New York Film Festival

The World Premiere of Laura Poitras’s CITIZENFOUR has been added to the 2014 New York Film Festival’s Main Slate as a Special Presentation on Friday, October 10 at 6PM in Alice Tully Hall. Poitras will also participate in a FREE HBO Directors Dialogues the following day, October 11 at 4PM, at the Walter Reade Theater. CITIZENFOUR will open theatrically on October 24.

New York Film Festival Director Kent Jones said, “Seeing CITIZENFOUR for the first time is an experience I’ll never forget. The film operates on multiple levels at the same time: a character study (of Edward Snowden)… a real-life suspense story… and a chilling exposé. When the lights came up, everyone in the room was alternately stunned, excited, and deeply troubled. A brave documentary, but also a powerful work from a master storyteller.”

In January 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras was several years into the making of a film about abuses of national security in post-9/11 America when she started receiving encrypted e-mails from someone identifying himself as “citizen four,” who was ready to blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies.  In June 2013, she and reporter Glenn Greenwald flew to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with the man who turned out to be Edward Snowden. She brought her camera with her. The film that resulted from this series of tense encounters is absolutely sui generis in the history of cinema: a 100% real-life thriller unfolding minute by minute before our eyes.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has long been a supporter of Poitras’s work, premiering several of her films throughout the years and honoring her as the 2011 recipient of the 25th anniversary Martin E. Segal Award, given annually to two rising young artists in recognition of exceptional accomplishments.  CITIZENFOUR marks the final film in her 9/11 trilogy. The first film, My Country, My Country focused on the Iraq War and had its New York premiere in 2006 at the Film Society’s New Directors/New Films series. My Country, My Country was nominated for an Academy Award, an Independent Spirit Award, and an Emmy Award. The second installment in the trilogy, The Oath, was about Guantánamo and also received its New York premiere at New Directors/New Films, in 2010. The Oath won the Sundance Cinematography Award, the Edinburgh Film Festival Documentary Jury Award, and a Gotham Award for Best Documentary.  Poitras has taught filmmaking at Duke and Yale Universities, and in 2012, her work was selected for the 2012 Whitney Biennial. She is also the recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Fellowship. Her NSA reporting contributed to a Pulitzer Prize awarded to The Guardian and The Washington Post.  Along with Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, she is co-founder of the digital magazine The Intercept. She currently lives in Berlin.

Read more

The Wonders

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the 30 films that will comprise the Main Slate official selection of the 52nd New York Film Festival  taking place September 26 to October 12, 2014, including such notable directors as Lisandro Alonso, Asia Argento, Olivier Assayas, Nick Broomfield, Pedro Costa, David Cronenberg, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Abel Ferrara, Jean-Luc Godard, Hong Sang-soo, Mike Leigh, Mia Hansen-Løve, Bennett Miller, Oren Moverman, Alex Ross Perry, Alain Resnais, Alice Rohrwacher, and Josh & Benny Safdie.

Award winners from other festivals presented for the first time to New York audiences include four from this year’s Cannes Film Festival: Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders, the winner of the 2014 Grand Prix Award; Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, for which he was named Best Director, David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, for which Julianne Moore won the prize for Best Actress, and Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, for which Timothy Spall received the Best Actor Award for his performance as the painter J.M.W. Turner. Additional award winners are Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, which won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and Life of Riley, the final feature from the late Alain Resnais, which took home the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize. The 4K restored version of Resnais’s first feature, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), was previously announced as part of the Revivals selection at this year’s NYFF.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, his first feature in 3-D, will fittingly screen at NYFF in the wake of the comprehensive retrospective of the filmmaking legend’s work that was a highlight of last year’s festival. Other notables among the many filmmakers returning to NYFF with new works are Olivier Assayas with Clouds of Sils Maria, which stars Juliette Binoche as an actress preparing for a new role and Kristen Stewart as her assistant; Pedro Costa with Horse Money, a moving look at the life of Cape Verdean Ventura, who has worked with Costa on his last few films; Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne with Two Days, One Night, which stars Marion Cotillard as a woman desperately trying to save her job; and Abel Ferrara, with his biographical film Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe as the controversial filmmaker/poet/novelist.

NYFF’s 2014 Filmmaker in Residence Lisandro Alonso’s latest film, Jauja, which stars Viggo Mortensen as an Argentinian officer in the 1870s searching for his missing daughter, will be a highlight, as will the North American premiere of French actor Mathieu Amalric’s heated dramatization of Georges Simenon’s novel The Blue Room, about a love triangle coming to a dangerous conclusion. Actress Asia Argento also puts on the director’s hat once again with her new autobiographical film, Misunderstood, about a pre-teen girl all but ignored by her self-absorbed superstar parents in 1980s Rome.

The city of New York takes center stage via the works of local filmmakers Alex Ross Perry, Oren Moverman, and Josh & Benny Safdie. Perry’sListen Up Philip stars Jason Schwartzman as an insufferable young literary star taken under the wing of an older literary lion played by Jonathan Pryce. Moverman’s Time Out of Mind features a remarkable performance by Richard Gere as a man who finds himself out on the streets. The Safdie Brothers’ Heaven Knows What places us in the world of two heroin-addicted young lovers as they struggle to live and find their next fix. 

The 52nd New York Film Festival Main Slate

52nd NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Films & Descriptions

 Opening Night – World Premiere
Gone Girl
David Fincher, USA, 2014, DCP, 150m
David Fincher’s film version of Gillian Flynn’s phenomenally successful best seller (adapted by the author) is one wild cinematic ride, a perfectly cast and intensely compressed portrait of a recession-era marriage contained within a devastating depiction of celebrity/media culture, shifting gears as smoothly as a Maserati 250F. Ben Affleck is Nick Dunne, whose wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing on the day of their fifth anniversary. Neil Patrick Harris is Amy’s old boyfriend Desi, Carrie Coon (who played Honey in Tracy Letts’s acclaimed production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is Nick’s sister Margo, Kim Dickens (Treme, Friday Night Lights) is Detective Rhonda Boney, and Tyler Perry is Nick’s superstar lawyer Tanner Bolt. At once a grand panoramic vision of middle America, a uniquely disturbing exploration of the fault lines in a marriage, and a comedy that starts black and keeps getting blacker, Gone Girl is a great work of popular art by a great artist. A 20th Century Fox and Regency Enterprises release.

Centerpiece – World Premiere           
Inherent Vice
Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2014, 148m
Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild and entrancing new movie, the very first adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, is a cinematic time machine, placing the viewer deep within the world of the paranoid, hazy L.A. dope culture of the early ’70s. It’s not just the look (which is ineffably right, from the mutton chops and the peasant dresses to the battered screen doors and the neon glow), it’s the feel, the rhythm of hanging out, of talking yourself into a state of shivering ecstasy or fear or something in between. Joaquin Phoenix goes all the way for Anderson (just as he did in The Master) playing Doc Sportello, the private investigator searching for his ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston, a revelation), menaced at every turn by Josh Brolin as the telegenic police detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen. Among the other members of Anderson’s mind-boggling cast are Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Martin Short, Owen Wilson, and Jena Malone. A trip, and a great American film by a great American filmmaker. A Warner Bros. Picturesrelease.

Closing Night – New York Premiere
Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance
Alejandro G. Iñárritu, USA, 2014, DCP, 119m
In Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s big, bold, and beautifully brash new movie, one-time action hero Riggan Thomson (a jaw-dropping Michael Keaton), in an effort to be taken seriously as an artist, is staging his own adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. As Thomson tries to get his perilous undertaking in shape for the opening, he must contend with a scene-hogging narcissist (Edward Norton), a vulnerable actress (Naomi Watts), and an unhinged girlfriend (Andrea Riseborough) for co-stars; a resentful daughter (Emma Stone); a manager who’s about to come undone (Zach Galifianikis)… and his ego, the inner demon of the superhero that made him famous, Birdman. Iñárritu’s camera magically prowls, careens, and soars in and around the theater, yet remains alive to the most precious subtleties and surprises between his formidable actors. Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance is an extravagant dream of a movie, alternately hilarious and terrifying, powered by a deep love of acting, theater, and Broadway—a real New York experience. A Fox Searchlight Pictures and New Regency release.

 
North American Premiere
Beloved Sisters / Die geliebten Schwestern
Dominik Graf, Germany/Austria, 2014, DCP, 170m
German and French with English subtitles
Romantic sentiment runs high but aristocratic decorum holds sway in this beautiful and thoroughly modern rendering of the real-life 18th-century love triangle involving German poet Friedrich Schiller (Florian Stetter) and two sisters of noble birth, Charlotte (Henriette Confurius) and Caroline (Hannah Herzsprung), whose strikingly intense relationship and profound mutual devotion verge on symbiosis. As Schiller’s star rises in the philosophical-literary world of Weimar Classicism, with Charlotte at his side, the married Caroline chooses to stay close by—with dramatic consequences. Sisterhood is finally the most passionate and wrenching form of love in the aptly titled Beloved Sisters, and the deeply felt performances of Confurius and Herzsprung are hard to forget. Meanwhile, there’s a fresh, bracingly contemporary sense of energy, a relaxed pace and a down-to-earth directness to director Dominik Graf’s unfussy re-creation of ultra-formal 18th-century town-and-country life. A Music Box Films release.

North American Premiere
The Blue Room / La chambre bleue
Mathieu Amalric, France, 2014, DCP, 76m
French with English subtitles
A perfectly twisted, timeless noir, Mathieu Amalric’s adaptation of Georges Simenon’s domestic crime novel also tips its hat to Alfred Hitchcock/Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. A country hotel’s blue room is the scene of erotic rapture, but the adulterous man (Amalric) and woman (a boldly sexual Stéphanie Cléau, co-author of the script with Amalric) who meet there have different visions of their future. She is more obsessed than he, and his misunderstanding of the madness in her desire will destroy him and all he holds dear. Amalric’s direction is brutally spare, as is his performance of a man caught in a vise—a situation of his own making. The classic aspect ratio (1:33) and Grégoire Hetzel’s turbulent, insistent score heighten the sense of entrapment. Léa Drucker as the deceived wife and Cléau as the desperate mistress make strong impressions, but Amalric, who has the most eloquent eyes in contemporary cinema and uses them here to convey lust, guilt, bewilderment, and the dawning realization that he is a pawn in a malignant game, is unforgettable. A Sundance Selects release.

U.S. Premiere
Clouds of Sils Maria
Olivier Assayas, Switzerland/Germany/France, 2014, DCP, 124m
English and French with English subtitles
Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is a middle-aged actress who soared to stardom in her twenties in a play called Maloja Snake, in which she created the role of a ruthless young woman named Sigrid who engages in a power game with her older boss. Now an established international actress, Maria is considering the role of the older woman in a heavily promoted revival, with an infamous young superstar (Chloë Grace Moretz) as Sigrid. Maria and her savvy personal assistant (Kristen Stewart) prepare for the production at a secluded spot in the Swiss Alps, in a series of stunning scenes that are the beating heart of Olivier Assayas’s brilliant new film. What begins as a chronicle of an actress going through the paces of celebrity culture (fashion shoots, official dinners, interviews, Internet rumors) gradually develops into something more powerfully mysterious: a close meditation on time and how one comes to terms with its passage. An IFC Films release.

U.S. Premiere
Eden
Mia Hansen-Løve, France, 2014, DCP, 131m
Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature is a rare achievement: an epically scaled work built on the purely ephemeral, breathlessly floating along on currents of feeling. Eden is based on the experiences of Hansen-Løve’s brother (and co-writer) Sven, who was one of the pioneering DJs of the French rave scene in the early 1990s. Paul (Félix de Givry) and his friends, including Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter (otherwise known as Daft Punk), see visions of ecstasy in garage music—as their raves become more and more popular, they experience a grand democracy of pure bliss extending into infinity, only to dematerialize on contact with changing times and the demands of everyday life. Hansen-Løve’s film plays in the mind as a swirl of beautiful faces and bodies, impulsive movements, rushes of cascading light and color (she worked with a great cameraman, Denis Lenoir), and music, music, and more music. Eden is a film that moves with the heartbeat of youth, always one thought or emotion ahead of itself.

New York Premiere
Foxcatcher
Bennett Miller, USA, 2014, DCP, 134m
Bennett Miller’s quietly intense and meticulously crafted new film deals with the tragic story of billionaire John E. du Pont and the brothers and championship wrestlers Dave and Mark Schultz recruited by du Pont to create a national wrestling team on his family’s sprawling property in Pennsylvania. Miller builds his film detail by detail, and he takes us deep into the rarefied world of the delusional du Pont, a particularly exotic specimen of ensconced all-American old money and privilege. Miller’s film is a powerfully physical experience, and the simmering conflicts between his characters are expressed in their stances, their stillnesses, their physiques, and, most of all, their moves in the wrestling arena. At the core is a trio of perfectly meshed and absolutely stunning performances from Mark Ruffalo as Dave, Channing Tatum as Mark, and an almost unrecognizable Steve Carell as the fatally dissociated du Pont. Foxcatcher offers us a vivid portrait of a side of American life in the ’80s that has never been touched in movies. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

New York Premiere
Goodbye to Language / Adieu au langage
Jean-Luc Godard, France, 2014, DCP, 70m
French with English subtitles
The 43rd feature by Jean-Luc Godard (and the only film at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival to get a round of applause mid-screening), Goodbye to Language alights on doubt and despair with the greatest freedom and joy. At 83, Godard works as a truly independent filmmaker, unencumbered by all concerns beyond the immediate: to create a work that embodies his own state of being in relation to time, light, color, the problem of living and speaking with others, and, of course, cinema itself. The artist’s beloved dog Roxy is the de facto “star” of this film, which is as impossible to summarize as a poem by Wallace Stevens or a Messiaen quartet. Goodbye to Language was shot, and can only be truly seen and experienced, in 3-D, which Godard has put to wondrous use. The temptation may be strong to see this film as a farewell, but this remarkable artist is already hard at work on a new project. A Kino Lorber release.

U.S. Premiere
Heaven Knows What
Josh & Benny Safdie, USA, 2014, DCP, 93m
Harley (Arielle Holmes) is madly in love with Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones). She’s sure he loves her just as much, if only he could express it. Both of them are heroin addicts, kids who pretend to be heavy-metal rockers but spend their time scuffling, arguing, and preying on each other as they wander around New York looking for a fix and the chump change to pay for it. The script, based on a Holmes’s memoir and written by the Safdies with Ronald Bronstein, is a miracle of economy. Sean Price Williams’s cinematography expresses the clouded vision of kids who can’t imagine how invisible they are to the New Yorkers who take their homes and jobs for granted. And the Safdie Brothers, in their toughest and richest movie, direct a cast composed largely of first-time actors so that they disappear into their characters, horrify us, and break our hearts.

U.S. Premiere
Hill of Freedom / Jayuui Eondeok
Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2014, DCP, 66m
Korean and English with English subtitles
Kwon (Seo Young-hwa) returns to Seoul from a restorative stay in the mountains. She is given a packet of letters left by Mori (Ryo Kase), who has come back from Japan to propose to her. As she walks down a flight of stairs, Kwon drops and scatters the letters, all of which are undated. When she reads them, she has to make sense of the chronology… and so do we. Hong Sang-soo’s daring new film, alternately funny and haunting, is a series of disordered scenes based on the letters, echoing the cultural dislocation felt by Mori as he tries to make himself understood in halting English. At what point did he drink himself into a lonely stupor? Did he sleep with the waitress from the Hill of Freedom café (Moon So-ri) before or after he despaired of seeing Kwon again? Sixteen films into a three-decade career, Hong has achieved a rare simplicity in his storytelling, allowing for an ever-increasing psychological richness and complexity.

U.S. Premiere
Horse Money / Cavalo Dinheiro
Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2014, DCP, 103m
Portuguese and Creole with English subtitles
Since the late ’90s, Pedro Costa has devoted himself to the task of doing justice to the lives and tragedies and dreams of the Cape Verdean immigrants who once populated the now-demolished neighborhood of Fontainhas. Costa works with a minimal crew and at ground level, patiently building a unique cinematographic language alongside the men and women he has befriended. Where does his astonishing newHorse Money “take place”? In the soul-space of Ventura, who has been at the center of Costa’s last few shorts and his 2006 feature Colossal Youth. It is now, a numbing and timeless present of hospital stays, bureaucratic questioning, and wandering through remembered spaces… and it is then, the mid ’70s and the time of the Carnation Revolution, when Ventura got into a knife fight with his friend Joaquim. A self-reckoning, a moving memorialization of lives in danger of being forgotten, and a great and piercingly beautiful work of cinema.

U.S. Premiere
Jauja
Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/Denmark/France/Mexico/USA/Germany/Brazil, 2014, DCP, 108m
Danish and Spanish with English subtitles
A work of tremendous beauty and a source of continual surprise, Alonso’s first film since 2008’s Liverpool is also his first period piece (set during the Argentinian army’s Conquest of the Desert in the 1870s), his first film with international stars (led by Viggo Mortensen), and his first screenplay with a co-writer (poet and novelist Fabián Casas). But the emphasis, as in all his work, is on bodies in landscapes. Danish military engineer Gunnar Dinesen (Mortensen, in a Technicolor-bright cavalry uniform) traverses a visually stunning variety of Patagonian shrub, rock, grass, and desert on horseback and on foot in search of his teenage daughter (Viilbjørk Agger Malling), who has eloped with a new love. Alonso’s style reaches new heights of sensory attentiveness and physicality, driving the action toward a thrilling conclusion that transcends the limits of cinematic time and space.

New York Premiere
Life of Riley / Aimer, boire et chanter
Alain Resnais, France, 2014, DCP, 108m
French with English subtitles
Adapted from Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking, Life of Riley, the final work by Alain Resnais, is the story of three couples in the English countryside who learn that their close mutual friend is terminally ill. Yet the story is only half the movie, a giddily unsettling meditation on mortality and the strange sensation of simply being alive and going on, feeling by feeling, action by action. The swift, fleeting encounters between various combinations of characters (played by Resnais regulars André Dussollier and Sabine Azéma—the director’s wife—along with Michel Vuillermoz, Hippolyte Girardot, Sandrine Kiberlain, and Caroline Silhol) take place on extremely stylized sets, and they are punctuated with close-ups set against comic-strip grids, and broken up by images of the real English countryside. Funny but haunting, Life of Riley is a moving, graceful, and surprisingly affirmative farewell to life from a truly great artist. A Kino Lorber release.

New York Premiere
Listen Up Philip
Alex Ross Perry, USA, 2014, DCP, 108m
Alex Ross Perry’s third feature heralds the arrival of a bold new voice in American movies. Even more than in his critically lauded The Color Wheel, Perry draws on literary models (mainly Philip Roth and William Gaddis) to achieve a brazen mixture of bitter humor and unexpected pathos. In this sly, very funny portrait of artistic egomania, Jason Schwartzman stars as Philip Lewis Friedman, a precocious literary star anticipating the publication of his second novel. Philip is a caustic narcissist, but the film, shot with tremendous agility on Super-16mm by Sean Price Williams, leaves his orbit frequently, lingering on the perspectives of his long-suffering photographer girlfriend, Ashley, (Elisabeth Moss) and his hero, the Roth-like literary lion Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), who himself considers Philip a major talent. A film about callow ambition, Listen Up Philip is itself remarkably poised, a knowing, rueful account of how pain and insecurity transfigure themselves as anger but also as art. A Tribeca Film release.

U.S. Premiere
Maps to the Stars
David Cronenberg, Canada/Germany, 2014, DCP, 111m
David Cronenberg takes Bruce Wagner’s script—a pitch-black Hollywood satire—chills it down, and gives it a near-tragic spin. The terrible loneliness of narcissism afflicts every character from the fading star Havana (Julianne Moore, who won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her nervy performance) to the available-for-anything chauffeur (Robert Pattinson) to the entire Weiss family, played by John Cusack, Olivia Williams, Evan Bird, and Mia Wasikowska. The last two are brother and sister, damaged beyond repair and fated to repeat the perverse union of their parents. And yet, in their murderous rages, they have the purity of avenging angels, taking revenge on a culture that needs to be put out of its misery—or so it must seem to them. Cronenberg’s visual strategy physically isolates the characters from one another, so that their occasional violent connections pack a double whammy. An eOne Films release.

North American Premiere
Misunderstood / Incompresa
Asia Argento, Italy/France, 2014, DCP, 110m
Italian, French, and English with English subtitles
The imaginative life of a preteen girl in Rome in the 1980s is depicted with love and humor by Asia Argento, who grew up in the same place and time under similar showbiz circumstances. All but ignored by her divorced, narcissistic parents and tormented by her more conventional and manipulative siblings, Aria (a marvelous Giulia Salerno) shuttles between the well-appointed digs of her singer mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and actor father (Gabriel Garko), carrying her only companion, a large cat who is more affectionate and comfortable in his own skin than any of the humans in her life. A precociously gifted writer, Aria elaborates her cat-accompanied walks into the sometimes life-threatening adventures that mix with mundane actualities. As a projection of young female subjectivity, Misunderstood is ingenious, direct, and utterly real.

New York Premiere
Mr. Turner
Mike Leigh, UK, 2014, DCP, 149m
Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner is certainly a portrait of a great artist and his time, but it is also a film about the human problem of… others. Timothy Spall’s grunting, unkempt J.M.W. Turner is always either working or thinking about working. During the better part of his interactions with patrons, peers, and even his own children, he punches the clock and makes perfunctory conversation, while his mind is clearly on the inhuman realm of the luminous. After the death of his beloved father (Paul Jesson), Turner creates a way station of domestic comfort with a cheerful widow (Marion Bailey), and he maintains his artistic base at his family home, kept in working order by the undemonstrative and ever-compliant Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson). But his stays in both houses are only rest periods between endless and sometimes punishing journeys in search of a closer and closer vision of light. A rich, funny, moving, and extremely clear-eyed film about art and its creation. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

U.S. Premiere
Pasolini
Abel Ferrara, France/Belgium/Italy, DCP, 87m
Italian, English, and French with English subtitles
Pier Paolo Pasolini—filmmaker/poet/ novelist, Christian, Communist, permanent legal defendant, and self-proclaimed “inconvenient guest” of modern society—was an immense figure. Abel Ferrara’s new film compresses the many contradictory aspects of his subject’s life and work into a distilled, prismatic portrait. We are with Pasolini during the last hours of his life, as he talks with his beloved family and friends, writes, gives a brutally honest interview, shares a meal with Ninetto Davoli (Riccardo Scamarcio), and cruises for the roughest rough trade in his gun-metal gray Alfa Romeo. Over the course of the action, Pasolini’s life and his art (represented by scenes from his films, his novel-in-progressPetrolio, and his projected film Porno-Teo-Kolossal) are constantly refracted and intermingled to the point where they become one. A thoughtful, attentive, and extremely frank meditation on a man who continues to cast a very long shadow, featuring a brilliant performance by Willem Dafoe in the title role.

U.S. Premiere
The Princess of France / La Princesa de Francia
Matías Piñeiro, Argentina, 2014, DCP, 70m
Spanish and Italian with English subtitles
As in his critical hit Viola (2013), Matías Piñeiro doesn’t transplant Shakespeare to the present day so much as summon the spirit of his polymorphous comedies. Víctor (Julián Larquier Tellarini) returns to Buenos Aires after his father’s death and a spell in Mexico to prepare a radio production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Reuniting with his repertory, he finds himself sorting out complicated entanglements with girlfriend Paula (Agustina Muñoz), sometime lover Ana (María Villar), and departed actress Natalia (Romina Paula), as well as his muddled relations with the constellation of friends involved with the project. As the film tracks the group’s criss-crossing movements and interactions, their lives become increasingly enmeshed with the fiction they’re reworking, potential outcomes multiply, and reality itself seems subject to transformation. An intimate, modestly scaled work that takes characters and viewers alike into dizzying realms of possibility, The Princess of France is the most ambitious film yet from one of world cinema’s brightest young talents, a cumulatively thrilling experience. A Cinema Guild release.

North American Premiere
Saint Laurent
Bertrand Bonello, France, 2014, DCP, 146m
French with English subtitles
Running counter to the current strain of wan, mechanical biopics, Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent toys deliriously with the genre’s rules and limitations. Focusing on a dark, hedonistic, wildly creative decade (from 1967 to ’77) in Yves Saint Laurent’s life and career, Bonello considers the couturier (convincingly embodied by Gaspard Ulliel and later by Visconti stalwart Helmut Berger) as a myth, a brand, an avatar of his era. Bonello’s star-studded supporting cast (including Louis Garrel, Léa Seydoux, Jérémie Renier, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) serves as first-rate human mise en scène amid a kaleidoscopic torrent of lavish excess, retrospectively pieced together with a Proustian form of fast-and-loose association. As much as his subject and the gravitational pull he exerts in the hothouse environments of atelier and nightclub, Bonello is interested—as he was in House of Pleasures, his sumptuous portrait of a fin de siècle Parisian brothel—in cinema’s potential both to capture and to warp the passage of time and our perception of it. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

U.S. Premiere
La Sapienza
Eugène Green, France/Italy, 2014, DCP, 100m
French and Italian with English subtitles
In Eugène Green’s exquisite new film, Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione) and Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman) are a married couple who are unhappy in an all-too-familiar way: they have retreated into silence and away from intimacy. Alexandre, an architect, decides to restore himself by renewing his old dream of writing about the great Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. They drive to Ticino, Borromini’s birthplace, and then to Stresa on Lake Maggiore, where they meet a brother and sister. Goffredo (Ludovico Succio) is an architecture student in need of support and Lavinia (Arianna Nastro) is a shut-in who goes into a panic when her brother is too far away. As Alexandre and Aliénor offer their friendship to Goffredo and Lavinia, they restore their own sense of inner balance. It’s difficult to convey the precise beauty of La Sapienza, to describe its serenity, its quiet intensity, or the delicate equilibrium Green locates between faces, landscapes, and architectural forms.

New York Premiere
’71
Yann Demange, UK, 2014, DCP, 99m
A riveting thriller set in the mean streets of Belfast over the course of 24 hours, ’71 brings the grim reality of the Troubles to vivid, shocking life. Within days of being posted to Northern Ireland in a divided province that would soon turn into a war zone after January 1972’s Bloody Sunday, squaddie Gary (Jack O’Connell) finds himself trapped and unarmed in hostile territory when a house raid provokes a riot. Running for his life as the lines between friend and foe become increasingly blurred, Gary gets a baptism of fire and we get a stark, eye-opening look at the dirty war that tore Northern Ireland apart. Suggesting an update of Carol Reed’s classic Odd Man Out, this tough, compact suspenser is tightly written by Black Watch playwright Gregory Burke and handled with a dynamic, vigorous energy by debut director Yann Demange. A Roadside Attractions release.

New York Premiere
Tales of the Grim Sleeper
Nick Broomfield, USA/UK, 2014, DCP, 105m
When Lonnie Franklin Jr. was arrested in South Central Los Angeles in 2010 as the suspected murderer of a string of young black women, police hailed it as the culmination of 20 years of investigations. Four years later documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield took his camera to the alleged killer’s neighborhood for another view. At first, Franklin’s pals stand up for him: he was the go-to guy, and certainly no murderer. But soon friends and neighbors start offering up chilling testimony, as do local activists who question why it took so long for the authorities to pay attention: certainly the community doesn’t trust the LAPD, with good reason, so they don’t talk. But if they did, what would the police do? Aided by Pam, a former prostitute and crack addict who knows the streets and the people walking them, Broomfield reveals the journey of a serial killer, gives voice to his victims, and finds the racial divide that still exists between the police and African-Americans in Los Angeles.

U.S. Premiere
Timbuktu
Abderrahmane Sissako, France/Mauritania, 2014, DCP, 100m
Arabic, Bambara, French, English, Songhay, and Tamasheq with English subtitles
Abderrahmane Sissako’s new film looks at the terror and humiliation of occupation with an uncommonly serene eye. We are in the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu, where foreign jihadists are enforcing bans against sports, music, loafing, and bare-headed women. Sissako gracefully pivots between multiple characters, some of whom are seen only fleetingly (a group of young people who gather to sing, a woman who refuses to wear gloves), while others, like the Tuareg family living in the hills near the city, we come to know intimately. Visually, Timbuktu is a series of wonders—once seen, visions of jihadists beaming their criss-crossing flashlights into the deep blue night or of a man treading the length of a shallow river from a distant vantage point are not easily forgotten. And Sissako’s becalmed and sensitive eye for beauty intensifies the absurdity and horror of the film’s quietly unfolding tragedy. A Cohen Media Group release.

U.S. Premiere
Time Out of Mind
Oren Moverman, USA, 2014, DCP, 117m
We are in an apartment from which the tenant has been evicted. Junk is piled everywhere. A man, sleeping in the bathtub, is awoken by the maintenance crew. He is forced onto the streets, and into a series of realizations that gradually materialize over the unending days that stretch to infinity: that he must find clothing to cover himself, food to eat, liquid to drink, a bed to sleep in. And we are simply with him, and with the sound and movement of the city that engulfs him and makes him seem smaller and smaller. As George, Richard Gere may be the “star” of Oren Moverman’s new film, but he allows the world around him to take center stage, and himself to simply be: it’s a wondrous performance, and Time Out of Mind is as haunting as a great Bill Evans solo. With lovely work by Ben Vereen as George’s one and only friend and Jena Malone as his estranged daughter.

New York Premiere
Two Days, One Night / Deux jours, une nuit
Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France/Italy, 2014, DCP, 95m
French with English subtitles
The action is elemental. The employees in a small factory have been given a choice. They will each receive a bonus if they agree to one of them being laid off; if not, then no one gets the bonus. The chosen employee (Marion Cotillard) spends a weekend driving through the suburbs and working-class neighborhoods of Seraing and Liège, knocking on the doors of her co-workers and asking a simple but impossible question: will you give up the money to let me continue to earn my own living? The force of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s new film lies in the intensity with which they focus on the second-by-second toll the situation takes on everyone directly affected, while the employers sit at a benign remove. In Two Days, One Night, the Dardennes take an urgent and extremely relevant ethical inquiry and bring it to bold and painfully human life. A Sundance Selects release.

U.S. Premiere
Two Shots Fired / Dos Disparos
Martín Rejtman, Argentina, 2014, DCP, 105m
Spanish with English subtitles
The first feature in a decade by Martín Rejtman (The Magic Gloves), a founding figure of the new Argentine cinema, is an engrossing, digressive comedy with the weight of an existentialist novel. Sixteen-year-old Mariano (Rafael Federman), inexplicably and without warning, shoots himself twice—once in the stomach and once in the head—and improbably survives. As his family strains to protect Mariano from himself, his elder brother (Benjamín Coehlo) pursues a romance with a disaffected girl (Laura Paredes) who works the counter at a fast-food restaurant, his mother (Susana Pampin) impulsively takes off on a trip with a stranger, and Mariano recruits a young woman (Manuela Martelli) to join his medieval wind ensemble. Rejtman tells this story with both compassion and formal daring, pursuing one thread only to abandon it for another. Two Shots Fired is a wry, moving, consistently surprising film about the irrationality of emotions and how they govern our actions at each stage of our lives.

New York Premiere
Whiplash
Damien Chazelle, USA, 2014, DCP, 105m
A pedagogical thriller and an emotional S&M two-hander, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash is brilliantly acted by Miles Teller as an eager jazz drummer at a prestigious New York music academy and J.K. Simmons as the teacher whose method of terrorizing his students is beyond questionable, even when it gets results. Dubbed “Full Metal Jacket at Juilliard” at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, Chazelle’s jazz musical was developed from his short film of the same name, which premiered at Sundance the previous year. The live jazz core that is fused with Justin Hurwitz’s ambient score, the blood-on-the-drum-kit battle between student and teacher, and the dazzling filmmaking will keep your pulse rate elevated from beginning to end. A kinesthetic depiction of performance anxiety—you don’t need to be a musician to feel it—Whiplash also presents us with a moral issue open to debate. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

North American Premiere
The Wonders / Le meraviglie
Alice Rohrwacher, Italy/Switzerland/Germany, 2014, DCP, 110m
Italian, German, and French with English subtitles
Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Alice Rohrwacher’s follow-up to Corpo celeste (NYFF 2011) is a vivid story of teenage yearning and confusion that revolves around a beekeeping family in rural central Italy: German-speaking father (Sam Louwyck), Italian mother (Alba Rohrwacher), four girls. Two unexpected arrivals prove disruptive, especially for the pensive oldest daughter, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu). The father takes in a troubled teenage boy as part of a welfare program and a television crew shows up to enlist local farmers in a kitschy celebration of Etruscan culinary traditions (a slyly self-mocking Monica Bellucci plays the bewigged host). The film never announces its themes but has plenty on its mind, not least the ways in which old traditions survive in the modern world, as acts of resistance or repackaged as commodities. Combining a documentary attention to daily ritual with an evocative atmosphere of mystery, The Wonders conjures a richly concrete world that is nonetheless subject to the magical thinking of adolescence.

Read more

The Last Hijack

USC’s Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, has been selected to make the Keynote Address for the 2014 NYFF Convergence, which takes place September 27-28, 2014. In addition, the festival announced the initial three selections for NYFF Convergence.

The first three selections announced for NYFF Convergence include the North American Premiere of the interactive presentation of Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting’s The Last Hijack, which combines documentary footage, animation, and an online transmedia experience to explore contemporary piracy from the point of view of a Somali man contemplating one final hijacking attempt; and a 30th Anniversary screening (of a restored 16mm print) of Diego Echeverria’s 1984 documentary Living Los Sures about the challenges and struggles of living in Brooklyn’s Los Sures neighborhood at that time. Nearly lost, the restored, reframed, and remixed documentary is now part of a multi-platform participatory media project of Brooklyn-based UnionDocs. For the third selection, NYFF Convergence will play host to a creator-guided tour of Futurestates, the compelling ITVS series that imagines the impact of technology on humanity in the not-so-distant future.

.NYFF Convergence Programmer Matt Bolish said, “The exciting thing about this form of storytelling is that it’s constantly evolving, changing, morphing, and being remixed. These three projects represent some of the most compelling immersive material we’ve seen to date.”

Focusing on the intersection of technology and storytelling, NYFF Convergence offers audiences and creators the unique opportunity to experience a curated selection of some of the most exciting immersive storytelling projects being produced today. Jenkins, who is the Provost’s Professor of Communication Journalism and Cinematic Arts at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, will focus his address (“A Brief History of Transmedia Worlds”) on world-building in the contemporary entertainment landscape, as it applies to film, as well as exploring the worlds of games, online content, books, etc.

Previewing the address, Jenkins said, “Today’s films, television series, games, comics, novels, and even documentaries and journalism rely heavily on the concepts of world-building and world-mapping. In this talk, I will provide a conceptual map for understanding what we mean by ‘worlds,’ what roles they are playing in the production and consumption of popular media, how thinking in terms of worlds involves a shift from more traditional focuses on character and narrative, and why this concept has gained such traction in an era of networked communication and transmedia entertainment.”

FILM AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

 Los Sures
Diego Echeverria, USA, 1984, 16mm, 66m 
Diego Echeverria’s Los Sures skillfully represents the challenges of its time: drugs, gang violence, crime, abandoned real estate, racial tension, single-parent homes, and inadequate local resources in Brooklyn’s Los Sures neighborhood. Yet Echeverria’s portrait also celebrates the vitality of this largely Puerto Rican and Dominican community, showing the strength of their culture, their creativity, and their determination to overcome a desperate situation. Nearly lost, this 16mm film has been restored, reframed, and remixed by Southside based UnionDocs just in time for the 30th anniversary of its premiere at the New York Film Festival.
Saturday, July 27

Living Los Sures (Interactive Presentation)
Produced by UnionDocs, 2014
Using Escheverria’s 1984 documentary Los Sures as a starting point, Southside-based UnionDocs has created Living Los Sures, a massive mixed-media project that defies easy categorization. Composed over the course of four years and pulling on the talents of over 30 different artists, Living Los Sures paints a picture of a neighborhood from street level, an ever-evolving mosaic of people and places captured through film, audio, and now an online participatory experience.  With the premiere of two new elements—Eighty-Nine Steps, a continuation of the story of one of the original characters from Los Sures, and Shot by Shot—that invite people to share their personal stories inspired by the shots and locations of the original film, the UnionDocs team will take audiences through the process of building this unique documentary storyworld.
Saturday, July 27

The Last Hijack 
Tommy Pallotta & Femke Wolting, Netherlands, 2014, DCP, 83m
Mohamed is your average middle-aged man trying to make ends meet in his homeland: the failed state of Somalia. One of the country’s most experienced pirates, he is faced with constant pressure—from his fiancée, family, and friends—to get out of his dangerous profession. Far from the romantic figures of movies and literature, piracy is coming under increasing scrutiny from global forces and communities within Somalia. Sensing the end of an era, Mohamed must decide if he should risk everything and do one last hijack. As he wrestles with these very real problems, a dramatic tail of survival unfolds. How did Mohamed come to live this brutal and dangerous existence and is it possible to walk away? The Last Hijack is both a feature-length film, combining documentary footage and animation, and an online transmedia experience, allowing viewers a unique and original way to explore the story of Somali piracy from different perspectives.
Sunday, September 28

North American Premiere
The Last Hijack (Interactive Presentation)
Tommy Pallotta & Femke Wolting
Join directors Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting as they explore the immersive online components of The Last Hijack. The creators will offer a bird’s-eye view of the online elements of their documentary that investigates modern-day piracy.  Using data visualizations, animation, live footage, and audio, the online experiences paint a picture not of perpetrators of crimes and their victims but of real people whose actions have an effect on the world around them.
Sunday, September 28

Futurestates (Interactive Presentation)
Produced by ITVS, USA, 2014, 90m
What will America look like in 10, 15, even 20 years? Futurestates, the revolutionary series produced by ITVS, has been proposing answers to those questions since 2010. For its fifth and final season, Futurestates is presented as an immersive online video experience featuring short films that imagine robots with feelings, what education looks like in a wired world, and the future of prisons and our penal system. The central question at the heart of Futurestates is how technologies we may take for granted have a profound effect on our capacity to feel, create, live… and be human.
Sunday, September 28

Read more

 

The Film Society of Lincoln Center today announced Laurie Simmons as the artist behind the design for the 52nd New York Film Festival poster. She joins a stellar lineup of artists that have commissioned their work for the festival including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, and last year’s artist, Tacita Dean. Looked upon as a yearly artistic “signature” for the film festival, NYFF posters have taken on a celebrated pop culture significance through the years. Recently, the Saul Bass 1964 NYFF poster has been seen prominently on AMC’s Mad Men. Please find a complete list of artists below.

Laurie Simmons is an internationally recognized artist who stages photographs and films with paper dolls, finger puppets, ventriloquist dummies, and costumed dancers as “living objects,” animating a dollhouse world suffused with nostalgia and colored by an adult’s memories, longings, and regrets.

Her photographic works are collected by many institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim as well as The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Tate Modern, Walker Art Center and the Hara Museum, Tokyo.

Simmons’s first film, The Music of Regret (2006), extends her photographic practice to performance, incorporating musicians, professional puppeteers, Alvin Ailey dancers, Hollywood cinematographer Ed Lachman, and actress Meryl Streep. She has received many awards, including the Roy Lichtenstein Residency in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome (2005); and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1984). She has had major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Baltimore Museum of Art (1997); San Jose Museum of Art, California (1990); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1987); and she has participated in two Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1985, 1991) and was included in the 2013 Venice Biennial.  Simmons lives and works in New York. 

Her 2014 solo exhibitions include “Kigurumi, Dollers and How we See,” at Salon 94, New York, and “The Fabulous World of Laurie Simmons” at Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany; other recent solo exhibitions include: Wilkinson Gallery, London; Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera, New York; Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; The Gothenburg Museum, Sweden and Koyama Gallery, Tokyo. In 2006 she made her first film, She was recently shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Award in photography. The nominated works are being exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.. Laurie Simmons is at work on her second film, a narrative feature titled My Art.

The poster will be available for purchase during the New York Film Festival (September 26 – October 12) at the merchandise kiosk in Alice Tully Hall, the Film Society of Lincoln Center merchandise store located in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, and at the Walter Reade Theater concession stand. Posters are $25; Film Society members receive a special discount for purchase.

The complete list of NYFF poster artists: 

Larry Rivers, 1963
Saul Bass, 1964
Bruce Conner, 1965
Roy Lichtenstein, 1966
Andy Warhol, 1967
Henry Pearson, 1968
Marisol (Escobar), 1969
James Rosenquist, 1970
Frank Stella, 1971
Josef Albers, 1972
Niki de Saint Phalle, 1973
Jean Tinguely, 1974
Carol Summers, 1975
Allan D’Arcangelo, 1976
Jim Dine, 1977
Richard Avedon, 1978
Michelangelo Pistoletto, 1979
Les Levine, 1980
David Hockney, 1981
Robert Rauchenberg, 1982         
Jack Youngerman, 1983
Robert Breer, 1984
Tom Wesselmann, 1985
Elinor Bunin, 1986
Sol Lewitt, 1987
Milton Glaser, 1988
Jennifer Bartlett, 1989
Eric Fischl, 1990
Philip Pearlstein, 1991
William Wegman, 1992
Sheila Metzner, 1993
William Copley, 1994
Diane Arbus, 1995
Juan Gatti, 1996
Larry Rivers, 1997
Martin Scorsese, 1998
Ivan Chermayeff, 1999
Tamar Hirschl, 2000
Manny Farber, 2001
Julian Schnabel, 2002
Junichi Taki, 2003
Jeff Bridges, 2004
Maurice Pialat, 2005
Mary Ellen Mark, 2006
agnès b., 2007
Robert Cottingham, 2008
Gregory Crewdson, 2009
John Baldessari, 2010
Lorna Simpson, 2011
Cindy Sherman, 2012
Tacita Dean, 2013

Read more

The 51st New York Film Festival which started September 27 and runs through October 13, 2013 has scheduled an additional screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 masterpiece VIVRE SA VIE on 35MM. The film was previously announced as part of the Jean-Luc Godard – The Spirit of the Forms three-week retrospective taking place from October 9 to October 30, 2013. The additional screening will take place on Friday, October 4, 2013, at 9PM at Alice Tully Hall.

Between 1955 and today, Godard has made 45 shorts, 11 medium-length films, 40 features, three television series, a handful of commercials, and several of his own trailers. Throughout every “period” of his working life—his early heyday with the French New Wave, his explicitly political films made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin in the aftermath of May ’68 in France, his collaborative television and video work in Switzerland during the 70s with Anne-Marie Miéville, his movement between film and video from the 80s onward—he has always continually ventured into new territory. Godard has never once retreated or backtracked. It’s been almost six decades since his first short, and he’s given us a body of work that is like a multiverse.

Here is Manny Farber’s description of one of Godard’s greatest films, Vivre sa vie, made with, and for, his wife Anna Karina: “The fall, brief rise, and death of a Joan of Sartre, a prostitute determined to be her own woman. The format is a condensed Dreiserian novel: Twelve near-uniform segments with chapter headings, the visual matter used to illustrate the captions and narrator’s comments. This is an extreme documentary, the most biting of his films, with sharp and drastic breaks in the continuity, grim but highly sensitive newsreel photography, a soundtrack taped in real bars and hotels as the film was shot and then left untouched. The unobtrusive acting inches along in little, scuttling steps, always in one direction, achieving a parched, memory-ridden beauty. A film of extraordinary purity.” Print courtesy of Janus Films.

Read more

 

 The Film Society of Lincoln Center (FSLC) and Rockstar Games will present panel discussions from September 29 to October 1 tied to the recent release of Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV) during the 51st New York Film Festival as part of its NYFF Convergence program, as well as an exclusive concert with live performances of the original score from composers Tangerine Dream, Woody Jackson, The Alchemist & Oh No.

Panel presentations will include; Visit Los Santos and Blaine County: The World of Grand Theft Auto V, where audiences will hear members of the Rockstar Games creative team discussing the storytelling and game development of GTAV; and The Music of Grand Theft Auto V, which will feature the game’s composers during a special edition of NYFF LIVE, a free-to-the-public event where they will discuss the challenges and process involved with scoring an interactive game. 

Live From Los Santos: The Music of Grand Theft Auto V is an exclusive concert event in which the audience will be invited to step inside the world of GTAV with a once-in-a-lifetime musical performance by the renowned artists and producers performing the score for the game with support from over 20 additional supporting musicians, while images of Los Santos and Blaine County, the setting of GTAV roll by on a massive screen. 

“These NYFF Convergence events aim to examine GTAV from multiple angles, giving our audience multiple ways to explore what has already become one of the most compelling works in the genre,” says NYFF Convergence Programmer Matt Bolish. “The heart and soul of NYFF Convergence is storytelling and Rockstar Games has proven with GTAV that they are simply the best when it comes to creating narrative, cinematic experiences in games.”

NYFF Convergence is the second edition of the crowning event for the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s year round programming commitment to transmedia presented at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center and the Walter Reade Theater with panels, workshops and “immersive experiences” being presented from Saturday, September 28 through Tuesday, October 1. Focusing on the intersection of technology and storytelling, NYFF Convergence offers audiences and creators the unique opportunity to experience a curated selection of some of the most exciting immersive storytelling projects being produced today.

Grand Theft Auto V, the latest in the critically acclaimed blockbuster open world series, released on Tuesday, September 17 to rave reviews. The New York Times said “(Grand Theft Auto V) remains the most immersive spectacle in the interactive entertainment” and that the game is the “best plotted, most playable, character-driven, fictionally coherent entry” in the history of the series.

GTAV is also the first title in the series to have an original interactive score composed in a special collaboration of Tangerine Dream, Woody Jackson, and renowned hip-hop producers The Alchemist & Oh No.
Tickets for The Rockstar Experience will go on sale at 10am on Friday, September 27:  $125 Concert Plus (Full Experience includes concert + afterparty with DJ & open bar); $40 Concert Only. 

EVENT DESCRIPTIONS

GRAND THEFT AUTO V PANEL: 
Visit Los Santos and Blaine County: The World of Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto V, the latest blockbuster videogame from Rockstar Games, is a highly detailed and satirical reimagining of modern day Southern California, from the bustling metropolis of Los Santos to the surrounding countryside, rivers, mountains, lakes and beaches of Blaine County. Join us as we take a look at a presentation of the game-world and talk with some of the creative team at Rockstar Games about Grand Theft Auto V’s formation from a series of ambitious ideas to complete ‘virtual’ reality.
Sunday, September 29 at 3:30PM at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (144 West 65th Street)

CONCERT INFORMATION:
The Film Society of Lincoln Center & Rockstar Games Present:
Live From Los Santos: The Music of Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto V comprises an entire universe filled not only with action, but with sound, thanks to the dynamic score from composers Tangerine Dream, Woody Jackson, and The Alchemist & Oh No. For one night only, this talented group of artists, along with more than 20 supporting musicians will come together to perform the game’s score, live to a very limited audience at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle.  This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear this incredible collaboration perform the score, combined with art and game visuals to offer a completely unique and immersive live experience.
Monday, September 30 at 9:00PM (Doors open at 8:00PM)
The Church of St. Paul the Apostle (405 W 59th Street)
$40 for concert, $125 for concert + After Party

AFTER PARTY (included with ticket):
Grand Theft Auto V: A Celebration
Join us after the concert at a very special event to celebrate the music of Grand Theft Auto V at Le Poisson Rouge, featuring DJ sets from Flying Lotus, host of the in-game radio station, FlyLo FM, and Gilles Peterson who hosts Worldwide FM.
Le Poisson Rouge (158 Bleecker Street) 

 
NYFF LIVE: FREE MUSIC PANEL:
The Music of Grand Theft Auto V
For the first time in the series, Grand Theft Auto V features a completely original and dynamic interactive musical score, adding a level of immersion and tension never heard before in a Grand Theft Auto game. This exciting addition to the game series is the result of many years work and Ivan Pavlovich, Music Supervisor for Rockstar Games, will be on hand with the game’s key composers, Tangerine Dream, Woody Jackson, and Alchemist & Oh No to explain the many intricacies of such a mammoth project and its impact on this iconic piece of entertainment
Tuesday, October 1 at 8:00PM at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater (144 West 65th Street)

Read more

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today a final addition to the very popular free-to-the-public Summer Talks lineup, with Nicole Holofcener on September 17 at 7PM, to discuss her new film ENOUGH SAID. With Opening Night for the 51st New York Film Festival less than three weeks away, on September 27, FSLC also announced details forThe New York Film Festival at 50, a panel discussion with Joanne Koch, Kent Jones and Richard Peña at the Jacob Burns Film Center (364 Manville Road, Pleasantville, New York) on Wednesday, September 11 at 7:30PM. Visit Filmlinc.com for more information.

ENOUGH SAID director Nicole Holofcener

On Tuesday, September 17 at 7PM, Nicole Holofcener will join NYFF Director of Programming Kent Jones for a free Summer Talks event in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater. Holofcener, who previously wrote and directed WALKING AND TALKING, LOVELY & AMAZING, FRIENDS WITH MONEY and PLEASE GIVE, will discuss her upcoming film ENOUGH SAID, and also show clips. The Summer Talks series began in May with BEFORE MIDNIGHT director Richard Linklater and actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke and has since welcomed an impressive list of talented filmmakers including Sofia Coppola (THE BLING RING), Ryan Coogler (FRUITVALE STATION), Nicolas Winding Refn (ONLY GOD FORGIVES), Lee Daniels (LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER), David Gordon Green (PRINCE AVALANCHE), Brian De Palma (PASSION) and many more. Visit Filmlinc.com/holofcener for more information.

ENOUGH SAID is about a divorced and single parent, Eva (Julia Louis Dreyfus) who spends her days enjoying work as a masseuse but dreading her daughter’s impending departure for college. She meets Albert (James Gandolfini) – a sweet, funny and like-minded man also facing an empty nest.  As their romance quickly blossoms, Eva befriends Marianne (Catherine Keener), her new massage client. Marianne is a beautiful poet who seems “almost perfect” except for one prominent quality: she rags on her ex-husband way too much. Suddenly, Eva finds herself doubting her own relationship with Albert as she learns the truth about Marianne’s Ex.  ENOUGH SAID is a sharp, insightful comedy that humorously explores the mess that often comes with getting involved again. The Fox Searchlight Pictures release is opening in NY and LA on September 18.

On Wednesday, September 11, The Jacob Burns Film Center celebrates NYFF with The New York Film Festival at 50, a panel discussion with Joanne Koch, Kent Jones and Richard Peña, moderated by Steve Apkon. A touchstone of the US film scene since 1963, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival has long served as a guide to the masterworks of cinema and a forum for the artists who create them. Apkon will discuss the history of the film festival with three of the people who’ve been instrumental in the programming and presentation of NYFF for many years: Joanne Koch (Executive Director of FSLC 1971 – 2003), Richard Peña (FSLC & NYFF Program Director 1988 – 2012) and Kent Jones (current NYFF Program Director), all contributors to the lavish new book New York Film Festival Gold: A 50th Anniversary Celebration. A special limited number of autographed copies of the book will be available for purchase that evening, signed by director Pedro Almodóvar and Richard Peña.

The 340-page coffee table book features recollections by esteemed critics and scholars who recount their personal involvement with the festival. Also included are hundreds of rare stills and behind-the-scenes shots with over 130 filmmakers, reproductions of all 50 NYFF posters and a complete listing of all the films and events that have been featured in the festival for the past 50 years. The NYFF 50th Anniversary collector’s book can also be purchased at FilmLinc.com and on Amazon.

http://youtu.be/xOdX1Pb9aoU

Read more

Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition

Richard Curtis, Paul Greengrass, Agnieszka Holland and Frederick Wiseman have been selected to participate in the HBO Directors Dialogues and the popular HBO On Cinema conversation will feature James Gray at the upcoming 2013 New York Film Festival. The festival also announced the selection of Joanna Hogg and Fernando Eimbcke as the two filmmakers whose work will be screened and celebrated as NYFF’s Emerging Artists this year, as well as the selections for NYFF’s Shorts Programs.

The fifth edition of NYFF’s annual master class, HBO On Cinema, will feature James Gray (THE IMMIGRANT) speaking to NYFF Director of Programming and Selection Committee Chair, Kent Jones on Saturday, October 12 about his cinematic influences. Film clips will also be shown, spotlighting filmmakers and films that have inspired him, and continue to today.

The popular HBO Directors Dialogues return to the New York Film Festival with four diverse filmmakers, paired with a journalist or Selection Committee member as they discuss their careers, views on their own approach to making movies as well as the current state of the art of filmmaking. This year’s lineup will feature Paul Greengrass (CAPTAIN PHILLIPS) on Saturday, September 28; Frederick Wiseman (AT BERKELEY) on Sunday, September 29; Richard Curtis (ABOUT TIME) on Wednesday, October 2; and Agnieszka Holland (BURNING BUSH) on Saturday, October 5.

Co-Presented with the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), NYFF’s Emerging Artists is the next step in FSLC and RBC’s combined efforts to promote and encourage the work of promising filmmakers by providing a spotlight on two enormously talented filmmakers, Fernando Eimbcke from Mexico and Joanna Hogg from England.

Eimbcke’s comedy CLUB SANDWICH (2013) deals with the fraught territory of puberty and separation anxiety as it follows the experiences of a teenage boy taking his first tentative (and furtive) steps into the uncharted waters of sex. NYFF will also screen Eimbcke’s prior two films, DUCK SEASON (2004), which screened previously at New Directors/New Films, and LAKE TAHOE (2008).

Hogg’s drama EXHIBITION (2013) is an intimate look at two married middle-aged artists that live and work in their unusual London home, at once labyrinth, battleground and refuge. Hogg’s films UNRELATED (2007) and ARCHIPELAGO (2010), both starring Tom Hiddleston will also be presented.

NYFF also announced today the films and filmmakers selected for this year’s Shorts Programs (4 in total). The selections are highlighted by films directed by returning NYFF alumni, including Miguel Gomes’s REDEMPTION (TABU, NYFF 2012) and João Pedro Rodrigues’s THE KING’S BODY (TO DIE LIKE A MAN, NYFF 2009), as well as Lav Diaz, whose short film PROLOGUE TO THE GREAT DESAPARECIDO will join his feature, NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY in the NYFF lineup. Nicolas Saada’s AUJOURD’HUI stars Academy Award nominee Bérenice Béjo from THE ARTIST (NYFF 2011) and includes an appearance by documentary filmmaking legend (with frequent NYFF appearances to his credit) Frederick Wiseman.

Additional notable directors with films in the Shorts Programs include Michael Almereyda (HAMLET, NADJA) with his short, THE MAN WHO CAME OUT ONLY AT NIGHT; Damien Chazelle (GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH) with his film, WHIPLASH; and David Kestin, who has two films set to be screened (THE AIR MATTRESS and OPEN HOUSE).

HBO DIRECTORS DIALOGUES

Paul Greengrass
With films like Bloody Sunday, United ’93 and the new Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass has established himself as one of the masters of reality-based cinematic fiction. With The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, he brought the immediacy of those films to the suspense genre. We’ll discuss the fine points of the geopolitical thriller, and the art of bringing history to life on the screen.

Frederick Wiseman
Frederick Wiseman is not just one of our greatest documentary filmmakers, he’s one of our greatest filmmakers, period. From his 1967 debut Titicut Follies to the present, Wiseman has taken his camera into Metropolitan Hospital in New York, a Benedictine monastery in Michigan, Madison Square Garden, the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, and the University of California at Berkeley among many other places and institutions, and fashioned vast cinematic frescoes of the ways we live, die, work, grieve, and create.

Agnieszka Holland
Agnieszka Holland has a career like no one else’s. She studied cinema in Czechoslovakia in the late 60s and was imprisoned for six weeks for her participation in the student uprising that followed the Soviet invasion after Prague Spring (dramatized in her extraordinary mini-series Burning Bush, showing in this year’s NYFF). She began working for Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzéj Wajda, and she has slowly built an extraordinary body of work, including Europa Europa and Olivier, Olivier, which opened the 1992 NYFF; her stunning 1993 adaptation of The Secret Garden; the Oscar-nominated In Darkness (2012); and numerous episodes of some of the best of episodic television, including “The Wire” and “The Killing.”

Richard Curtis
Without a doubt, writer/director Richard Curtis has become the most formidable presence in modern comedy. This is the man who wrote The Black Adder, Mr. Bean, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones’ Diary, and has thus far written and directed Love Actually, Pirate Radio and now About Time.

HBO ON CINEMA

James Gray
From Little Odessa in 1994 to his new film The Immigrant, James Gray has lovingly crafted five deeply personal films one image and emotion at a time. He is a New York director through and through, and he has shown us people and places within the city that one rarely sees in movies. This marks Gray’s first visit to the New York Film Festival, and we are very happy that he has agreed to talk with us about the films that have formed him and his own unique approach to movies.

EMERGING ARTISTS

JOANNA HOGG

EXHIBITION (2013) 110 min
Director: Joanna Hogg
Country: UK
Joanna Hogg’s exactingly minimal and intimately character-driven portrait of a married middle-aged couple – both artists – living and working in their unusual London home, at once labyrinth, battleground and refuge.

ARCHIPELAGO (2010) 114 min
Director: Joanna Hogg
Country: UK
A group stay on the island of Tresco off of Sicily, animated by resentments, jealousies, upheavals and revelations that will ring true to anyone who has ever spent a vacation with their family. Tom Hiddleston, a mainstay of Hogg’s films, is the discontented son at a crossroad in his life, at odds with his mother (Kate Fahy) and sister (Lydia Leonard). His priorities are re-set by landscape artist Christopher Baker, who appears as himself, and the pungent, wondrous landscape.

UNRELATED (2007) 105 min
Director: Joanna Hogg
Country: UK
Middle-aged, discontented Anna (Kathryn Worth) decides to spend her summer holiday apart from her husband, in Tuscany with her friends. As the days go by, she finds herself more attuned to their teenaged children (Tom Hiddleston and his sister Emma). Hogg’s 2007 debut established her right away as an unusual artist with a place-specific approach to drama.

FERNANDO EIMBCKE

CLUB SANDWICH (2013) 82 min
Director: Fernando Eimbcke
Country: Mexico
The new low-key, slow-burn comedy from Fernando Eimbcke, venturing into the fraught territory of puberty and separation anxiety, focuses on a teenage boy taking his first tentative (and furtive) steps into the uncharted waters of sex.

LAKE TAHOE (2008) 84 min
Director: Fernando Eimbcke
Country: Mexico
In this whimsically wayward comedy with a poignant twist, Eimbcke’s ’scope camera follows the meanderings of Juan (Diego Cataño) through the sleepy streets of a small town as he searches for a spare part after crashing the family car.

DUCK SEASON (Temporada de patos) (2004) 90 min
Director: Fernando Eimbcke
Country: Mexico
Two 14 year olds are home alone for the day, with video games, soda and snacks—how bad can it get? Soon they have company: a teenage neighbor who wants to bake herself a birthday cake, and a thirtysomething pizza delivery man. Then the power goes out…

NYFF SHORTS PROGRAMS

Shorts Program 1: 102 min
THE AIR MATTRESS (2013) 9 min
Director: David Kestin
Country: USA
Sometimes a noisy neighbor isn’t so bad after all…

MY MIND’S OWN MELODY (2012) 29 min
Director: Josh Wakely
Country: Australia
A bright, musical world exists within the depths of a comatose state.

9 METER (2012) 17 min
Director: Anders Walter
Country: Denmark
Daniel believes that his record-breaking jumps are the cause of his mother’s health improvements, but he needs to find a way to do better.

OPEN HOUSE (2013) 11 min
Director: David Kestin
Country: USA
Worst birthday gift ever: find a NYC apartment ASAP.

SAMNANG (2013) 22 min
Director: Asaph Polonsky
Country: USA
Samnang works long hard nights at a donut shop. One day his steady and solitary routine is shaken by the arrival of another worker.

TRYOUTS (2013) 14 min
Director: Susana Casares
Country: USA
Nayla discovers that the only way to fit in as a cheerleader is to rebel.

Shorts Program 2: 97 min
BASICALLY (2013) 15 min
Director: Ari Aster
Country: USA
An actress provides a hilarious tour of her privileged but dysfunctional world.

BUTTER LAMP (La lampe au beurre de yak) (2013) 15 min
Director: Hu Wei
Country: France
Families of Tibetan nomads get their pictures taken against an array of exotic scenic backdrops.

CARNY (Animador) (2012) 20 min
Director: Fernanda Chicolet
Country: Brazil
Ligia’s psyche escapes the dullness of her daily routine at an amusement park in danger-filled dreams that betray the flip side of her passive nature.

FRAYED (2013) 9 min
Director: Georgia Oakley
Country: UK
Plagued by imaginary terrors, Freya cannot keep her demons at bay in this wild mix of live action and animation.

#POSTMODEM (2012) 12 min
Directors: Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva
Country: USA
A musical satire on preparing for the singularity, based on the theories of Ray Kurzweil.

SUBCONSCIOUS PASSWORD (2013) 11 min
Director: Chris Landreth
Country: Canada
Charles’ subconscious plays games with him as he tries to remember an acquaintance’s name.

UNCLE ŞEREF AND HIS SHADOW (Şeref Dayı ve Gölgesi Fragman) (2013) 15 min
Director: Buğra Dedeoğlu
Country: Turkey
In a moment of anger Şeref berates his shadow, which promptly walks out on him.

Shorts Program 3: 61 min
AUJOURD’HUI (2012) 8 min
Director: Nicolas Saada
Country: France
The end of the world as experienced by a young mother (played by Bérenice Béjo from THE ARTIST) in Paris. She finds herself face to face with a silent, menacing prophet played by the great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman.

L’ASSENZA (2013) 20 min
Director: Jonathan Romney
Country: UK
A young man (Stephen Mangan) goes to see an Italian movie from the 60s with his wife  (Amanda Ryan) and is confronted with a strange apparition; an extra, who appears to be his doppelganger, haunting the edges of the frame.

THE MAN WHO CAME OUT ONLY AT NIGHT (2013) 15 min
Director: Michael Almereyda
Country: USA
Michael Almereyda’s wry adaptation of Italo Calvino’s folktale, shot in the East Village in black and white, is about a man (James Ransone) who marries the youngest of three sisters (India Kotis), and shares a very strange secret with her on their wedding night.

WHIPLASH (2013) 18 min
Director: Damien Chazelle
Country: USA
In this wild and intense new film from the director of GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH, a young jazz drummer (Johnny Simmons) beats his brains out trying to please his unforgiving conservatory instructor (J.K. Simmons – no relation).

Shorts Program 4: 89 min

Three ingenious explorations of history and myth from a trio of NYFF Main Slate alumni.

REDEMPTION (2013) 26 min
Director: Miguel Gomes
Country: Portugal
1975: from a village in northern Portugal, a child writes to his parents in Angola. 2011: an old man in Milan remembers his first love. 2012: a new father in Paris talks to his baby daughter. 1977: in Leipzig, a woman prepares for her wedding day. Where and when did these four poor devils begin searching for redemption? Combining voiceover and image as brilliantly as he did in TABU (NYFF 2012), Miguel Gomes pairs suggestively edited archival material with bittersweet, wryly funny monologues that put their speakers in a surprising new light.

THE KING’S BODY (O Corpo de Afonso) (2013) 32 min
Director: João Pedro Rodrigues
Country: Portugal
Dom Afonso Henriques was Portugal’s first king, a figure whose legendary strength and much-vaunted sword have been subject to considerable myth making over the years. In this sly, playful investigation into the meaning of national identity, director João Pedro Rodrigues (TO DIE LIKE A MAN, NYFF 2009) stages a casting session of sorts for the king’s body. A group of muscle-bound men, stripping down against a green-screen backdrop, answer questions about the fabled past and the mundane realities of their lives. The results, by turns amusing and poignant, speak volumes about Portugal in the present day.

PROLOGUE TO THE GREAT DESAPARECIDO (2013) 31 min
Director: Lav Diaz
Country: Philippines
Andrés Bonifacio, the freedom fighter known as the father of the Philippine revolution, was executed by rival revolutionaries in 1897. His wife, Gregoria de Jesus, searched for his body in the mountains for 30 days. It was never found. The next feature by Lav Diaz — whose latest, NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY, is also a Main Slate presentation this year — concerns Bonifacio’s controversial death. Returning to his familiar palette of rich, deep black-and-white after the blazing colors of NORTE, this short film about the desperate quest of Bonifacio’s widow is both a haunting standalone work and a tantalizing preview of the film to come.

Read more

COSTA DA MORTE by Lois Patiño

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today the complete lineup for the 17th edition of Views from the Avant-Garde (VIEWS), taking place from October 3-7, 2013, during the New York Film Festival (NYFF). The popular yearly touchstone for experimental film returns with curator Mark McElhatten at the helm, and will contain 35+ programs in glorious Super-8, 16 mm and 35mm film and HD formats. Many familiar faces will return, and VIEWS will also feature 45 new artists and several mini-retrospectives of several of these artists including, Aura Satz, Lois Patiño, Sandro Aguilar, and Jean-Paul Kelly. Views will also offer special tributes to the late Stom Sogo and Anne Robertson whose work is a testimony to the power of a Cinema that is fearless, confidential and inextinguishable.

Curator of Views from the Avant-Garde, Mark McElhatten said, “Cinema existed before Film and will exist long after film’s twilight and digital’s decay. Cinema exists as an innate way of perceiving the world through light, through cadence through juxtaposition and as a way of sensing and organizing reality. VIEWS celebrates Cinema in its material marriage with film, in its honeymoon period with an ideal medium, projecting super-8, 16mm, 35mm, sequential slides. We celebrate the lightning fleetness of digital that is able to translate the cinema of consciousness in a way than is very different than film, giving it a different elasticity and a different body. We are screening work that ranges through the ethnographic, abstract, psychological, documentarian, essayistic, devotional, parotic, scientific-naturalist many different impulses and directions along with the latest archival preservations of rediscovered works from earlier decades. The goal is to offer a festival of works that is evidence of true exploration coming from individual impulse, showing what can happen when exceptional artists absent themselves from the concerns of a consensus commercial aim and authentically pursue the limits of their art.”

Some highlights this year include, work by Lois Patiño who will showcase multiple programs, group shows, solo and amphitheater cycles. Opening night offers the North American Premiere of Patiño’s first feature COSTA DA MORTE, which just won an award of distinction at the 66th Festival del Film Locarno for Best Emerging Director. Filmed in a region of Galicia, Spain called Coast of Death, derived from the numerous shipwrecks that happened in this region. The film crosses this land observing the people who inhabit it, witnessing the traditional craftsmen who maintain both an intimate relationship and an antagonistic battle with the vastness of this territory. The wind, the stones, the sea, the fire, are characters in this film, and through them, approach the mystery of the landscape, understanding it as a unified ensemble with man, his history and legends.

Sandro Aguilar is known internationally as the founder of the production company, “O Som e a Fúria,” responsible for acclaimed films by Miguel Gomes, Manoel de Olivera and many other notable directors. His extraordinary films have been receiving nominations and awards from dozens of festivals worldwide over the last decade or so. Aguilar’s latest film Dive: Approach and Exit will be shown in its New York Premiere along with a selection of short films from 2007 to 2013. In addition his film A Serpente will screen once with the New York premiere of Scott Stark’s The REALIST.

VIEWS will present the World Premiere of Aura Satz’s just completed work Doorway for Nathalie Kalmus, a film centered around the use of color in moving image technology and exploring the disorienting technicolor prismatic effects of the lamp house of a 35mm color film printer. Through minute shifts across an abstract color spectrum, punctuated by a mechanical soundtrack, the film evokes kaleidoscopic perceptual after-images (bringing to mind Paul Sharits, Dario Argento and the Wizard of Oz).

SUNKEN TREASURE will be part of a special closing day of VIEWS that seeks to dissolve boundaries in the way we categorize and approach cinema of different origins and genre by presenting relative rarities directed by John Stahl and Max Ophuls, along with the works of Stan Brakhage and Nathaniel Dorsky. The evening will conclude with the last presentation in this year’s edition of VIEWS titled Kodachrome Dailies from the Time of Song and Solitude (Reel 2)
by Nathaniel Dorsky, includes screening unreleased materials for the first and only time to a public audience.

Over 200 individual works will screen this year from all over the world, including: Argentina, Austria, Australia, Brazil, Burma/Myanmar, Canada, Ethiopia, France, Germany. Israel, Italy, India, Japan, Palestinian territories, Mexico, Nepal, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States, Vanuatu and Venezuela.

Director Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s film Manakamana will be co-presented by Views from the Avant-Garde and was previously announced in the Spotlight on Documentary section, Motion Portraits. The film will screen on September 28 and 30 with the filmmakers in attendance. Visit Filmlinc.com for more information.

The 17-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring top films from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Kent Jones, also includes: Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Cinematheque Programming; Marian Masone, FSLC Associate Director of Programming; Gavin Smith, Editor-in-Chief, Film Comment; and Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor, Film Comment and Sight & Sound.

Gain access to the 34 programs in Views from the Avant-Garde with a $99 NYFF Views Badge, which will be available for purchase exclusively online. The badge as well as tickets to individual programs will go on sale September 12th.  More ticket information for the New York Film Festival will be available on Filmlinc.com/NYFF.

 

 
Venue Key: Francesca Beale Theater (FBT), Howard Gilman Theater (HGT), Amphitheater (AMPH)

 
Thursday, October 3      
(Please Note: Thursday, Opening day Views program includes amphitheater events and all other days, the amphitheater events are listed separately at the end of the schedule)                                                                           

3:00 pm       Program 15a: (FBT)
voices perish  (coloring the darkening glow)
Strawberries in the Summertime, Jennifer Reeves U.S., 2013 15min.

LUNA (Snow), Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2013, 2:21min.

Onomatopoeic Alphabet, Aura Satz, U.K., 2010, 7min

Doorway for Nathalie Kalmus, Aura Satz, U.K., 2013, 9min

Paisaje-Duración Trigal  (Duration Landscape Cornfield), Lois Patiño, Spain, 2010, 2:57min

Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow, Phil Solomon, U.S., 2013, 7:31min
                       
All or Nothing, Fred Worden, U.S., 2013, 8 min

Half Life, April Simmons, U.S., 2013, 6:04min
                       
LUNA  (Heaven), Leslie Thornton, 2013, U.S., 9:05min 

Remanence IV, Josh Bonnetta, U.S., 2013, 54 seconds
Bedtime Story, Esther Shatavsky, U.S., 35mm, 1981, 5.5 min, *35mm (blown-up from 16mm), Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
                       
WEISSFILM, Wilhelm and Birgit Hein, Germany, 1977, 5min                                                                                                                                                                         
“Splice 181 to Splice 243 of SPLICEFILM, 2013, Homage to Birgit and Wilhelm Hein’s WEISSFILM, 1977,” Florian Zeyfang, Germany, 2013, 5min.

Creme 21, Eve Heller, Austria, 2013, 11min 

Ten Notes on A Summer Day, Mike Stoltz, 2012, 4.5min

The Sea Seeks Its Own Level, Erin Espelie, U.S., 2013, 5:04min 

*Program repeats on Saturday, October 5 at 11:30 am (FBT) with the addition of Philosphers Walk on the Sublime, Leslie Thornton, U.S.  2013,12min

6:00 pm      Program 1: (FBT)
STEPHANIE BARBER:  DAREDEVILS  
World Premiere!
Daredevils, Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2013, 1hr 25min with Flora Cokes, Kim Su Theiler and the voice of Susan Howe. 

6:30 pm      Amphitheater Program A: (AMPH) 
PATRICIA THORNLEY 
World Premiere!
THIS IS US: Don’t Cry For Me, Patricia Thornley, U.S., 2013, 48min., with Janie Geiser, Michael Buscemi, Paul David Young. withKriminalistik, Janie Geiser,U.S., 2013, 3min.

7:00 pm      Program 2a: (HGT)   
Travis Wilkerson Los Angeles Red Squad with Miguel Gomes’ Redemption 
Redemption, Miguel Gomes, Portugal, France, Germany, Italy 2013, 26min.
Los Angeles Red Squad: The Communist Situation in  
California, Travis Wilkerson, U.S., 2013, 70min
*Program repeats on Friday, October 4 at 2:00 (FBT), with the exception of Miguel Gomes’ Redemption.

8:00 pm      Amphitheater Program B: (AMPH) 
The Wooster’s Group’s RUMSTICK ROAD  (2010-2013) Ken Kobland and Elizabeth LeCompte, U.S., 2013, 77min. A Video Reconstruction of the 1977 theater piece by Ken Kobland and Elizabeth LeCompte with Spalding Gray.

9:00 pm      Program 3a: (FBT)  
Lois Patiño : COSTA DA MORTE 
Costa da Morte (Coast of Death), Lois Patiño, Spain, 2013, 83 min.
*Repeats on Friday, October 4 at 1:00 pm (HGT)

9:15 pm       Program 4: (HGT) 
Chris Marker DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE with Miguel Gomes’ Redemption 
Redemption, Miguel Gomes, Portugal, France, Germany, Italy 2013, 26min.
Description of A Struggle (Description d’un combat) Chris Marker, France 1961 51min 
*Digital Restoration from the Israel Film Archive –Jerusalem Cinematheque

10:00 pm    Amphitheater Program C: (AMPH) 
JIM FINN
ENCOUNTERS WITH YOUR INNER TROTSKY CHILD, Jim Finn, U.S., 2013, 21.5 min. and Christmas with Chávez, Jim Finn, Argentina, U.S./Venezula, 2013, 2min.

11:00 pm     Amphitheater Program D: (AMPH)
LESLIE THORNTON 
LUNA (Trance), Leslie Thornton, U.S. 2013, 12min
Binocular: Zebra 2, Leslie Thornton, U.S. 2013, 2:45min
Binocular: Bees, Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2013, 6min
Binocular: Mandarin Duck, Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2013, 2min59
Little Balls of Air, Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2013, 5min

Friday, October 4 
12:00 pm     Program 5: (FBT)
Raúl Ruiz  Life is A Dream 
Mémoire des apparences (Life is Dream), Raúl Ruiz, France, 1987, 100min

 1:00 pm       Program 3b: (HGT)
Lois Patiño   Costa da Morte 
Costa da Morte ( Coast of Death), Lois Patiño, Spain, 2013, 83 min.

2:00 pm       Program 2b: (FBT)
Travis Wilkerson: Los Angeles Red Squad
Los Angeles Red Squad: The Communist Situation in  
California, Travis Wilkerson, U.S., 2013, 70min

3:15 pm        Program 6:  (HGT)
SOLAR RADIOS, FIRE FROM THE SUN
With Pluses and minuses, Mike Stoltz, U.S., 2013, 5min

The Starry Messenger, Marika Borgeson, U.S., 2013, 15min
Palindrome, Hollis Frampton, U.S. 1969, 22 minutes, 2013 *Preservation Print provided by Anthology Film Archives
Radio Adios, Henry Hills, U.S.,1982, 10.5 minutes
*Preserved in 2013 by Anthology Film Archives in with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Neuron, Robert Russett, U.S., 1972, 7min
Primary Stimulus, Robert Russett, U.S., 8min, 1977/1980
*2013 Restored prints of the Robert Russet films courtesy of the Academy Film Archive 
Tessitura Calda, Paolo Gioli, Italy, 2013, 7:30min
Screen Tone, Richard Touhy, Australia, 2012, 16min

4:00 pm       Program 7a: (FBT)  
 SANDRO AGUILAR – DIVE: APPROACH AND EXIT 
DIVE: APPROACH AND EXIT Sandro Aguilar, Portugal,2013, 12′

SIGNS OF STILLNESS OUT OF MEANINGLESS THINGS  Sandro Aguilar, Portugal, 2012, 28′
REMAINS Sandro Aguilar, Portugal, 2010, 18 min
MERCURIO Sandro Aguilar, Portugal, 2010  18 min
ARQUIVO Sandro Aguilar, Portugal, 2007 19 min
VOODOO Sandro Aguilar, Portugal, 2010 30 min
*Program repeats on Saturday, October 5 at 2:30 pm  (HGT)

5:15 pm        Program 8: (HGT)
ANNE CHARLOTTE ROBERTSON  :
I Wanted to See How I Lived, I Wanted to Love Myself and My Past. Films from 1976 to 1996.  
*Presented with The Harvard Film Archive and HFA Conservator Liz Coffee  from materials preserved in the Harvard Film Archive.TRT: 90min

6:15 pm        Program 9a: (FBT)
Landscapes in the Shadow of Time
Views from the Acropolis Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan Netherlands/Turkey, 2012, 14: 58

Paisaje-Duración Duration Rocas (Landscape Rocks ) Lois Patiño   Spain  2011 4:19 

Montaña en sombra
 (Mountain in shadow) Lois Patiño   Spain 2012 13:54 

Nile Perch (35mm version) Josh Gibson US./Uganda 2013 16:47

Three Landscapes Peter Hutton, 2013 US/Ethiopia 46min.   
*Program repeats on Sunday, October 6 at 10:30 pm  (HGT)

8:00 pm       Program 10: (HGT)
SUPER -8 SHORT FUSE INCANDESCENCE 
Please note: All films except Photooxidation and Lunas screen in super-8 projection.

Blind Alley Augury, Daichi Saito, Canada 2.5
Green Fuse, Daichi Saito, Canada, 3:11
Field of View #1, Daichi Saito, Canada, 3:16
Javi  Malena Szlam, Canada  2011, super 8, 2:42    
Lunas  Malena Szlam, Canada, 2013,  4: 33  16mm
The Quilpo Dreams of Waterfalls / El Quilpo Sueña Cataratas, Pablo Mazzolo, Argentina 2012 11 min Super-8
Conjectures / Conjeturas, Pablo Mazzolo, Argentina, 2013,  3:30min
Photooxidation/Fotooxidación – Pablo Mazzolo, Argentina, 2013, 7min.
VOID REDUX Paul Clipson, U.S., 2013 Silent 6.5 min
DIFFICULT LOVES  Paul Clipson U.S. 2013,. 3.5 music by Jefre Cantu- Ledesma.
SPEAKING CORPSE Paul Clipson, U.S. 2012 7.5min Music by Jefre Cantu Ledesma
CARRIE AT STILL Stom Sogo, U.S./Japan 1998, 27 minutes, From the collection of Anthology Film Archives.

8:15 pm:       Program 11: (FBT)
ONE SECRET DESTROYS EVERYTHING 

Dad’s Stick, John Smith, Great Britain, 2013, 6min
The Invisible World, Jesse McLean, U.S., 2012, 20:15 seconds
Lyrica, Shana Moulton, U.S. 2012, 4:53
The Dark, Krystle, Michael Robinson, U.S., 2013, 8 min
Mount Song, Shambhavi Kaul , U.S./India, 2013,  8:49  
Property, Jeanne Liotta  U.S, 2013,  3:28
Ojo Caliente, Pat O’Neill U.S., 2012, 4m   
Dirty Code, Bobby Abate, U.S., 2013, 5min
Black Powder, White Smoke, Sarah Halpern, U.S., 2.5 min
Life is an Opinion Fire a Fact Karen Yasinsky U.S., 2012,  9 min.
Greystone, Kerry Tribe, U.S.. 2012, 29min.

9:45 pm        Program 12: (HGT)
LUTHER PRICE: TEARS OF A CLOWN 
Jellyfish Sandwich Luther Price U.S. 1994, 17min.
Clown Luther Price U.S. 1991/2002, 32 min. 2013 Digital *Preservation by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

10:30 pm     Program 13: (FBT)
JODIE MACK: LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE 
LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE:  
Undertone Overture, Jodie Mack, U.S., 2013, 10:30
New Fancy Foils, Jodie Mack, U.S., 2013, 12min
Dusty Stacks of Mom, Jodie Mack, U.S., 2013 41m
Glistening Thrills, Jodie Mack, U.S., 2013, 8m
Let Your Light Shine, Jodie Mack, U.S., 2013, 2:45

Saturday, October 5
11:30 am     Program 15b: (FBT) 
voices perish (coloring the darkening glow) 
Strawberries in the Summertime, Jennifer Reeves U.S., 2013 15min.
LUNA (Snow) Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2013, 2:21
Onomatopoeic Alphabet, Aura Satz U.K. 2010 7min
Doorway for Nathalie Kalmus, Aura Satz, U.K. 2013 9min
Paisaje-Duración  Trigal   ( Duration Landscape Cornfield ), Lois Patiño, 2010, 2:57min
Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow, Phil Solomon, U.S., 2013, 7:31min
All or Nothing, Fred Worden, U.S., 2013, 8 min
Half Life, April Simmons, 2013, U.S., 6:04min
LUNA (Heaven), Leslie Thornton, 2013 U.S., 12min    
Remanence IV, Josh Bonnetta, U.S., 2013, 54 seconds
Bedtime Story Esther Shatavsky, U.S. 35mm 1981, 5.5 min, 35mm (blown-up from 16mm)
*Preserved by Anthology Film Archives in 2013 with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

 WEISSFILM, Wilhelm and Birgit Hein, Germany ,1977, 5min
“Splice 181 to Splice 243 of SPLICEFILM, 2013, Homage to Birgit and Wilhelm Hein’s WEISSFILM, 1977” Florian Zeyfang, Germany 2013, 5min.      
Creme 21, Eve Heller, Austria, 2013 11 min 
Ten Notes on A Summer Day Mike Stoltz  2012, 4.5min
The Sea Seeks Its Own Level Erin Espelie, U.S., 2013, 5:04 
Philosophers Walk on the Sublime  Leslie Thornton, U.S.  2013,12min

12:00 pm     Program 16: (HGT) 
L’Age D’Or

Tender Feet U.S., 2013, 10 min Fern Silva
45  7 Broadway  Tomonari Nishikawa, U.S./Japan,2013, 6 min.
Blue Shiloh Cinquemani, Germany, 2013, 3:02
Sea Series 12, 13, 14   John Price, Canada, 2013 7:30
Despedida (Farewell) Alexandra Cuesta U.S.,2013, 9:36
Bat El Drinking Water and Other Signs  Jonathan Schwartz, U.S/Israel 2013, 9:59
Utskor: Either/Or  Laida Lertxundi, Norway Spain U.S.      2013, 7:30
Gowanus Canal   Sarah J. Christman, U.S. 2013, 7 min.
High Water  Pawel Wojtasik U.S., 2013, 9:23
A Idade de Pedra/ Age of Stone  Ana Vaz, Brazil, 2013, 28:57

2:15 pm        Program 17 :  (FBT)
Being Here (found in silence , heard within sight)       
Narcissi  Shiloh Cinquemani , Germany, 2012,  3 min. 
Listening to the Space in My Room  Robert Beavers, Germany/U.S., 2013,19min.
Lost and Found  Jim Jennings, U.S., rediscovered in 2013, 5 min.
Susan +Lisbeth  Ute Aurand Germany, 2013 10 min.
to be here Ute Aurand, Germany/U.S., 2013, 38:06

2:30 pm       Program 17b: (HGT)
SANDRO AGUILAR: DIVE: APPROACH AND EXIT  
DIVE: APPROACH AND EXIT – Sandro Aguilar,Portugal, 2013, 12′
SIGNS OF STILLNESS OUT OF MEANINGLESS THINGS – Sandro Aguilar,Portugal, 2012, 28′
REMAINS – Sandro Aguilar,Portugal, 2010, 18 min.
MERCURIO – Sandro Aguilar,Portugal, 2010  18 min.
ARQUIVO – Sandro Aguilar ,Portugal, 2007 19 min.
VOODOO Sandro Aguilar ,Portugal, 2010 30 min.

4:15 pm        Program 18  (FBT)
PRECARIOUS LIGHT IN CALM FREQUENCIES 

Balga  Lichun Tseng, Netherlands, 2012 4:26
Natura Obscura Paolo Gioli, Italy, 7:50
Orchard.5  Hey –Yeun Jang, U.S., 2013, 4min
Late Summer Barry Gerson, U.S., 2013, 11min
Lost Our Lease  Jim Jennings, U.S., 2013, 10min.    
February  Inhan Cho, South Korea, 2011, 4:25
Watercolor (Fall Creek) Vincent Grenier,U.S.  2013,12:15
Flow Lichun Tseng, Netherlands, 2013,16min
Falling Notes Unleaving Saul Levine, U.S., 2013, 12min.
Threshold  Robert Todd, U.S.,2013, 19min 
Exterior Extended Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Austria, 2013, 9 min. 

5:15 pm        Program 19: (HGT)  
STOM SOGO:  EIJANAIKA –BROKEN IMAGE, UNPROTECTED JOY

Around the World  (aka Speedy Speedy California Sky)  Stom Sogo   103 min.
Diaries  Stom Sogo excerpts and other surprises
*All materials provided by Anthology Film Archives.

7:30 pm       Program 20a: (FBT)  
Momentary Light and Seasonal Songs: The Films of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler
Song Nathaniel Dorsky, U.S.,2013,18.5 min
Spring   Nathaniel Dorsky U.S.,23min 2013
Misplacement  Jerome Hiler ,U.S.,2013, 21min.
*Program repeats on Sunday, October 6 at 1:30pm 

8:30 pm       Program 21: (HGT) 
 Two Weeks in Another Time,-Transfigured and Immersive Ethnographies.
MAGIC MUSHROOM MOUNTAIN MOVIE  Manuel De Landa, Mexico/U.S.1973-1980, 15 min.
*Super- 8mm digitized to HD video in 2013 by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Brébeuf   Stephen Broomer 
Canada / 10:32 / 2013

Kolkata  Mark Lapore  U.S./India,2005,35min   A Views -NYFF reprise screening

Let Us Persevere in What We Have Resolved Before We Forget   Ben Russell, U.S./France/ Vanuatu 2013 20 min.       

Natpwe, the feast of the spirits Jean Dubrel and Tiane Doan Na Champassak  France/ Burma 2012,31min.

9:30 pm       Program 22: (FBT)   
LULLABIES AND ALARMS 
Cars and Killers Gretchen Skogerson, U.S. 2013.2min.
Platonic  Dani Leventhal,U.S., 2013 21 min.
Elsa merdelamerdelamer Abigail Child, U.S., 2013.3:30 sec
vis à vis Abigail Child, U.S. 2013, 25min.
After Hours  Karen Yasinsky, U.S., 2013,14:40 min.
El Adios Largos Andrew Lampert U.S.,2013,10min
Rode Molen  Esther Urlus, Netherlands, 2013, 4min
Seoul Electric Richard Tuohy, South Korea, 2012 16mm sound  7:29min
Las Variaciones Schwitters Alberto Cabrera Bernal, Spain,2012 6min.
Slackness Princess Sara Grace Nesin, U.S. 2013,3:57
Scattered in the Wind Lori Felker,U.S. 2013, 5:32
P.S. WHEN YOU ARE ABOUT TO DIE  Stom Sogo, U.S./Japan, 2003, 12min. a Views NYFF reprise screening ,from the collection of Anthology Film Archive.

10:45 pm     SURPRISE SCREENING (HGT)

Sunday, October 6
11:30 am     Program 14: (HGT) 
KEVIN JEROME EVERSON 
The Island of St. Matthews  Kevin Jerome Everson,U.S. 2013, 70min
Rhinoceros  2013, Kevin Jerome Everson,U.S. 2013,7min,            

12:00 pm     Program 23: (FBT)
TALENA SANDERS 
Liahona Talena Sanders, U.S.,2013, 68min 

1:30 pm        Program 20b: (HGT)
Momentary Light and Seasonal Songs : The films of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler
Song  Nathaniel Dorsky, U.S.,2013,18.5 min
Spring   Nathaniel Dorsky U.S.,23min 2013
Misplacement  Jerome Hiler ,U.S.,2013, 21min.

2:30 pm       Program 24: (FBT)  
Breaking the Frame   
Breaking the Frame  Marielle Nitoslawska, Canada, 2012,100 min with Carolee Schneemann

3:15 pm        Program 25:  (HGT)
(a noisy distance of None will be returned if, and only if, the ghost is captured).

Home Movie Gaza  Basma Alsharif, Palestinian Territories   2013,24min.

The Fold – Leslie Thornton, 2013, 4min.
Every Filter In Final Cut Pro  Lisa McArty, U.S., 2013 9:55min.
Immortal, Suspended  Deborah Stratman , U.S., 2013 5min
Sound Seam Aura Satz, U.K.,2010, 14’04
Binocular; Zebra 2, Leslie Thornton, 2013, 2:
Movement in Squares   Jean-Paul Kelly, Canada, 2013, 12:37
Figure –ground   Jean-Paul Kelly, Canada, 2013, 4:47 
Service of the Goods  Jean-Paul Kelly, Canada, 2013, 29:10

5:30 pm        PROGRAM 26: (FBT)  
WRITTEN ON THE WIND 
Murmurations  Rebecca Meyers, U.S., 2013, 5:40
Aviary Katherin McInnis 2013 5:00
Verses James Sansing ,U.S. 2012, 4min
Experiments in Buoyancy  Calum Michel Walter, U.S., 2013, 4:30
Handful of Dust  Hope Tucker, U.S.,2013, 8:46 sec.
Burrow- Cams Sam Easterson, U.S.,2012, 3min. 
True-Life Adventure I, Erin Espelie, U.S. 2012, 5 min
True-Life Adventure II, Erin Espelie, U.S. 2013, 5 min
True-Life Adventure III, Erin Espelie, U.S. 2013, 6 min
Looking Glass Insects  Charlotte Pryce, U.S. 2013, 4:02
A Study in Natural Magic  Charlotte Pryce U.S.,2013, 3:28
Animals Moving to the Sound of Drums Jonathan Schwartz, U.S. 2013, 8min. 
Painter and Ball 4-14  Pat O’Neill, U.S. 2011, 10min.
After Creation After Icebergs  Mary Beth Reed  16mm 2013  2:26 second  

5:45 pm        PROGRAM  27: (HGT)  
ROBERT NELSON 
Robert Nelson: Miracle of the Overlook: A Second Chance for Second Sight, Wonders that Pass Us By Seldom Return, Returning to Suite California  
SUITE CALIFORNIA STOPS & PASSES PART 1: TIJUANA TO HOLLYWOOD VIA DEATH VALLEY  
Robert Nelson U.S.,1976, , 46min.
SUITE CALIFORNIA STOPS & PASSES PART 2: SAN FRANCISCO TO THE SIERRA NEVADAS & BACK AGAIN 
Robert Nelson, U.S.1978,48min.
This program is co- presented with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Preservationist Mark Toscano will be present.
Restored Prints courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. 

7:30 pm       PROGRAM 28: (FBT)  
ERNIE GEHR : LIVING NEXT DOOR TO MAGIC
PHOTOGRAPHIC PHANTOMS  Ernie Gehr, U.S.,2013 26 min.  
WINTER MORNING  Ernie Gehr, U.S.,2013 18 min.  
THE QUIET CAR Ernie Gehr, U.S.,2013 18 min.  
AUTO-COLLIDER XVIII Ernie Gehr, U.S.,2013 13 min.  
BROOKLYN SERIES  Ernie Gehr, U.S.,2013 8min. HD   

8:30 pm       PROGRAM 29: (HGT)
LUTHER PRICE- LIGHT FRACTURES 
Light Fractures  Luther Price, U.S., 2013. double projection slides of varying durations.
Home Luther Price, U.S. 1999, 13min.
2013 Digital restoration by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Recitations   Luther Price U.S.1999- Luther Price, U.S.,1998-2000, 10min. 
And other surprises.  

9:45 pm        PROGRAM 30: (FBT)   
SCOTT STARK – THE REALIST 
Etienne’s Hand  Richard Touhy Australia  2011 12:34
Poetry and Truth Dichtung und Wahrheit, Peter Kubelka 2003, 13 mins  a Views NYFF festival reprise 
A Serpente  Sandro Aguilar,Portugal, 2005,15′
The Realist Scott Stark,U.S., 2013, 40min., music Daniel Goode       

10:30 pm    PROGRAM 9b: (HGT)   
LANDSCAPES IN THE SHADOW OF TIME 
Views from the Acropolis  Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan Netherlands/Turkey, 2012, 14: 58
Paisaje-Duración  Duration Rocas ( Landscape Rocks ) Lois Patiño   Spain  2011 4:19 
Montaña en sombra
  (Mountain in shadow ) Lois Patiño   Spain 2012 13:54 
Nile Perch (35mm version)  Josh Gibson US./Uganda 2013 16:47    
Three Landscapes   Peter Hutton, 2013 US/Ethiopia 46min.   

Monday, October 7 
VIEWS special programs  
Coda:  SUNKEN TREASURE – BRUEGHEL TEACHES US HOW TO SEE de KOONING (and vice versa)

2:00 pm       PROGRAM 31: (HGT) 
JOHN STAHL  ONLY YESTERDAY
Only Yesterday  John Stahl, U.S.,1933, 105min.

4:15 pm        PROGRAM 32: (HGT)
MAX OPHULS  SANS LENDEMAIN
Sans Lendemain  Max Ophuls, France 1939-40 82min

6:30 pm       PROGRAM 33: (HGT)
STAN BRAKHAGE
Anticipation of the Night    Stan Brakhage, U.S. 1958, 40min.
Window Water Baby Moving Stan Brakhage, U.S. 1959 12min.
The Dead Stan Brakhage, U.S. 1960, 11min.
This program is co- presented with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Preservationist Mark Toscano will be present.
2012/2013 Preservation prints courtesy of The Academy Film Archive restored by the Academy with the support of the Film Foundation.   – 

8:30 pm       PROGRAM 34:  (HGT)
Nathaniel Dorsky   In A Silent Way (part2)
First and only public showing of
Kodachrome Dailies from the Time of Song and Solitude (Reel 2)
 Nathaniel Dorsky U.S. 2005-6  30m (approx.)
Ariel  Nathaniel Dorsky, U.S 1983 16min  

 

 
Amphitheater Program A:  
PATRICIA THORNLEY 
THIS IS US: Don’t Cry For Me, Patricia Thornley, U.S., 2013, 48min with Kriminalistik, Janie Geiser, U.S., 2013, 3min.
*Thursday, October 3/Friday, October 4 at 6:30 p.m., Saturday, October 5 at 1:30 p.m., Sunday, October 6 at 4:00 p.m.

Amphitheater Program B:  
The Wooster’s Group’s RUMSTICK ROAD  (2010-2013), Ken Kobland and Elizabeth LeCompte, U.S. 2013, 77min. A Video RE-Construction of the 1977 theater piece by Ken Kobland and Elizabeth LeCompte with Spalding Gray
*Thursday, October 3 at 8:00 p.m., Friday, October 4 at 7:25 p.m., Saturday, October 5 at 2:30 p.m. and 8:30p.m., Sunday, October 6 at 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.

Amphitheater Program C: 
JIM FINN
ENCOUNTERS WITH YOUR INNER TROTSKY CHILD, Jim Finn, U.S. 2013, 21.5 min. Christmas with Chávez, Jim Finn, Argentina, U.S., Venezula, 2013, 2min.
*Thursday, October 3 at 10 p.m., Friday, October 4 at 4:30pm and 10:30pm,
Saturday, October 5 at 12:30 p.m. and 10:35 p.m., Sunday, October 6 at 2 p.m.

Amphitheater Program D: 
LESLIE THORNTON 
LUNA (Trance), Leslie Thornton, U.S. 2013, 12min
Binocular; Zebra 2, Leslie Thornton, U.S. 2013, 2:45
Binocular; Bees. Leslie Thornton, U.S.   2013  6min.
Binocular: Mandarin Duck, Leslie Thornton, U.S.  2013, 2min 59 second
Little Balls of Air, Leslie Thornton, U.S.   2013 5min
*Thursday, October 3 at 10:30 p.m., Friday, October 4 at 9:45 p.m., 
Saturday, October 5 at 12:00 p.m. and 10:05 p.m., Sunday, October 6 at 3:00 p.m.

Amphitheater program E: 
ANNE CHARLOTTE ROBERTSON from the 5 YEAR DIARY 
Diary #9,#22,#23,#31,#80,#81
*Friday, October 4 at 11am (AMPT) Diary #9,#22,#23,#31,#80,#81, Saturday, October 5 at 11a.m. Diary #9,#22 only, Saturday, October 5 at 4p.m. Diary#23,#31 only
Sunday Oct 6 at 11 a.m. Diary #23,#31,#80,#81

Amphitheater program F 1:  
JOHN PRICE : THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE  
*Friday, October 4 at 2:15pm, Sunday, October 6 at 1:00 p.m.

Amphitheater Program : G: 
Lois Patiño: Distance/Duration/Vibration 
Duration Landscape Road, 2012 Duration, Landscape Rocks, 2011 Distance –Landscape, Football Field, 2011 Into Earth’s Vibration, 2011 Into Water’s Vibration, 2012 Mountain in shadow, 2012
*Friday, October 4 at 3:30 (AMPT), Saturday, October 5 at 5:00 p.m., Sunday, October 6 at 8:30 p.m.

Amphitheater program H: 
ERNIE GEHR and CINTHIA MARCELLE 
As If Ernie Gehr, 2013 and Automóvel, Cinthia Marcelle, 2012
*Friday, October 4 at 5:30 pm (in repeat cycles), Saturday, October 5 at 6:00 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. (in repeat cycles), Sunday, October 6 at 2:30 p.m. (in repeat cycles) 

Amphitheater program I: 
AURA SATZ 
Onomatopoeic Alphabet  2010  Sound Seam  2010  Vocal Flame 2012 
Oramics: Atlantis Anew  2011  Doorway for Natalie Kalmus   2013
*Friday, October 4 at 8:45 p.m., Saturday, October 5 at 7:30 p.m., Sunday, October 6 at 9:15 p.m.

Amphitheater program J:  TALENA SANDERS: THE RELIEF MINING COMPANY
*Saturday, October 5 at 1:00 p.m., Sunday, October 6 at 3:30 p.m.

Amphitheater program K:  
STOM SOGO: The Mystery Album  
*Sunday October 6 at 10:15 p.m.

via press release

Read more

Katerina Cizek’s A SHORT HISTORY OF THE HIGHRISE

Building on the success of last year’s debut, the New York Film Festival revealed the program details for the 2013 NYFF Convergence, which will run on Saturday, September 28 through Monday, September 30, 2013.  Described as focusing on the intersection of technology and storytelling, NYFF Convergence projects and presentations will fall under three categories – Experiences, Keystone Presentations and Panels.

Experiences will underline the interactive element of transmedia storytelling with highlights including the World Premiere of Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill’s THE EMPIRE PROJECT, an immersive documentary project that examines the still-unfolding legacy of Dutch colonialism, and the New York Premieres of Robert Berger, Patrick Daniels and Karlyn Michelson’s CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO, Nicolas Alcala’s THE COSMONAUT, Suvi Andrea Helminen’s 48 HOUR GAMES and Rick Prelinger’s NO MORE ROAD TRIPS?

Among the highlights of Keystone Presentations is the World Premiere of Katerina Cizek’s A SHORT HISTORY OF THE HIGHRISE, an interactive documentary series produced by Op-Docs, the New York Times editorial department’s forum for short, opinionated documentaries, and the National Film Board of Canada. The series explores the global history of vertical living and issues of social equality in an increasingly urbanized world via four short films that, like a visual accordion, allow viewers to dig deeper into the project’s themes with additional photography and archival materials, exploratory features and micro-games. Writer, musician, director, actor Cory MacAbee (AMERICAN ASTRONAUT (2001), STINGRAY SAM (2009), CRAZY & THIEF (2012)) returns to the Film Society with CAPTAIN AHAB’S MOTORCYCLE CLUB to discuss his most recent project. In a presentation featuring live music and video pieces from the project, MacAbee will share anecdotes from the front lines of this truly original experiment in collaborative art. Presented by Christian Fonnesbech and Frederik Øvlisen, CLOUD CHAMBER is an enthralling collaborative experience that is part alternate reality game, part film, part social network, and in its way altogether original. Players are asked to work together via a single web portal to uncover the story of a young scientist who risked her sanity and betrayed her father in order to save humanity from its most dangerous enemy: itself.

NYFF Convergence Panels will explore whether or not there has ever been a better time to create content thanks to the technological innovation of crowdfunding and microfinance sites. Other panels will also delve into the fact that some of the most compelling work being done by transmedia creators today is in field of multiplatform documentaries, as well as discuss producing in the transmedia world – the process, business models, team and tools, as well as the ins and outs of working on multiple platforms.

NYFF CATEGORIES AND FILM DESCRIPTIONS

EXPERIENCES

New York Premiere
CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO
Directors: Robert Berger, Patrick Daniels and Karlyn Michelson – APPEARING IN PERSON
Saturday, September 28 at 2:00PM, EBM Beale Theater
Derived in its entirety from black box recordings of true airline emergencies, CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO presents the sort of visceral experience that stays with audiences long after credits roll. Originally produced as a highly successful stage play in New York’s Lower East Side, the film makes startlingly effective use of a state-of-the-art 3D process to take us to a place few civilian eyes have ever been: the other side of the steel reinforced door that separates the public from the pilots. Directors Robert Berger, Patrick Daniels and Karlyn Michelson invite their audience to play silent witness to six high-tension dramatizations possessed with a raw intensity real enough to earn multiple citations from organizations such as the Air Force, West Point, and countless professional groups across the aviation community. In equal measure startling and uplifting, CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO is a project that demands our respect and attention.

New York Premiere
THE COSMONAUT
Director: Nicholas Alcala – APPEARING IN PERSON
Sunday, September 29 at 12:30PM, EBM
Ambitious in scale and scope, THE COSMONAUT is the very definition of what a multiplatform immersive narrative can be. Encompassing a feature film, web-based content, social media, studio albums, live events, and a documentary feature the project has garnered international attention and praise since its inception in 2009. Set in the late 1960’s, the project follows Stas and Andrei – two Russian space-farers in training who along with a cast of adventurers, scientists, engineers, and dreamers are in a race against the clock to beat the United States to space.

THE COSMONAUT EXPERIENCE
Director: Nicholas Alcala – APPEARING IN PERSON
Sunday, September 29 at 2:00PM
In 1957, the first man-made object was put in orbit. That ignited a wild race between two countries that were fighting an undercover war. Earth wasn’t enough anymore. The new goal was to conquer the universe.

See the feature film then dive deeper into the world of Riot Cinema’s THE COSMONAUT. Featuring choice selections of web content created to augment and expand the world of the film, these short videos provide audiences with a unique cinematic experience. Equal parts backstory and primer on the characters, situations, and pivotal moments in this storyworld, we invite audiences to join us for this free event and to explore this complex narrative universe. New York based filmmaker and transmedia creator Mark Harris (THE LOST CHILDREN) will lead a creator to creator discussion with THE COSMONAUT’S Nicolas Alcala about building this unique multiplatform experience.

World Premiere
THE EMPIRE PROJECT
Directors: Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill – APPEARING IN PERSON
Saturday, September 28 at 4:00PM
A hidden synagogue in the mountains of Indonesia. A Dutch-style village in the Sri Lankan rainforest. A white separatist enclave in the South African desert. These are just a few of the communities brought to light in Empire, an immersive documentary project that examines the still-unfolding legacy of Dutch colonialism. Shot in ten countries over four years, Empire employs a broad range of storytelling techniques—including nonfiction filmmaking, multi- channel video projection, and experience design—to unearth the contemporary aftershocks of the world’s first brush with global capitalism.
Empire’s videos and installations will be on display throughout NYFF at several venues on the Lincoln Center campus including the Film Center, Walter Reade Theater, and Alice Tully Hall. Viewers are invited to chart their own course through the work, and to draw their own thematic connections as they go and then join Directors Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill for a discussion about the genesis of this one of a kind experiential documentary.

New York Premiere
48 HOUR GAMES
Director: Suvi Andrea Helminen – APPEARING IN PERSON
Saturday, September 28 at 5:00PM
48 HOUR GAMES is an interactive “choose your own adventure” style documentary that is as much a game as it is a film. Shot during the Nordic Game Jam, an event that annually brings together more than 300 game developers from all parts of Scandinavia, the film is an intense exploration of the creative process. Fueled by caffeine, competition, and perhaps a little madness, 48 HOUR GAMES tracks the soaring highs and depressing lows of the Game Jam teams as they work towards the epic grand finale. Originally released as an online experience for a single user, NYFF Convergence will host a fully interactive screening of the film with creator Suvi Andrea Helminen – an event that will ask the audience to chart the course of story through a process that the film magazine Ekko describes as “…somewhere in between democracy and ”survival of the fittest” – the ones who shout louder get to decide…it’s about cheering with your whole body. ”

New York Premiere
NO MORE ROADTRIPS?
Director: Rick Prelinger – APPEARING IN PERSON
Saturday, September 28 at 9:00PM
Artfully assembled from thousands of home movies and amateur films, NO MORE ROAD TRIPS?, the latest film from archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger (LOST LANDSCAPES OF SAN FRANCISCO; LOST LANDSCAPES OF DETROIT), explores the highways and byways of a period in American history that may well be in our rearview mirror. Focusing on road culture and the idea of “peak travel,” the film is a participatory experience that depends upon audiences to provide the soundtrack and narration. NO MORE ROAD TRIPS? is a perpetual work in progress, a piece that cannot be completed until you, the audience, lends your voice to the images to this one of a kind interactive cinema experience.

KEYSTONE PRESENTATIONS

CAPTAIN AHAB’S MOTORCYCLE CLUB
Presented by Cory McAbee
Sunday September 29, 5:00PM
Writer, musician, director, actor Cory McAbee (AMERICAN ASTRONAUT, STINGRAY SAM; CRAZY & THIEF) returns to the Film Society to discuss his most recent project, THE EMBALMER’S TALE. Set in an America still reeling from the Civil War, the film charts the 1600 mile journey that carried the body of President Abraham Lincoln from Washington D.C to Springfield, Il, and the lives of the soldiers, surgeons, and morticians tasked with keeping the president’s remains intact. Through a global collaborative known as CAPTAIN AHAB’S MOTORCYCLE CLUB, McAbee is leading a band of fans, filmmakers, illustrators, actors, and artists in creating a crowdsourced storyworld of epic scope. In a presentation featuring live music and video pieces from the project, McAbee will share anecdotes from the front lines of this truly original experiment in collaborative art.

THE CLOUD CHAMBER MYSTERY
Presented by Christian Fonnesbech and Frederik Øvlisen
Saturday September 28, 11:00AM
Billed as the world’s first premium online mystery community, CLOUD CHAMBER is an enthralling collaborative experience that is part alternate reality game, part film, part social network, and in its way altogether original. Players are asked to work together via a single web portal to uncover the story of a young scientist who risked her sanity and betrayed her father in order to save humanity from its most dangerous enemy: itself. The project stars Gethin Anthony (Game of Thrones) and Jesper Christensen (CASINO ROYALE, QUANTUM OF SOLACE) and is produced by Vibeke Windeløv (BREAKING THE WAVES, DOGVILLE). In a session featuring an in-depth exploration of this unique storyworld, director Christian Fonnesbech and CEO Frederik Øvlisen will discuss the genesis of the project and their vision as well as the challenges involved with building and marketing this new interactive experience.

HOLLOW AND THE CALL TO ACTION: ELAINE McMILLION ON THE ROLE INTERACTIVE DOCS PLAY IN ONGOING NARRATIVES
Presented by Elaine McMillion
Sunday September 29, 11:00AM
Launched in 2013, HOLLOW is an interactive documentary that merges cinematic techniques with web-based storytelling to encourage a dialogue about the issues facing small town America. Part of a new wave of documentary cinema that creates immersive environments that literally calls their audiences to action, HOLLOW is a story of hope that strives to not only address the issues through storytelling but help provide potential solutions. Director Elaine McMillion will take the Convergence stage to reflect on the project and the evolution of the documentary creator from filmmaker to facilitator, offering audiences an insider’s view to this essential piece of contemporary web-based storytelling.

World Premiere
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE HIGHRISE
Director: Katerina Cizek
Produced by the National Film Board of Canada and The New York Times
Monday September 30, 7:00PM
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE HIGHRISE is an interactive documentary series that explores the 2,500-year global history of vertical living and issues of social equality in an increasingly urbanized world. The centerpiece of the project is four short films. The first three (MUD, CONCRETE and GLASS) draw on The New York Times’s extraordinary visual archives, a repository of millions of photographs which have largely been unseen in decades. Each film is intended to evoke a chapter in a storybook, with rhyming narration and photographs brought to life with intricate animation. The fourth chapter (HOME) is comprised of images submitted by the public. The interactive experience incorporates the films and, like a visual accordion, allows users to dig deeper into the project’s themes with additional archival materials, text and micro-games. The festival premiere will include a screening of the films, followed by a walkthrough demonstration of highlights from the interactive experience.

 

PANELS

MAKING MOVIES AS THE ULTIMATE SOCIAL MEDIUM
Presented in collaboration with Digital Hollywood NYC
Saturday, September 28 at 2:00PM
In the early 2000’s advances in inexpensive digital video cameras and easy to use editing software placed the means of production in the hands of any person with the will to become a filmmaker. It wasn’t long before web sites like YouTube and Vimeo provided creators with a way to get their work seen by a global audience. Technology is once again revolutionizing filmmaking – from professional creators to novice makers – this time fueled by crowdfunding and microfinance sites likes Kickstarter, IndieGogo, and Seed & Spark. With technology, distribution, and finance readily available to hungry creatives this panel of industry pros asks the question “has there ever been a better time to create content?”

PRODUCING CONVERGENCE: A HISTORY OF MULTIPLATFORM COLLABORATION
Presented in partnership with the Producers Guild of America New Media Council.
Saturday, September 29 at 3:30PM
The Producers Guild of America (PGA) has been recognizing producers working on platforms beyond television and movie screens for a decade, and in that time, the opportunities to create new media types has expanded exponentially. Seasoned PGA members will share some of their early work integrating the creative process on multiple platforms and describe how those techniques have evolved into what we see today. We will discuss the process, business models, team and tools, as well as the ins and outs of working with producers on multiple platforms as it relates to projects involving: film, animation, digital distribution and platform extension. The art of producing holds many similarities even though the art that is produced may lead to very different experiences. How do leaders in the field keep a handle on creative consistency while breaking new ground with technology? How do you produce successful convergent material?

TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING & DOCUMENTARY FILM
Presented in partnership with the Writers Guild of America, East.
Saturday, September 28 at 12:30PM
The word “transmedia” often conjures images of interactive worlds filled with fictional characters and vast story arcs yet some of the most compelling work being done by creators today is in field of immersive, multiplatform documentaries. Moderated by Orlando Bagwell (MLK; Hymn: Remember Alvin Ailey; JustFilms), this panel will explore some of the most intriguing work being done in the field today – nonfiction pieces that tell their story in film, television, online, and in living color – and discuss the profound effects of synthesizing the cutting edge storytelling techniques with riveting documentary material. Featuring panelists actively developing immersive projects and those engaging with the form for the first time the discussion promises a twist on the classic adage – that the truth can be much more engaging than fiction.

PLATFORM AGNOSTIC, BRAND SPECIFIC
Presented in collaboration with Digital Hollywood NYC
Sunday, September 29 at 12:30PM
What do trendy tastemakers, magazine publishers and traditional television networks have in common? They all need to become platform agnostic and transcend their roots to cross into new and uncharted territory. While Daily Candy is transforming from an aggregator into an original content generator with high aspirations, Condé Nast has long provided filmmakers with material for first-rate adaptations. HBO and Bravo on the other hand started out as TV’s innovators on cross platform extensions and quickly left their TV roots behind for HBOgo and Bravo-online. What does it take to succeed in a world increasingly defined by the content produced and less by the means audiences discover it and what can indie creators learn from these trendsetters?

Read more