Wes & company! Olivia! Timmy! Jane & Charlotte! Joaquin! and more), while also looking back at our roots, celebrating the history of NYFF and New York City’s film culture by shining a special light on Amos Vogel. We hope that our Spotlight section, in year two, will again engage, enlighten, and entertain!”

Among the highlights are Denis Villeneuve’s highly anticipated adaptation of Dune; Academy Award–nominated director Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle, a visually extraordinary tale about a shy teenager who becomes an online sensation as a pop star; Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a warmhearted radio journalist; Wes Anderson’s latest, The French Dispatch, showcasing his unmistakable cinematic style with a cast of familiar collaborators; directorial debuts from Charlotte Gainsbourg, profiling her legendary mother Jane Birkin in Jane By Charlotte, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, adapting Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter, with a brilliant performance by Oscar-winner Olivia Colman; veteran Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio’s Marx Can Wait, a heart-wrenching examination of the legacy of his twin brother’s suicide, on the occasion of a family reunion in his hometown of Piacenza; and Red Rocket, Sean Baker’s newest depiction of contemporary America as a playground for hustlers and con men, set against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election. 

NYFF59 also pays tribute to the centenary of late film programmer and festival co-founder Amos Vogel—who offered the city “films you cannot see elsewhere,” and whose uncompromising dedication to the medium’s radical possibilities inspired NYC film culture as it exists today—with a special Spotlight sidebar. Vogel’s wide-ranging curatorial career spanned his many years running Cinema 16, America’s most influential film society; his foundational work at Lincoln Center; his time at Grove Press; and his classic study Film as a Subversive Art, which will soon be reissued by The Film Desk. FLC’s tribute focuses on the NYFF period, bookended by screenings devoted to his work before and after his involvement with the festival, including films from Glauber Rocha, John Huston, and trailblazers of the Czech New Wave; a program from NYFF5 sidebar The Social Cinema in America, featuring Lebert Bethune’s Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom, Santiago Álvarez’s dispatch from postrevolutionary Cuba, Now, and David Neuman and Ed Pincus’s snapshot of Civil Rights-era Mississippi, Black Natchez; and works from the era’s burgeoning avant-garde scene, such as Tony Conrad’s The Flicker and a world premiere restoration of Robert Frerck’s Nebula II. 

The NYFF59 Spotlight retrospective will be followed by tributes at repertory cinemas across New York City—Anthology Film Archives, Film Forum, Light Industry, Metrograph, MoMA, and the Museum of the Moving Image—in an unprecedented collaboration. 

The Spotlight section is programmed by Eugene Hernandez and Dennis Lim. NYFF’s Amos Vogel centenary celebration is organized by Thomas Beard, Dennis Lim, and Tyler Wilson.

NYFF59 will feature in-person screenings, as well as select outdoor and virtual events. In response to distributor and filmmaker partners and in light of festivals returning and theaters reopening across the country, NYFF will not offer virtual screenings for this year’s edition. 

Proof of vaccination will be required for all staff, audiences, and filmmakers at NYFF59 venues. Additionally, NYFF59 will adhere to a comprehensive series of health and safety policies in coordination with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and state and city medical experts, while adapting as necessary to the current health crisis. Visit filmlinc.org for more information. 

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema and takes place September 24 – October 10, 2021. An annual bellwether of the state of cinema that has shaped film culture since 1963, the festival continues an enduring tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. 

Festival Passes are now on sale through this Sunday, August 22 only. NYFF59 tickets will go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, September 7 at noon ET, with early-access opportunities for FLC members and pass holders prior to this date. Learn more here. Support of the New York Film Festival benefits Film at Lincoln Center in its nonprofit mission to promote the art and craft of cinema.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

Belle
Mamoru Hosoda, 2021, Japan, 121m
Japanese with English subtitles

In his densely beautiful, eye-popping animated spectacle, Academy Award–nominated director Mamoru Hosoda (Mirai) tells the exhilarating story of a shy teenager who becomes an online sensation as a princess of pop. Still grieving over a childhood tragedy, Suzu has a difficult time singing in public or talking to her crush at school, yet when she takes on the persona of her glittering, pink-haired avatar, Belle, in the parallel virtual universe known as the “U,” her insecurities magically disappear. As her star begins to rise, Belle/Suzu finds herself drawn to another “U” fan favorite—a scary but soulful monster whose “real” identity, like Belle’s, becomes a source of fascination for legions. Both a knowing riff on the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale and a moving commentary on the duality of contemporary living, Belle is a thrilling journey into the matrix and a deeply human coming-of-age story, packed with unforgettable images and dazzlingly styled characters. A GKIDS release.

C’mon C’mon
Mike Mills, 2021, USA, 108m

After gracing audiences with Beginners and 20th Century Women (NYFF54), writer-director Mike Mills returns with another warm, insightful, and gratifyingly askew portrait of American family life. A soulful Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a kindhearted radio journalist deep into a project in which he interviews children across the U.S. about our world’s uncertain future. His sister, Viv (a marvelously intuitive Gaby Hoffmann), asks him to watch her 9-year-old son, Jesse (Woody Norman, in one of the most affecting breakout child performances in years), while she tends to the child’s father, who’s suffering from mental health issues. After agreeing, Johnny finds himself connecting with his nephew in ways he hadn’t expected, ultimately taking Jesse with him on a journey from Los Angeles to New York to New Orleans. Anchored by three remarkable actors, C’mon C’mon is a gentle yet impeccably crafted drama about coming to terms with personal trauma and historical legacies. An A24 release.

Dune
Denis Villeneuve, 2021, USA, 155m

A mythic and emotionally charged hero’s journey, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides, a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding, who must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure the future of his family and his people. As malevolent forces explode into conflict over the planet’s exclusive supply of the most precious resource in existence—a commodity capable of unlocking humanity’s greatest potential—only those who can conquer their fear will survive. Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, Chang Chen, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem lead the all-star ensemble in visionary filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal novel. A Warner Bros. Pictures release.

​​The French Dispatch
Wes Anderson, 2021, USA, 107m
English and French with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Wes Anderson’s unmistakable cinematic style proves delightfully suited to periodical format in this missive from the eponymous expatriate journal, published on behalf of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun from the picturesque French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. Brought to press by a corps of idiosyncratic correspondents, the issue includes reports on a criminal artist and his prison guard muse, student revolutionaries, and a memorable dinner with a police commissioner and his personal chef. As brimming with finely tuned texture as a juicy issue of a certain New York–based magazine to which the film pays homage, The French Dispatch features precision work from a full masthead of collaborators (including Bill Murray, Timothée Chalamet, Tilda Swinton, Benicio del Toro, Frances McDormand, and Jeffrey Wright), each propagating inventive dedication to detail. Anderson’s deadpan whimsy is complemented by the film’s palpable sense of nostalgia. A Searchlight Pictures release.

Jane by Charlotte
Charlotte Gainsbourg, 2021, France, 86m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere

In creating a documentary portrait of a parent, as actor Charlotte Gainsbourg does in her directorial debut, one could overly flatter the subject or iron out the tough creases. Gainsbourg avoids these traps in her wise and wondrous film about her legendary mother, the singer and actress Jane Birkin. Consisting of several intimate conversations between parent and child, as well as footage of Birkin performing onstage, the result is a spare, loving window into the emotional lives of two women as they talk about subject matter that ranges from the delightful to the difficult: aging, dying, insomnia, celebrity, and their differing memories of their shared past, which includes Charlotte’s father and Jane’s husband, Serge Gainsbourg. Jane by Charlotte is an unexpected, imaginatively visualized work that affords intimate access to someone whom many of us only think we know.

The Lost Daughter
Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021, USA/Greece, 121m

In her striking feature directorial debut, Maggie Gyllenhaal adapts the 2006 novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante, a potent work of psychological interiority that follows Leda, a divorced professor on a solitary summer vacation who becomes intrigued and then oddly involved in the lives of another family she meets there. Oscar-winner Olivia Colman brilliantly embodies this quietly tempestuous character, finely shading in the enigmatic relationships she creates with strangers. A moving, sometimes unsettling inquiry into motherhood and personal freedom, Gyllenhaal’s adaptation maintains Ferrante’s signature ambiguity and matter-of-fact style, and features an outstanding supporting cast, including Jessie Buckley, Ed Harris, Dakota Johnson, Paul Mescal, Alba Rohrwacher, and Peter Sarsgaard. A Netflix release.

Marx Can Wait
Marco Bellocchio, 2021, Italy, 95m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere

In his most achingly personal film to date, legendary Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio—an NYFF mainstay from the very beginning, from Fists in the Pocket (NYFF3) to The Traitor (NYFF57)—uses the occasion of a family reunion in his hometown of Piacenza to excavate and discuss a traumatic event: the death his twin brother Camillo, who committed suicide in the late ’60s at age 29. Through detailed conversations with his siblings, archival footage providing context about 20th-century Italian leftist politics, and occasional clips from his films, many of which were in some way imbued with this defining family tragedy, Bellocchio conducts a personal and historical exorcism. Reckoning with the push-pull the director has long felt between the twin poles of family and politics, Marx Can Wait is an attempt at reconciliation and understanding from a filmmaker in his eighties whose work has never shied away from the challenging or the provocative.

Red Rocket
Sean Baker, 2021, USA, 128m

Adding to his gallery of jet-fueled portraits of economic hardship within marginalized pockets of the U.S., director Sean Baker (The Florida Project, NYFF55) trains his restless camera on an unforgettable protagonist. Mikey, a wildly narcissistic former porn star fallen on hard times, has returned from L.A. to his depressed, postindustrial hometown of Texas City, reconnecting with his skeptical, drug-dependent estranged wife and mother-in-law, and using his wily charms to ingratiate himself into a community of people he couldn’t care less about. As played by a brilliantly cast Simon Rex (a star MTV VJ in the ’90s), Mikey is a charismatic force of nature—and destruction—who exploits the innocence and goodwill of everyone around him. Pointedly set against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election, Red Rocket is an aptly steamed-up depiction of contemporary America as a playground for hustlers and con men. An A24 release.

The Souvenir
Joanna Hogg, 2019, UK/USA, 119m

The follow-up to her 2013 feature Exhibition finds Joanna Hogg mining her own autobiography to craft a portrait of the artist as a young woman in early 1980s London. Caught between her dreams of becoming a filmmaker and her commitment to a toxic romance, 24-year-old Julie (an excellent Honor Swinton Byrne) comes home each night from film school to the Knightsbridge apartment owned by her mother (Tilda Swinton) only to discover some new, unpleasant surprise proffered by her boyfriend, Anthony (Tom Burke), a dandyish junkie whose sophisticated aura masks an abyss of selfishness and desperation. An eminently refined and moving bildungsroman about the ties that inexplicably bind, The Souvenir—as its title suggests—is also an absorbing evocation of a time, place, and national mood. An A24 release. 

Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II is a Main Slate selection.

AMOS VOGEL CENTENARY RETROSPECTIVE

Program 1, 113m
Cinema 16
At a time when moviegoing in New York was dominated by Hollywood offerings, Amos Vogel, a young Austrian émigré, and his wife Marcia saw the need for a new kind of venue. In the fall of 1947, they founded Cinema 16, inspired by European film societies as well as the daily screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, the shows Maya Deren organized of her own work at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, and Frank Stauffacher’s Art in Cinema series in San Francisco. The organization, named after the gauge of the independent filmmaker, would become the most important film society of its era. Unlike a typical movie theater, Cinema 16 was based on a subscription model, with members paying a fee for a season of programs—an approach that allowed for financial stability, and a means by which to thwart the local censorship board. By the 1950s, 7,000 adventurous cinephiles had joined.

It was through Vogel that many of the period’s most vital auteurs were introduced to New York audiences. As historian Scott MacDonald has noted, Cinema 16 “was one of the first, if not the first, American exhibitor to present the work of Robert Breer, John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Brian DePalma, Georges Franju, Robert Gardner, John Hubley, Alexander Kluge, Jan Lenica, Richard Lester, Norman McLaren, Jonas Mekas, Nagisa Oshima, Yasujiro Ozu, Sidney Peterson, Roman Polanski, Alain Resnais, Tony Richardson, Jacques Rivette, Lionel Rogosin, Carlos Saura, Arne Sucksdorff, François Truffaut, Stan Vanderbeek, Melvin Van Peebles, Agnes Varda, and Peter Weiss.”

The significance of Cinema 16, however, lies not simply in what was shown, but how. Vogel would routinely bring together strikingly different works—pairing, for instance, an abstract animation with a science film, allowing both to be understood, contrapuntally, in a new light. For this screening, we’ve recreated the May 1950 program, with Vogel’s original notes.

The Lead Shoes
Sidney Peterson, 1949, USA, 16mm, 18m

A surrealist exploration of two ballads, “Edward” and “The Three Ravens,” scrambled in jam session style and interwoven with a boogie-woogie score. Produced by Workshop 20 at California Institute of Fine Arts.

Unconscious Motivation
Lester F. Beck, USA, 1949, 16mm, 40m

Produced by Dr. Lester F. Beck of the University of Oregon, this astonishing 40-minute motion picture is an unrehearsed, authentic clinical record, showing the inducement of an artificial neurosis by hypnotic suggestion in a young man and a young woman. Upon reawakening, the subjects, by means of dream analysis, ink blot and word association tests, gradually realize first the existence of a traumatic experience and then its content by slowly reconstructing the bogus events which caused it. Their reactions, discussion and self-analysis were spontaneous, unrehearsed and unpredictable: the result is a most unusual motion picture. Print courtesy of Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive.

The Battle of San Pietro
John Huston, USA, 1945, 35mm, 38m

A master of the cinema, John Huston (Treasure of the Sierra Madre) portrays the horror of battle and the cruelty of its aftermath in unforgettable images that make this one of the great anti-war films of all time. Print preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

The Work of Oskar Fischinger
Study No. 11, Germany, 1932, 16mm, 4m
Allegretto, USA, 1936-43, 35mm, 2.5m
Motion Painting No. 1, USA, 1947, 35mm, 11m

The father of the “absolute film” and internationally famous film experimentalist is here represented by three films: Absolute Film Study No. 11 is an abstraction set to Mozart’s “Divertissement;” Allegretto, a non-objective color film accompanied by jazz; Motion Painting No. 1—hand-painted in oil on glass—won the Grand Prix 1949 at the International Experimental Film Festival in Belgium. [NB: “Absolute Film” was not part of Fischinger’s title for this film, and its accompaniment is Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” not “Divertissement.”] All Fischinger prints courtesy of Center for Visual Music, Allegretto preserved by CVM.

The New York Film Festival, 1963-1968
Cinema 16 came to a close in 1963. That same year Vogel co-founded the New York Film Festival with Richard Roud, and, as the head of Lincoln Center’s film department, laid the groundwork for the FLC of today. For our tribute, we’ll be highlighting a number of works that were presented during Vogel’s tenure at the festival, each of which reflects, in different ways, his long-standing preoccupations as a programmer.

Program 2
Barravento
Glauber Rocha, 1962, Brazil, 16mm, 78m
Portuguese with English subtitles

The first edition of NYFF included in its main slate Barravento, a seminal work of Cinema Novo and the debut feature of Glauber Rocha, whose work Vogel would champion for decades thereafter. The film—shot on location in sensuous black and white, and deeply attuned to the rhythms of collective labor and religious ritual—centers upon a Bahian fishing village. The community finds itself caught in the net of capitalist exploitation and likewise bound by mystical belief, a situation that one man, returning to his hometown after years spent in the city, seeks to change. Though Rocha’s visual style would continue evolving with later works like Antonio das Mortes, his insurrectionary imperatives, aesthetic as well as political, were already evident in Barravento. “The Tricontinental cinema,” he would famously declare, “must infiltrate the conventional cinema and blow it up.” Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Program 3
Pearls of the Deep / Perličky na dně
Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Evald Schorm, Věra Chytilová, and Jaromil Jireš, Czechoslovakia, 1965, 107m
Czech with English subtitles

Among Vogel’s many contributions to film culture in America, especially notable is the platform he gave to work coming out of Eastern Europe during the 1960s and ’70s, a particularly rich moment for filmmaking in the region. Emblematic of this era is the omnibus Pearls of the Deep, which played at the New York Film Festival in 1966. Each of its five sections, from the wonderfully morbid opening chapter, set against the backdrop of a motorcycle race, to its closer, a tender study of young love, is directed by a different filmmaker and based on a short story by Bohumil Hrabal; the work as a whole, with its forays into the absurd, is now regarded as a kind of manifesto for the Czech New Wave. “This astonishing, tightly knit group of young filmmakers represented the values of the first post-Stalinist generation,” Vogel would go on to remark. “It was striking to note how similar their views were to those of the West’s rebellious youth, which, from a different starting point, had also become engaged in a search, without illusions, for possible ideals and provisional truths. It seemed that the world was perversely backing into an enforced brotherhood, which would universalize such problems as individual freedom in a bureaucratic society, estrangement between generations, the failure of dogmatic ideologies, and eternal confrontations of imperfect innocence as against the corruption of so-called maturity.”

Program 4, 105m
The New American Cinema, 1966
The Fourth New York Film Festival featured a sampling of the New American Cinema, bringing the underground uptown. Two of the works screened that year, Tony Conrad’s The Flicker and Peter Emmanuel Goldman’s Echoes of Silence, reflect the range of avant-garde activity flourishing at the time: the former, a landmark of structural filmmaking, reduces the cinema to its most fundamental elements, while the latter suggested alternative paths for the narrative feature. 

The Flicker
Tony Conrad, 1966, USA, 16mm, 30m

“This film contains no images at all,” wrote Vogel of The Flicker. “Its subject is light and its absence. It consists of combinations of alternating white and black frames, flashing by in constantly changing patterns and causing a continuous stroboscopic flicker effect of great complexity. Whether its frequency is momentarily static or changeable (it ranges from 24 flashes down to 4 flashes per second throughout its 30 minute duration), the effect is literally hypnotic. This concerted ‘overload’ of the retina and nervous system provokes an endless variety of changing shapes, patterns and, most surprisingly, colors, whose nature differs with each viewer (even varying from performance to performance). The electronic soundtrack was generated by relays and components carrying different types of information; the various frequencies are orchestrated by the director. This ‘pure’ film deals with perception itself; its hallucinatory effect—despite absence of image, content, or meaning—reveals an unsuspected congruity with deep emotional needs.” Please note: This film may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy and other photosensitivities.

Echoes of Silence
Peter Emmanuel Goldman, 1965, USA, 16mm, 75m

Echoes of Silence, by contrast, chronicles the lives of twentysomethings adrift in New York City, locating tremendous feeling in the smallest moments: a furtive glance across a museum gallery, women putting on makeup, a stroll beneath the gleaming lights of Times Square marquees. Unencumbered by diegetic sound, its shadowy images of youthful flaneurs are paired with evocatively hand-painted title cards and a dynamic soundtrack drawn from the artist’s LPs that, when combined, produce an unforgettable ballad of sexual dependency. Though little remembered today, Goldman was hailed by Vogel (along with Godard, Mekas, and Sontag) as a major new talent.

Program 5, 92m
The Social Cinema in America, 1967
The Fifth New York Film Festival featured a sidebar on “The Social Cinema in America,” which surveyed the new directions of documentary filmmaking, with an emphasis on cinema verité and the possibilities opened up by more portable recording equipment (the program introduced New York audiences to now-classic works like Peter Adair’s Holy Ghost People, Allan King’s Warrendale, and Frederick Wiseman’s Titticut Follies). One screening, reprised here, brought together Lebert Bethune’s Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom, Santiago Álvarez’s Now, and David Neuman and Ed Pincus’s Black Natchez. 

Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom
Lebert Bethune, 1964, France, 22m

Bethune, a Jamaican filmmaker who had become a notable figure within Paris’s Black expatriate milieu, created a remarkable portrait of a political icon, and his film features some of the very last interviews with Malcolm X, recorded during his travels in Europe and Africa mere months prior to his assassination. 

Now
Santiago Álvarez, 1965, Cuba, 35mm, 6m
A brief but incendiary dispatch from postrevolutionary Cuba, Now blasts forth as a machine-gun montage of violent imagery from the American civil rights era while Lena Horne provides a soaring soundtrack with her titular protest anthem, sung to the tune of “Hava Nagila.”

Black Natchez
David Neuman and Ed Pincus, 1967, USA, 64m
In Black Natchez, we encounter the struggle for freedom again, though articulated in a different form. “The advent of portable sync-sound equipment in the early ’60s meant, for the first time in the sound era, that filmmakers could go to the subject as opposed to bringing the subject to the camera,” Pincus would later explain. “The ability to take a camera out into the world created the desire to ‘get it right,’ to film the world independent of the act of filmmaking. In the U.S., all sorts of rules were being created in documentary film—no script, no narration, no interviews, no lighting, no mic boom, no collusion between subject and filmmaker.

In 1965, the second year of intense voter registration drives in Mississippi, we decided to make a film in the southwest corner of the state. Little civil rights work had been done there because of the danger in the region. Our approach was to seek out several story lines and then continue with the most interesting. A car bombing of a civil rights leader while we were there changed everything. The event emphasized the rifts in the Black community around the demands for equality. Rifts between teenagers and women on one hand and the Black business community on the other. Rifts between Black males forming armed protection groups and the call for nonviolence by the major civil rights groups. And rifts between grassroots organizations and more traditional leadership organizations such as the FDP (Freedom Democratic Party) and the NAACP.” New digitization courtesy of Ed Pincus Film Collection, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. Digitization was supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Program 6, 69m
Personal Cinema, 1968
1968 marked Vogel’s final year of overseeing the NYFF, and, as with the festival’s previous iterations, many remarkable (and even today underappreciated) works were selected. One program in particular from that edition stands out. Dubbed “Personal Cinema,” it included several key examples of how the medium was being democratized, with the camera made accessible to those who had previously enjoyed limited or no access to the tools of production. In The Jungle, members of North Philadelphia’s 12th & Oxford Street gang dramatize the internal workings of their group, and, in so doing, put forward a vivid, unvarnished image of urban life in America, while Jaime Barrios’s Film Club showcases the activities of a storefront workshop that allowed Puerto Rican teenagers living on the Lower East Side to make their own movies. In The Spirit of the Navajo, Mary J. and Maxine Tsosie likewise drew from their own community, here focusing on their grandfather, a well-known medicine man, as a way to document the traditions of their tribe in their own style, on their own terms.

The Jungle
12th and Oxford Street Film Makers, 1967, USA, 35mm, 22m
35mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Film Club
Jaime Barrios, 1968, USA, 16mm, 26m

The Spirit of the Navajo
Maxine Tsosie and Mary J. Tsosie, 1966, USA, 16mm, 21m
Print courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art. 

Program 7, 90m
Film as a Subversive Art
Long a source of inspiration for film programmers, Film as a Subversive Art is a guidebook to cinema’s outer limits, replete with tantalizing descriptions of some of the most radical movies ever made. First published in 1974, this lavishly illustrated volume can be seen as a culmination of Vogel’s work over the previous decades, chronicling as it does the taboo-busting potential of cinema, at the level of form as well as content. For this program, we foreground one of the book’s most iconic titles, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (a still featuring its star, Milena Dravić, with clenched fist raised, graces Vogel’s cover), alongside an altogether different piece: Nebula II, one of its most obscure entries. The precise abstraction of the latter stands in contradistinction to the messy fantasies, sexual and political, of the former, yet they emerge from a similar moment—and, in true Vogelian style, complement one another, suggesting unexpected affinities. His notes on the films are below.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism
Dušan Makavejev, 1971, Yugoslavia/West Germany, 35mm, 85m
English, German, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles
Banned in Yugoslavia, hailed at international film festivals, this is unquestionably one of the most important subversive masterpieces of the 1970s: a hilarious, highly erotic political comedy which quite seriously proposes sex as the ideological imperative for revolution and advances a plea for Erotic Socialism. Only the revolutionary Cubist Makavejev—clearly one of the most significant new directors now working in world cinema—could have pulled together this hallucinatory melange of Wilhelm Reich; excerpts from a monstrous Soviet film, The Vow (1946), starring Stalin; a transvestite of the Warhol factory; A.S. Neill of Summerhill; several beautiful young Yugoslavs fucking merrily throughout; the editor of America’s sex magazine Screw having his most important private part lovingly plaster-cast in erection; not to speak of a Soviet figure-skating champion, Honored Artist of the People (named Vladimir Ilyich!), who cuts off his girlfriend’s head with one of his skates after a particularly bountiful ejaculation, to save his Communist virginity from Revisionist Yugoslav Contamination. It is an outrageous, exuberant, marvelous work of a new breed of international revolutionary, strangely spawned by cross-fertilization between the original radical ideologies of the East, Consciousness III in America, and the sexual-politics radicalism of the early Wilhelm Reich, who equated sexual with political liberation and denied the possibility of one without the other…

Preceded by: 

Nebula II
Robert Frerck, 1971, USA, 16mm, 5m
World premiere of restoration
After Jordan Belson, one might have thought no further mandala films could be fruitfully made; Nebula II quickly dispels this notion. As the ever-changing circular patterns become more complex and change in increasingly rapid fashion, the incessant bombardment of our senses with flicker effects, visual transmogrifications, pulsating color, and enforced forward movement via zoom, finally set up a sensory overload both hypnotic and overpowering in its beauty and mystical revelation. Print restored by Anthology Film Archives with support from Cinema Conservancy.

Acknowledgments
Loring Vogel and Steven Vogel; Academy Film Archive; Anthology Film Archives; Amistad Research Center, Tulane University; Center for Visual Music; Elizabeth Peterson;  Lebert Bethune; The Museum of Modern Art; Rachael Stoeltje, Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive; Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; UCLA Film & Television Archive