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
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
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
The Brutalist
Brady Corbet, 2024, U.S., 215m (incl. 15m intermission)
English, Hungarian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Italian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
By the Stream
Hong Sangsoo, 2024, South Korea, 111m
Korean with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Caught by the Tides
Jia Zhangke, 2024, China, 111m
Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
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
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
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.