The 53rd New York Film Festival taking place September 25 to October 11, 2015, revealed the complete lineup for the Spotlight on Documentary section. The Spotlight on Documentary section will launch on Sunday, September 27, with a program highlighting episodic, short-form nonfiction, which will include a preview of new work by Laura Poitras, who follows up her Oscar-winning CITIZENFOUR (which had its World Premiere at NYFF last year) with the series Asylum, an intimate look at one of the most revolutionary and controversial thinkers of the digital age, unfolding in episodes. A behind-the-scenes drama, Asylum follows Julian Assange as he publishes classified U.S. State Department cables and eventually seeks political asylum inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The evening will include a preview of episodes from the series, as well as the premiere of new, multi-part work from other acclaimed filmmakers, which will be announced at a later date.
This year’s lineup also includes three films centered on iconic figures within the arts: Nora Ephron, Ingrid Bergman, and Jia Zhangke. Everything Is Copy director Jacob Bernstein delivers a vibrant portrait of his mother Nora Ephron, through her own words and the memories of her sisters, colleagues, former spouses, friends, and scenes from her movies. Stig Björkman’s focus in Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words is not on Bergman the star but on Bergman the woman and mother, using excerpts from her letters and diaries (extracts of which are read by Alicia Vikander); memories shared from her children (Pia Lindström and Isabella, Ingrid, and Roberto Rossellini); and clips from Super-8 and 16mm home movies shot by Bergman herself. Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang is the latest film from Brazilian director Walter Salles, who accompanies the director (whose latest, Mountains May Depart, is screening in this year’s NYFF Main Slate) on a visit to his hometown and other locations he has returned to in his vast body of work.
NYFF welcomes back director Frederick Wiseman with his 40th feature documentary, In Jackson Heights, which centers around one of New York City’s liveliest and most culturally diverse neighborhoods caught in the crunch of economic “development,” like so many other neighborhoods in the city and around the country. Joaquim Pinto returns to the festival, following his 2013 film What Now? Remind Me (NYFF51), with Fish Tail, co-directed with his husband Nuno Leonel, set in the Azorean island of Rabo de Peixe, where small-scale fishermen introduce the filmmakers to the rhythms of their labor-intensive routines—artisanal traditions that face extinction in the global economy.
Politics play a role in several of the selections in the lineup. Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson, who premiered a series of immigration films How Democracy Works at NYFF51, return with their final film on the subject, Immigration Battle. The duo have continued to chronicle the struggle for American immigration reform over the past 16 years, crossing the country numerous times to film politicians and activists on both sides of the issue. The North American Premiere of We Are Alive from Chilean filmmaker Carmen Castillo (her Calle Santa Fe was a selection of the 2007 NYFF) is a documentary essay asking the questions: What comprises political engagement in 2015? Is it still possible to influence the course of events in this world? She structures her film in dialogue with the writings of her late friend Daniel Bensaïd, organizer of the Paris student revolts in May ’68 and France’s leading Trotskyite philosopher.
FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
Everything Is Copy
Jacob Bernstein, 2015, USA, DCP, 89m
Jacob Bernstein’s extremely entertaining film is a tribute to his mother Nora Ephron: Hollywood-raised daughter of screenwriters who grew up to be an ace reporter turned piercingly funny essayist turned novelist/screenwriter/playwright/director. Ephron comes vibrantly alive onscreen via her words; the memories of her sisters, colleagues, former spouses, and many friends; scenes from her movies; and, above all, her own inimitable presence. Watch any given moment of Ephron being her sparkling but caustically witty self (for instance, this response to a scolding talk show host—“You have a soft spot for Julie Nixon, don’t you. See, I don’t…”) and you find it hard to believe that she’s been gone from our midst for three years. Everything Is Copy (Ephron’s motto, inherited from her mother) is a lovingly drawn but frank portrait and, incidentally, a vivid snapshot of an earlier, livelier, bitchier, and funnier moment in New York culture. An HBO Documentary Films release. World Premiere
Field of Vision: New Episodic Nonfiction
Laura Poitras, USA/Germany, 2015, HDCAM
A selection of short-form episodic works, including installments of Asylum, in which Laura Poitras (whose CITIZENFOUR had its world premiere at last year’s NYFF) shadows WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as he publishes classified diplomatic cables and seeks asylum in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. World Premiere
Fish Tail / Rabo de Peixe (pictured above)
Joaquim Pinto & Nuno Leonel, Portugal, 2015, DCP, 103m
Portuguese with English subtitles
In his 2013 masterpiece What Now? Remind Me (NYFF51), Joaquim Pinto turned a first-person diary about chronic illness into an all-encompassing meditation on what it means to be alive. His latest film, co-directed with his husband Nuno Leonel, pulls off a similar balancing act between intimacy and expansiveness. The setting is the Azorean island of Rabo de Peixe, where small-scale fishermen introduce the filmmakers to the rhythms of their labor-intensive routines, artisanal traditions that face extinction in the global economy. Initially broadcast on Portuguese television in an abbreviated version, this new director’s cut is a tender portrait of a community that, through Pinto’s associative narration, frequently extends into more personal and philosophical realms, contemplating such topics as the value of manual work and the meaning of freedom. Fish Tail is as lovely as it is quietly profound, a film that at once acknowledges and transcends cinema’s long romance with maritime ethnography. North American Premiere
Homeland (Iraq Year Zero)
Part 1: Before the Fall
Part 2: After the Battle
Abbas Fahdel, Iraq/France, 2015, DCP, 160m/174m
Arabic with English subtitles
In February 2002—about a year before the U.S. invasion in 2003—Iraqi filmmaker Abbas Fahdel traveled home from France to capture everyday life as his country prepared for war. He zeroed in on family and friends as they went about their business, with much of the action seen through the eyes of the director’s 12-year-old nephew, Haider. When Fahdel returned in 2003, two weeks after the invasion, daily activities like going to school or shopping at the market had become nearly impossible; many areas of Baghdad had been closed off to ordinary citizens, yet everyone pressed on. The young Haider represents, in various ways, the voice of his people: “They are occupiers and we can’t oppose them. Our country has become like Palestine,” he tells a neighbor. Fahdel’s epic yet intimate film paints a compelling portrait of people simply trying to exist in the midst of constant turmoil, and describes the fine line between life and death that civilians in a war zone must walk from day to day. North American Premiere
Immigration Battle
Michael Camerini & Shari Robertson, USA, 2015, DCP, 111m
Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson have been chronicling the protracted struggle for American immigration reform over the past 16 years, crossing the country numerous times to film politicians and activists on both sides of this great and divisive issue. They gained unprecedented fly-on-the-wall access to the key players in Washington as they rode the momentum toward the passage of a bipartisan bill, only to see it shot down, which meant that they had to begin pushing the boulder back up the hill all over again. Two years ago, NYFF51 screened Camerini and Robertson’s series of immigration films, How Democracy Works, and now we present Immigration Battle, their final film on the subject. The key player this time is Democrat Luis Gutiérrez, the charismatic U.S. Representative for the 4th congressional district of Illinois, who negotiates his way through this political minefield—past an obstructionist majority playing to an anti-immigrant base and a President who has just been dubbed the “Deporter-in-Chief” by the pro-reform community—while keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the prize. World Premiere
Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
Stig Björkman, Sweden, 2015, DCP, 114m
Swedish with English subtitles
This is a lovingly crafted film about one of the cinema’s most luminous and enchanting presences, composed from her letters and diaries (extracts of which are read by Alicia Vikander), the memories of her children (Pia Lindström and Isabella, Ingrid, and Roberto Rossellini), and a few close friends and colleagues (including Liv Ullmann and Sigourney Weaver), photographs, and moments from thousands of feet of Super-8 and 16mm footage shot by Bergman herself throughout the years. Stig Björkman’s focus is not on Bergman the star but on Bergman the woman and mother: orphaned at 13, drawn to acting on the stage and then on film, sailing for Hollywood at 24 and then leaving it all behind for a new and different life with Roberto Rossellini. Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words is, finally, a self-portrait of a truly independent woman. A Rialto Pictures release.
In Jackson Heights
Frederick Wiseman, USA, 2015, DCP, 190m
Fred Wiseman’s 40th feature documentary is about Jackson Heights, Queens, one of New York City’s liveliest and most culturally diverse neighborhoods, a thriving and endlessly changing crossroad of styles, cuisines, and languages, and now—like vast portions of our city—caught in the gears of economic “development.” Wiseman’s mastery is as total as it is transparent: his film moves without apparent effort from an LGBT support meeting to a musical street performance to a gathering of Holocaust survivors to a hilarious training class for aspiring taxi drivers to an ace eyebrow-removal specialist at work to the annual Gay Pride parade to a meeting of local businessmen in a beauty parlor to discuss the oncoming economic threat to open-air merchants selling their wares to a meeting of undocumented individuals facing deportation. Wiseman catches the textures of New York life in 2015, the music of our speech, and a vast, emotionally complex, dynamic tapestry is woven before our eyes. A Zipporah Films release.
Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang
Walter Salles, Brazil/France, 2014, DCP, 99m
Mandarin with English subtitles
Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles accompanies the prolific Chinese director Jia Zhangke (whose latest, Mountains May Depart, is screening in this year’s Main Slate) on a walk down memory lane, as he revisits his hometown and other locations used in creating his vast body of work. At each location, they visit Jia’s family, friends, and former colleagues, and their conversations range from his mother’s tales of him as a young boy to amusing remembrances of school days and film shoots to memories of his father and the fact that if not for pirated DVDs, much of Jia’s work would go unseen in China. All the roads traveled are part of one journey—the destination of which is Jia’s relationship to his past and to his country. And the confluence of storytelling, intellect, and politics informing all of Jia’s work is brought to light in this lovely, intimate portrait of the artist on his way to the future. North American Premiere
Rebel Citizen
Pamela Yates, USA, 2015, DCP, 75m
Pamela Yates’s new film grew out of her friendship with master cinematographer and fellow activist Haskell Wexler, who’s still going strong at 93. Wexler asked Yates to represent him at a retrospective of his documentary work at this year’s Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris, and she responded by making a film portrait of her mentor and longtime collaborator. Wexler—in an interview with Yates shot by Travis Wilkerson, another comrade-in-arms—speaks with warmth, lucidity, and absolute certitude about his left-wing political beliefs, his craft, and his aesthetics, which are fundamentally one in the same. Rebel Citizen takes us on a revelatory tour of Wexler’s work, and it includes clips from his early documentary The Bus, shot aboard a bus on its way across the country to the 1963 March on Washington, as well as Medium Cool and Underground, his film about the Weatherman co-directed with Emile de Antonio and Mary Lampson. A Skylight Pictures release. World Premiere
Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
James Crump, USA, 2015, DCP, 72m
The titular troublemakers are the New York–based Land (aka Earth) artists of the 1960s and 70s, who walked away from the reproducible and the commodifiable, migrated to the American Southwest, worked with earth and light and seemingly limitless space, and rethought the question of scale and the relationships between artist, landscape, and viewer. Director James Crump (Black White + Gray) has meticulously constructed Troublemakers from interviews (with Germano Celant, Virginia Dwan, and others), photos and footage of Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Charles Ross at work on their astonishing creations: Heizer’s Double Negative, a 1,500-feet long “line” cut between two canyons on Mormon Mesa in Nevada; Holt’s concrete Sun Tunnels, through each of which the sun appears differently according to the season; De Maria’s The Lightning Field in New Mexico; and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, built on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. A beautiful tribute to a great moment in art.
We Are Alive / On est vivants
Carmen Castillo, France/Belgium, 2015, DCP, 100m
French, Spanish, and Portuguese with English subtitles
What comprises political engagement in 2015? Is it still possible to influence the course of events in this world? These are the questions posed by the great Chilean filmmaker Carmen Castillo (her Calle Santa Fe was a selection of the 2007 NYFF) in this new documentary essay. Castillo, herself a one-time MIR militant expelled from Chile by the Pinochet regime, structures her film in dialogue with the writings of her late friend Daniel Bensaïd, organizer of the Paris student revolts in May ’68 and France’s leading Trotskyite philosopher. In Europe and Latin America, Castillo finds the ones who have resisted, from the masked Zapatistas of Chiapas in Mexico to the Water Warriors of Cochabamba in Bolivia, from the Landless Workers movement in Brazil to the striking workers at the Donges refinery in western France to the homeless squatters of Marseille. A mournful premise lays the groundwork for a radiantly hopeful film.
North American Premiere
The Witness
James Solomon, 2015, USA, DCP, 96m
On March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens, Kitty Genovese was stabbed, raped, robbed, and left to die by a man named Winston Moseley. On March 27, at the urging of Metro editor A.M. Rosenthal, The New York Times published an investigative report asserting that 38 eyewitnesses saw the attack and retreated to their apartments, and the case quickly became a symbol of urban apathy. Genovese’s family lost her twice: once to a murderer and once more to legend, a legend that would be questioned, dismantled, and discredited 40 years later in the very paper that had created it. James Solomon’s quiet, concentrated, and devastating film closely follows the efforts of Genovese’s brother Bill, 16 at the time of Kitty’s death, to track down the people who knew her, loved her, and tried to help her, to arrange a possible meeting with her killer, and to recover the presence of his beloved sister. A Submarine release. World PremiereNew York Film Festival
Since 1963, the New York Film Festival has brought new and important cinematic works from around the world to Lincoln Center. In addition to the Main Slate official selections, the festival includes newly restored classics, special events, filmmaker talks, panel discussions, an Avant-Garde showcase, and much more. The New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring top films from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent.
New York Film Festival started in 1963 and takes place in New York, New York, U.S.
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53rd New York Film Festival Lineup for the Spotlight on Documentary Section Incl. Laura Poitras, Nora Ephron, Ingrid Bergman
The 53rd New York Film Festival taking place September 25 to October 11, 2015, revealed the complete lineup for the Spotlight on Documentary section. The Spotlight on Documentary section will launch on Sunday, September 27, with a program highlighting episodic, short-form nonfiction, which will include a preview of new work by Laura Poitras, who follows up her Oscar-winning CITIZENFOUR (which had its World Premiere at NYFF last year) with the series Asylum, an intimate look at one of the most revolutionary and controversial thinkers of the digital age, unfolding in episodes. A behind-the-scenes drama, Asylum follows Julian Assange as he publishes classified U.S. State Department cables and eventually seeks political asylum inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The evening will include a preview of episodes from the series, as well as the premiere of new, multi-part work from other acclaimed filmmakers, which will be announced at a later date.
This year’s lineup also includes three films centered on iconic figures within the arts: Nora Ephron, Ingrid Bergman, and Jia Zhangke. Everything Is Copy director Jacob Bernstein delivers a vibrant portrait of his mother Nora Ephron, through her own words and the memories of her sisters, colleagues, former spouses, friends, and scenes from her movies. Stig Björkman’s focus in Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words is not on Bergman the star but on Bergman the woman and mother, using excerpts from her letters and diaries (extracts of which are read by Alicia Vikander); memories shared from her children (Pia Lindström and Isabella, Ingrid, and Roberto Rossellini); and clips from Super-8 and 16mm home movies shot by Bergman herself. Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang is the latest film from Brazilian director Walter Salles, who accompanies the director (whose latest, Mountains May Depart, is screening in this year’s NYFF Main Slate) on a visit to his hometown and other locations he has returned to in his vast body of work.
NYFF welcomes back director Frederick Wiseman with his 40th feature documentary, In Jackson Heights, which centers around one of New York City’s liveliest and most culturally diverse neighborhoods caught in the crunch of economic “development,” like so many other neighborhoods in the city and around the country. Joaquim Pinto returns to the festival, following his 2013 film What Now? Remind Me (NYFF51), with Fish Tail, co-directed with his husband Nuno Leonel, set in the Azorean island of Rabo de Peixe, where small-scale fishermen introduce the filmmakers to the rhythms of their labor-intensive routines—artisanal traditions that face extinction in the global economy.
Politics play a role in several of the selections in the lineup. Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson, who premiered a series of immigration films How Democracy Works at NYFF51, return with their final film on the subject, Immigration Battle. The duo have continued to chronicle the struggle for American immigration reform over the past 16 years, crossing the country numerous times to film politicians and activists on both sides of the issue. The North American Premiere of We Are Alive from Chilean filmmaker Carmen Castillo (her Calle Santa Fe was a selection of the 2007 NYFF) is a documentary essay asking the questions: What comprises political engagement in 2015? Is it still possible to influence the course of events in this world? She structures her film in dialogue with the writings of her late friend Daniel Bensaïd, organizer of the Paris student revolts in May ’68 and France’s leading Trotskyite philosopher.
FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
Everything Is Copy
Jacob Bernstein, 2015, USA, DCP, 89m
Jacob Bernstein’s extremely entertaining film is a tribute to his mother Nora Ephron: Hollywood-raised daughter of screenwriters who grew up to be an ace reporter turned piercingly funny essayist turned novelist/screenwriter/playwright/director. Ephron comes vibrantly alive onscreen via her words; the memories of her sisters, colleagues, former spouses, and many friends; scenes from her movies; and, above all, her own inimitable presence. Watch any given moment of Ephron being her sparkling but caustically witty self (for instance, this response to a scolding talk show host—“You have a soft spot for Julie Nixon, don’t you. See, I don’t…”) and you find it hard to believe that she’s been gone from our midst for three years. Everything Is Copy (Ephron’s motto, inherited from her mother) is a lovingly drawn but frank portrait and, incidentally, a vivid snapshot of an earlier, livelier, bitchier, and funnier moment in New York culture. An HBO Documentary Films release. World Premiere
Field of Vision: New Episodic Nonfiction
Laura Poitras, USA/Germany, 2015, HDCAM
A selection of short-form episodic works, including installments of Asylum, in which Laura Poitras (whose CITIZENFOUR had its world premiere at last year’s NYFF) shadows WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as he publishes classified diplomatic cables and seeks asylum in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. World Premiere
Fish Tail / Rabo de Peixe (pictured above)
Joaquim Pinto & Nuno Leonel, Portugal, 2015, DCP, 103m
Portuguese with English subtitles
In his 2013 masterpiece What Now? Remind Me (NYFF51), Joaquim Pinto turned a first-person diary about chronic illness into an all-encompassing meditation on what it means to be alive. His latest film, co-directed with his husband Nuno Leonel, pulls off a similar balancing act between intimacy and expansiveness. The setting is the Azorean island of Rabo de Peixe, where small-scale fishermen introduce the filmmakers to the rhythms of their labor-intensive routines, artisanal traditions that face extinction in the global economy. Initially broadcast on Portuguese television in an abbreviated version, this new director’s cut is a tender portrait of a community that, through Pinto’s associative narration, frequently extends into more personal and philosophical realms, contemplating such topics as the value of manual work and the meaning of freedom. Fish Tail is as lovely as it is quietly profound, a film that at once acknowledges and transcends cinema’s long romance with maritime ethnography. North American Premiere
Homeland (Iraq Year Zero)
Part 1: Before the Fall
Part 2: After the Battle
Abbas Fahdel, Iraq/France, 2015, DCP, 160m/174m
Arabic with English subtitles
In February 2002—about a year before the U.S. invasion in 2003—Iraqi filmmaker Abbas Fahdel traveled home from France to capture everyday life as his country prepared for war. He zeroed in on family and friends as they went about their business, with much of the action seen through the eyes of the director’s 12-year-old nephew, Haider. When Fahdel returned in 2003, two weeks after the invasion, daily activities like going to school or shopping at the market had become nearly impossible; many areas of Baghdad had been closed off to ordinary citizens, yet everyone pressed on. The young Haider represents, in various ways, the voice of his people: “They are occupiers and we can’t oppose them. Our country has become like Palestine,” he tells a neighbor. Fahdel’s epic yet intimate film paints a compelling portrait of people simply trying to exist in the midst of constant turmoil, and describes the fine line between life and death that civilians in a war zone must walk from day to day. North American Premiere
Immigration Battle
Michael Camerini & Shari Robertson, USA, 2015, DCP, 111m
Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson have been chronicling the protracted struggle for American immigration reform over the past 16 years, crossing the country numerous times to film politicians and activists on both sides of this great and divisive issue. They gained unprecedented fly-on-the-wall access to the key players in Washington as they rode the momentum toward the passage of a bipartisan bill, only to see it shot down, which meant that they had to begin pushing the boulder back up the hill all over again. Two years ago, NYFF51 screened Camerini and Robertson’s series of immigration films, How Democracy Works, and now we present Immigration Battle, their final film on the subject. The key player this time is Democrat Luis Gutiérrez, the charismatic U.S. Representative for the 4th congressional district of Illinois, who negotiates his way through this political minefield—past an obstructionist majority playing to an anti-immigrant base and a President who has just been dubbed the “Deporter-in-Chief” by the pro-reform community—while keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the prize. World Premiere
Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
Stig Björkman, Sweden, 2015, DCP, 114m
Swedish with English subtitles
This is a lovingly crafted film about one of the cinema’s most luminous and enchanting presences, composed from her letters and diaries (extracts of which are read by Alicia Vikander), the memories of her children (Pia Lindström and Isabella, Ingrid, and Roberto Rossellini), and a few close friends and colleagues (including Liv Ullmann and Sigourney Weaver), photographs, and moments from thousands of feet of Super-8 and 16mm footage shot by Bergman herself throughout the years. Stig Björkman’s focus is not on Bergman the star but on Bergman the woman and mother: orphaned at 13, drawn to acting on the stage and then on film, sailing for Hollywood at 24 and then leaving it all behind for a new and different life with Roberto Rossellini. Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words is, finally, a self-portrait of a truly independent woman. A Rialto Pictures release.
In Jackson Heights
Frederick Wiseman, USA, 2015, DCP, 190m
Fred Wiseman’s 40th feature documentary is about Jackson Heights, Queens, one of New York City’s liveliest and most culturally diverse neighborhoods, a thriving and endlessly changing crossroad of styles, cuisines, and languages, and now—like vast portions of our city—caught in the gears of economic “development.” Wiseman’s mastery is as total as it is transparent: his film moves without apparent effort from an LGBT support meeting to a musical street performance to a gathering of Holocaust survivors to a hilarious training class for aspiring taxi drivers to an ace eyebrow-removal specialist at work to the annual Gay Pride parade to a meeting of local businessmen in a beauty parlor to discuss the oncoming economic threat to open-air merchants selling their wares to a meeting of undocumented individuals facing deportation. Wiseman catches the textures of New York life in 2015, the music of our speech, and a vast, emotionally complex, dynamic tapestry is woven before our eyes. A Zipporah Films release.
Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang
Walter Salles, Brazil/France, 2014, DCP, 99m
Mandarin with English subtitles
Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles accompanies the prolific Chinese director Jia Zhangke (whose latest, Mountains May Depart, is screening in this year’s Main Slate) on a walk down memory lane, as he revisits his hometown and other locations used in creating his vast body of work. At each location, they visit Jia’s family, friends, and former colleagues, and their conversations range from his mother’s tales of him as a young boy to amusing remembrances of school days and film shoots to memories of his father and the fact that if not for pirated DVDs, much of Jia’s work would go unseen in China. All the roads traveled are part of one journey—the destination of which is Jia’s relationship to his past and to his country. And the confluence of storytelling, intellect, and politics informing all of Jia’s work is brought to light in this lovely, intimate portrait of the artist on his way to the future. North American Premiere
Rebel Citizen
Pamela Yates, USA, 2015, DCP, 75m
Pamela Yates’s new film grew out of her friendship with master cinematographer and fellow activist Haskell Wexler, who’s still going strong at 93. Wexler asked Yates to represent him at a retrospective of his documentary work at this year’s Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris, and she responded by making a film portrait of her mentor and longtime collaborator. Wexler—in an interview with Yates shot by Travis Wilkerson, another comrade-in-arms—speaks with warmth, lucidity, and absolute certitude about his left-wing political beliefs, his craft, and his aesthetics, which are fundamentally one in the same. Rebel Citizen takes us on a revelatory tour of Wexler’s work, and it includes clips from his early documentary The Bus, shot aboard a bus on its way across the country to the 1963 March on Washington, as well as Medium Cool and Underground, his film about the Weatherman co-directed with Emile de Antonio and Mary Lampson. A Skylight Pictures release. World Premiere
Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
James Crump, USA, 2015, DCP, 72m
The titular troublemakers are the New York–based Land (aka Earth) artists of the 1960s and 70s, who walked away from the reproducible and the commodifiable, migrated to the American Southwest, worked with earth and light and seemingly limitless space, and rethought the question of scale and the relationships between artist, landscape, and viewer. Director James Crump (Black White + Gray) has meticulously constructed Troublemakers from interviews (with Germano Celant, Virginia Dwan, and others), photos and footage of Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Charles Ross at work on their astonishing creations: Heizer’s Double Negative, a 1,500-feet long “line” cut between two canyons on Mormon Mesa in Nevada; Holt’s concrete Sun Tunnels, through each of which the sun appears differently according to the season; De Maria’s The Lightning Field in New Mexico; and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, built on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. A beautiful tribute to a great moment in art.
We Are Alive / On est vivants
Carmen Castillo, France/Belgium, 2015, DCP, 100m
French, Spanish, and Portuguese with English subtitles
What comprises political engagement in 2015? Is it still possible to influence the course of events in this world? These are the questions posed by the great Chilean filmmaker Carmen Castillo (her Calle Santa Fe was a selection of the 2007 NYFF) in this new documentary essay. Castillo, herself a one-time MIR militant expelled from Chile by the Pinochet regime, structures her film in dialogue with the writings of her late friend Daniel Bensaïd, organizer of the Paris student revolts in May ’68 and France’s leading Trotskyite philosopher. In Europe and Latin America, Castillo finds the ones who have resisted, from the masked Zapatistas of Chiapas in Mexico to the Water Warriors of Cochabamba in Bolivia, from the Landless Workers movement in Brazil to the striking workers at the Donges refinery in western France to the homeless squatters of Marseille. A mournful premise lays the groundwork for a radiantly hopeful film.
North American Premiere
The Witness
James Solomon, 2015, USA, DCP, 96m
On March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens, Kitty Genovese was stabbed, raped, robbed, and left to die by a man named Winston Moseley. On March 27, at the urging of Metro editor A.M. Rosenthal, The New York Times published an investigative report asserting that 38 eyewitnesses saw the attack and retreated to their apartments, and the case quickly became a symbol of urban apathy. Genovese’s family lost her twice: once to a murderer and once more to legend, a legend that would be questioned, dismantled, and discredited 40 years later in the very paper that had created it. James Solomon’s quiet, concentrated, and devastating film closely follows the efforts of Genovese’s brother Bill, 16 at the time of Kitty’s death, to track down the people who knew her, loved her, and tried to help her, to arrange a possible meeting with her killer, and to recover the presence of his beloved sister. A Submarine release. World Premiere
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53rd New York Film Festival Announces Complete Lineup for PROJECTIONS
The 53rd New York Film Festival, taking place from Friday, October 2 through Sunday, October 4, unveiled the complete lineup of 14 programs for Projections, – an international selection of film and video work that expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be. Drawing on a broad range of innovative modes and techniques, including experimental narratives, avant-garde poetics, crossovers into documentary and ethnographic realms, and contemporary art practices, Projections brings together a diverse offering of short, medium, and feature-length work by some of today’s most vital and groundbreaking filmmakers and artists.
“We think of Projections, now in its second year, as the festival’s ever-shifting zone of discovery, a survey of inventive and unconventional work that updates and challenges our idea of what constitutes experimentation in cinema,” said Dennis Lim, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Director of Programming and one of the curators of Projections. “In the spirit of its venerable predecessor, Views from the Avant-Garde, the program remains committed to the experimental film tradition, but it has been no less important for us to bring new voices and fresh approaches into the mix. This year we have a more varied slate than ever, one that I hope audiences will find invigorating in its breadth, and for its implicit assertion that there are still myriad ways to reimagine the possibilities of cinema and its relationship to the world.“
This year, the NYFF welcomes a new collaboration with the curated video on demand service MUBI, which will be a dedicated sponsor of the Projections section. Several titles from past Projections lineups will be made available on MUBI leading up to the festival, and a selection from the 2015 lineup will be offered after premiering. Details on the films and schedule will be announced at a later date.
Highlights in Projections this year include the U.S. Premiere of two new films from Ben Rivers (A Distant Episode, THE SKY TREMBLES AND THE EARTH IS AFRAID AND THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS (pictured above); Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s return to the festival after Leviathan with the World Premiere of Ah humanity!, co-directed with Ernst Karel; and World Premieres from previous Kazuko Trust Award winners Dani Leventhal (Hard as Opal, co-directed with Jared Buckhiester), Laida Lertxundi (Vivir para Vivir / Live to Live), and Michael Robinson (Mad Ladders). This year’s recipient of the Kazuko Award, which recognizes artistic excellence and innovation and is awarded to an emerging filmmaker in the Projections lineup, will be announced in early October.
Other World Premieres of note include returning regulars to Projections (and formerly Views from the Avant-Garde): Janie Geiser (Cathode Garden), Jim Finn (Chums from Across the Void), Jodie Mack (Something Between Us), Fern Silva (Scales in the Spectrum of Space), Mike Stoltz (Half Human, Half Vapor), and Vincent Grenier (Intersection).
Directors with medium- and feature-length works in this year’s selection include Nicolas Pereda (Minotaur), whose work has shown in New Directors/New Films and Art of the Real previously; FIDMarseille award winner Riccardo Giacconi (Entangled / Entrelazado); and Isiah Medina (88:88), whose film was a selection at the recent Locarno Film Festival and will screen at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival.
Several esteemed contemporary visual artists will also make their first appearance at the NYFF this year, including James Richards (Radio at Night), Basim Magdy (The Everyday Ritual of Solitude Hatching Monkeys), Simon Fujiwara (Hello), Michael Bell-Smith (Rabbit Season, Duck Season), Takeshi Murata (OM Rider), Jon Rafman (Erysichthon), and Cécile B. Evans (Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen).
Discovery and rediscovery will also take center stage throughout the weekend. Among the first-timers at the NYFF are Louis Henderson, who has two films in the festival, including the World Premiere of Black Code/Code Noir; and Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias, with his bold riff on Roberto Bolaño, Santa Teresa & Other Stories. Projections will also showcase restorations of the late Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction and Curt McDowell’s Confessions, both on 16mm and restored by the Academy Film Archive.
Films, Descriptions & Schedule
All screenings will take place at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street
Program #1
Friday, October 2, 2:00pm
Friday, October 2, 9:00pm
TRT: 82m
The entanglement of the psychological and physical worlds, as reflected in architecture, domestic space, and everyday objects.
Neither God nor Santa María
Samuel M. Delgado & Helena Girón, Spain, 2015, DCP, 12m
“Since airplanes did not exist, people moved around using prayers; they went from one land to another and returned early, before dawn. In old audio recordings, the voices of pastors speak of the mythical existence of witches and their travels. In the daily life of a woman, the magic of her tales begin to materialize as night falls. Night is the time when travel is possible.”—Samuel Delgado & Helena Girón U.S. Premiere
Something Horizontal
Blake Williams, USA/Canada, 2015, HDCAM, 10m
“Three-dimensional flashes of Victorian domestic surfaces and geometric shadows transform the physical world into a somber, impressionistic abstraction, while elsewhere a specter emerging from the depths of German Expressionism reminds us that what goes up always comes down.”—Blake Williams U.S. Premiere
Analysis of Emotions and Vexations
Wojciech Bakowski, Poland, 2015, digital projection, 13m
“This movie is a representation of my spirit’s volatile state. I used animation with poetic comment to analyze my emotions and vexations. I used pencil drawings in translucent frames to show a state of lightness. On the drawings you can see the elements taken from imagination and from real external sights. I did so because our mental states are built from what we can see and what we remember or imagine in abstraction.”—Wojciech Bakowski U.S. Premiere
Traces/Legacy
Scott Stark, USA, 2015, 35mm, 9m
“Discarded Christmas trees, colorfully arranged flea-market finds, a museum of animal kills, microscopic views of kitchenware, and other overlooked cultural artifacts are interwoven with flickering journeys through mysterious, shadowy realms. Traces/Legacy uses a device called a film recorder to print a series of still digital images onto 35mm film. The 35mm projector can only show a portion of the image at a time, so the viewer sees alterations between the top and bottom half of each frame. The images also overlap onto the optical sound area of the film, generating their own unique sounds.”—Scott Stark
Entangled / Entrelazado
Riccardo Giacconi, Colombia/Italy, 2014, digital projection, 37m
“In quantum physics, if two particles interact in a certain way and then become separated, regardless of how distant they are from each other they will share a state known as ‘quantum entanglement.’ That is, they will keep sharing information despite their separation. This theory used to upset Einstein. In his theory of relativity, no transmission of information could occur faster than the speed of light, therefore he couldn’t understand how the two particles could be simultaneously connected.”—Riccardo Giacconi North American Premiere
Program #2
Friday, October 2, 4:15pm
Saturday, October 3, 2:00pm
TRT: 78m
The raw and the cooked: from elemental particles and nature vs. culture to doomed transcendental urges and, out of the ashes, renewal in fresh visions of the material world.
Prima Materia
Charlotte Pryce, USA, 2015, 16mm, 3m
“Delicate threads of energy spiral and transform into mysterious microscopic cells of golden dust: these are the luminous particles of the alchemist’s dream. Prima Materia is inspired by the haunting wonderment of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. It is an homage to the first, tentative photographic records that revealed the extraordinary nature of phenomena lurking just beyond the edge of human vision.”—Charlotte Pryce
Intersection
Vincent Grenier, USA, 2015, DCP, 7m
“On the corner of Brooktondale Rd. and Route 79 near Ithaca is an amazing planting of forget-me-nots and dandelions. An improbable dance between different layers of reality, one organic, the other mechanical, and another the numbing everyday. Timeless fragility jousts with fleeting enamels and the upstanding violence.”—Vincent Grenier World Premiere
Port Noir
Laura Kraning, USA, 2014, digital projection, 11m
“Within the machine landscape of Terminal Island, the textural strata of a 100-year-old boat shop provides a glimpse into Los Angeles Harbor’s disappearing past. Often recast as a backdrop for fictional crime dramas, the scenic details of the last boatyard evoke imaginary departures and a hidden world at sea.”—Laura Kraning
Centre of the Cyclone
Heather Trawick, USA/Canada, 2015, 16mm, 18m
“‘In the province of the mind there are no limits. However, in the province of the body there are definite limits not to be transcended’ (John C. Lilly). An invocation for the transcendence between the corporeal and metaphysical, the passage is guided by marooned sailors, a moment of celestial chance, demolition derbies, and a slipping into the ether.”—Heather Trawick World Premiere
Le Pays Dévasté / The Devastated Land
Emmanuel Lefrant, France, 2015, 35mm, 12m
“A look back to the geological age when humans were just starting to learn to control the powers of nature that had dominated them up to that point. Traces—chemical, consumption, and nuclear—of their existence will remain in the planet’s geological code for thousands or even millions of years. Making use of negative images, Le Pays Dévasté presents an ominous picture of Earth’s future.”—Emmanuel Lefrant U.S. Premiere
Cathode Garden
Janie Geiser, USA, 2015, DCP, 8m
“A young woman moves between light and dark, life and death; a latter-day Persephone. The natural world responds accordingly. Neglected negatives, abandoned envelopes, botanical and anatomical illustrations, and found recordings reorder themselves, collapsing and reemerging in her liminal world.”—Janie Geiser World Premiere
Something Between Us
Jodie Mack, USA, 2015, 16mm, 10m
“A choreographed motion study for twinkling trinkets, beaming baubles, and glaring glimmers. A bow ballet ablaze (for bedazzled buoyant bijoux brought up to boil). Choreographed costume jewelry and natural wonders join forces to perform plastic pirouettes, dancing a luminous lament until the tide comes in.”—Jodie Mack World Premiere
brouillard – passage 15
Alexandre Larose, Canada, 2014, 35mm, 10m
“With this project I fabricate sequences by in-camera layering of repeated trajectories inside a path extending from my family’s home into Lac Saint-Charles. The image-capturing process produces a sedimented landscape that gradually unfolds while simultaneously disintegrating under temporal displacement. Approximately 30 long takes begin at the same frame on the film strip, all shot at a high frame rate. My walking rhythm varies for each trajectory, resulting in the space progressively expanding in depth until I reach the edge of a dock. The duration of the long take corresponds to the length of the celluloid reel, a thousand feet of 35mm film.”—Alexandre Larose
Program #3
Friday, October 2, 6:30pm
Saturday, October 3, 4:00pm
TRT: 86m
Disorienting visions, both near and far, of an apocalyptic world reveal the warped landscapes of the Anthropocene.
A Distant Episode
Ben Rivers, UK/Morocco, 2015, 16mm, 18m
“A meditation on the illusion of filmmaking, shot behind the scenes on a film being made on the otherworldly beaches of Sidi Ifni, Morocco. The film depicts strange activities, with no commentary or dialogue; it appears as a fragment of film, dug up in a distant future—a hazy, black-and-white hallucinogenic world.”—Ben Rivers U.S. Premiere
In Girum Imus Nocte
Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Italy, 2015, digital projection, 13m
“I imagine a wooden boat on fire. A fire that illuminates the night and slowly consumes and transforms the fishing boat into coal. A fire that accompanies the traveling distance of the miners and fishermen. Change of a substance from one physical state to another. An entropic event transforming matter and symbols.”—Giorgio Andreotta Calò North American Premiere
Half Human, Half Vapor
Mike Stoltz, USA, 2015, 16mm, 11m
“This project began out of a fascination with a giant sculpture of a dragon attached to a Central Florida mansion. The property had recently been left to rot, held in lien by a bank. Hurricanes washed away the sculpture. I learned about the artist who created this landmark, Lewis Vandercar (1913-1988), who began as a painter. His practice grew along with his notoriety for spell-casting and telepathy. Inspired by Vandercar’s interest in parallel possibility, I combined these images with text from local newspaper articles in a haunted-house film that both engages with and looks beyond the material world.”—Mike Stoltz World Premiere
Occidente
Ana Vaz, France/Portugal, 2014, 16mm/digital projection, 15m
“Filming in Lisbon in search of the origins of our colonial history, I found copies. Brazilians, the new worlders fluent in glitz, entertain the Portuguese in awe and discomfort, colonial norms applied and reapplied. Chinese porcelain seem to signal hybrids to come: the Chinese dressed as Europeans, the Brazilian maid dressed as a 19th-century European servant. Porcelain from the 15th-century becomes reproducible ready-mades that set the tables for the new colonies—a transatlantic calling. Ouro novo reads new money. As a poem without periods, as a breath without breathing, the voyage travels eastward and westward, marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s seat at the table.”—Ana Vaz
YOLO
Ben Russell, USA/South Africa, 2015, DCP, 7m
“Filmed in the remains of Soweto’s historic Sans Souci Cinema (1948-1998), YOLO is a makeshift structuralist mash-up created in collaboration with the Eat My Dust youth collective from the Kliptown district of Soweto, South Africa. Vibrating with mic checks and sine waves, resonating with an array of pre-roll sound—this is cause and effect shattered again and again, temporarily undone. O humanity, You Only Live Once!”—Ben Russell U.S. Premiere
Ah humanity!
Ernst Karel, Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Japan/France/USA, 2015, DCP, 22m
“Ah humanity! reflects on the fragility and folly of humanity in the age of the Anthropocene. Taking the 3/11/11 disaster of Fukushima as its point of departure, it evokes an apocalyptic vision of modernity, and our predilection for historical amnesia and futuristic flights of fancy. Shot on a telephone through a handheld telescope, at once close to and far from its subject, the audio composition combines excerpts from Japanese genbaku film soundtracks, audio recordings from scientific seismic laboratories, and location sound.”—Ernst Karel, Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor World Premiere
Program #4
Saturday, October 3, 1:00pm
Saturday, October 3, 6:00pm
TRT: 74m
When the worlds of fantasy and desire collide in a dissociative dance of bodies in motion, what’s love got to do with it?
Hard as Opal
Jared Buckhiester & Dani Leventhal, USA, 2015, digital projection, 29m
“A soldier’s trip to Syria is complicated when he accidentally impregnates a friend. Meanwhile, a horse breeder from Ohio is driven away from home by her own desire to become pregnant. In Hard as Opal the lines between truth and fiction, fact and fantasy, are reined in and treated not as fixed, divisive markers but as malleable threads of narrative potential. Buckhiester and Leventhal perform alongside other non-actors who are filmed in their own varying domestic and professional environments. The result is a rich accumulation of narratives held together by questions concerning the nature of objectification, loneliness, and dissociative fantasy.”—Brett Price World Premiere
Confessions
Curt McDowell, USA, 1971, 16mm, 11 min
“How much joy and lust and friendship can be crammed into one 11-minute movie? ‘To put it into words is just not that easy to do.’ After a tearful confession, Curt casts one true love as a leading man and lets the images do most of the talking, so what you know about him is felt. The difference between a messy guy in bloom and a perfect lifeless doll. The beauty of women’s faces and men’s cocks in close-up, and dirty bare feet, stepping forward. A live-wire radio built by editing that switches from folk to blues in a heartbeat. Fanfare, a cum shot, and a burst of applause as the director walks away from the camera, into San Francisco daylight. There’s no happier ending in cinema.”
—Johnny Ray Huston, from The Single and the LP
Restored print courtesy of Academy Film Archive. Confessions is the first in a large-scale project at the Academy Film Archive to restore the majority of Curt McDowell’s extant films.
Non-Stop Beautiful Ladies
Alee Peoples, USA, 2015, 16mm, 9m
“I use Super 8 and 16mm film as a vehicle for loose storytelling with history and humor. Simple props and gestures are part of a playful aesthetic. Glimpses into the culture of a place are given while playing with truth and representation. Non-Stop Beautiful Ladies is a Los Angeles street film starring empty signs, radio from passing cars, and human sign spinners, some with a pulse and some without.”—Alee Peoples
Mars Garden
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2014, DCP, 5m
“Mars Garden is episode 5 of my 12-film series Sixty Six, which on its most foundational level, splices Greek mythology with 1960s pop culture. In Mars Garden I employ a light box to excavate the chance superimpositions of the two-sided comic book page in vintage mid-1960s superhero comics.”—Lewis Klahr
The Exquisite Corpus
Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2015, 35mm, 19m
“The Exquisite Corpus is based on several different films, with reference to the surrealist ‘exquisite corpse’ technique. It combines rushes from commercials, an American erotic thriller from the 1980s, a British comedy from the 1960s, a Danish and a French porn film (both most likely from the 1970s), an Italian softcore sex movie from 1979, and a (British?) amateur “nudist film.” In addition to the found footage, many indexical signs and images are imprinted upon the film. By focusing on these erotic fragments The Exquisite Corpus brings the body of film itself to the forefront and finds its central theme.”—Peter Tscherkassky U.S. Premiere
Program #5
Saturday, October 3, 3:30pm
TRT: 64m
Soft Fiction
Chick Strand, USA, 1979, 16mm, 54m
“Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction is a personal documentary that brilliantly portrays the survival power of female sensuality. It combines the documentary approach with a sensuous lyrical expressionism. Strand focuses her camera on people talking about their own experience, capturing subtle nuances in facial expressions and gestures that are rarely seen in cinema. The film’s title works on several levels. It evokes the soft line between truth and fiction that characterizes Strand’s own approach to documentary, and suggests the idea of softcore fiction, which is appropriate to the film’s erotic content and style. It’s rare to find an erotic film with a female perspective dominating both the narrative discourse and the visual and audio rhythms with which the film is structured. Strand continues to celebrate in her brilliant, innovative personal documentaries her theme, the reaffirmation of the tough resilience of the human spirit.”
—Marsha Kinder, Film Quarterly
Restored by the Academy Film Archive. Restoration funding provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation.
Lost Note
Saul Levine, USA, 1969/2015, 16mm, 10m
“Scenes drawn from the home and life of Isa Milman (the woman I was then married to) and me, made together with our dog Jesse, our friends Bruce Blaney and Patti Tanaka, their children Sean and Jason, and many others. I began this as a love poem to Isa, but before I finished the film everything had changed. For many of us, 1968/69 was a period of violent transition. The film was formally challenging, editing footage with in-camera superimpositions and cutting black and white with color.”—Saul Levine
Program #6
Saturday, October 3, 5:30pm
TRT: 63m
Minotaur
Nicolas Pereda, Mexico/Canada, 2015, DCP, 53m
“Minotaur takes place in a home of books, of readers, of artists. It’s also a home of soft light, of eternal afternoons, of sleepiness, of dreams. The home is impermeable to the world. Mexico is on fire, but the characters of Minotaur sleep soundly.”—Nicolas Pereda U.S. Premiere
Vivir para Vivir / Live to Live
Laida Lertxundi, USA/Spain, 2015, 16mm, 10m
“The body, a space of production, creates structures for a film.”—Laida Lertxundi
World Premiere
Program #7
Saturday, October 3, 7:15pm
Sunday, October 4, 5:00pm
TRT: 69m
Modern conflicts of labor and race, traced from their complex origins to the chaotic present.
Hello
Simon Fujiwara, Germany, 2015, digital projection, 10m
“Hello explores changes in the working lives of two people: Maria, a Mexican trash picker who separates and collects recyclable materials from landfills to sell by the kilo, and Max, a German freelance computer-animation designer working for the advertising industry in Berlin. The double interview is controlled and manipulated by a computer-generated severed hand that Maria describes as an object once discovered in the trash while working in the violent northern town of Mexicali. This CGI hand was in turn produced by Max who was born with no arms and sought refuge in computer imaging as a means to operate and manipulate a digital reality.”—Simon Fujiwara U.S. Premiere
F for Fibonacci
Beatrice Gibson, UK, 2014, DCP, 16m
“F for Fibonacci takes as its departure point William Gaddis’s epic 1975 modernist novel JR. Unfolding through the modular machine aesthetics of the video game Minecraft, text-book geometries, graphic scores, images from physics experiments, and cartoon dreams blend with images from Wall Street: stock-market crashes, trading pits, algorithms, and transparent glass. As well as the writing of Gaddis, the film draws on the work of little-known British experimental educator and composer John Paynter. Gibson worked closely with 11-year-old Clay Barnard Chodzko on a number of the film’s production elements, commissioning him to design an office in Minecraft and develop an existing character of his, Mr. Money. Gibson and Chodzko’s ramblings on the subject of his protagonist lead the viewer through F for Fibonacci’s hallucinatory soup.”—Beatrice Gibson
Black Code/Code Noir
Louis Henderson, France, 2015, DCP, 21m
“Black Code/Code Noir unites temporally and geographically disparate elements into a critical reflection on two recent events: the murders of Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell by police officers in the U.S. in 2014. Archaeologically, the film argues that behind this present situation is a sedimented history of slavery, preserved by the Black Code laws of the colonies in the Americas. These codes have transformed into the algorithms that configure police Big Data and the necropolitical control of African Americans today. Yet how can we read in this present? How can we unwrite the sorcery of this code as a hack? Through a historical détournement the film suggests the Haitian Revolution as the first instance of the Black Code’s hacking and as a past symbol for a future hope.”—Louis Henderson World Premiere
Lessons of War
Peggy Ahwesh, USA, 2014, digital projection, 6m
“Five little narratives—newsworthy stories from the 2014 war on Gaza—retold in order to not forget the details, to reenact the trauma and to honor the dead. The footage is lifted from a YouTube channel that renders the news in animation, fantastic and imaginative, providing several protective layers away from reality. The footage is repurposed here to critique that safe distance from the violence, foregrounding the antiseptic nature of the virtual narrative. Video courtesy of Microscope Gallery.”—Peggy Ahwesh
Scales in the Spectrum of Space
Fern Silva, USA, 2015, DCP, 7m
“Commissioned by the Chicago Film Archive and in collaboration with legendary jazz musician Phil Cohran, Scales in the Spectrum of Space explores the documented histories of urban life and architecture in Chicago. Culled from 70 hours of footage and incorporating 35 different films, Scales in the Spectrum of Space weighs in on the pulse of the Midwest metropolis.”—Fern Silva World Premiere
Many Thousands Gone
Ephraim Asili, USA/Brazil, 2015, digital projection, 9m
“Filmed on location in Salvador, Brazil (the last city in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery) and Harlem, New York (an international stronghold of the African Diaspora), Many Thousands Gone draws parallels between a summer afternoon on the streets of the two cities. A silent version of the film was given to jazz multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee to create an interpretive score. The final film is the combination of the images and McPhee’s real-time “sight reading” of the score.”
—Ephraim Asili
Program #8
Sunday, October 4, 1:00pm
TRT: 65m
88:88
Isiah Medina, Canada, 2014/15, DCP, 65m
“You cannot pay your bill. – . Your heat and lights are cut off. -. You pay. The clocks initially flash 88:88, –:–. You set the clocks. You cannot pay. -. You pay. 88:88. –:–. Repeat. 88:88, –:–. Cut. -. You stop setting your clock to the time of the world. 88:88, –:– . Subtracted: – : you make do with suspension. 88:88, –:–, -.”—Isiah Medina U.S. Premiere
Program #9
Sunday, October 4, 3:30pm
Sunday, October 4, 7:00pm
TRT: 76m
Life in the Cloud: What are the material and emotional consequences of a digital world that has altered our bodily existence?
Radio at Night
James Richards, Germany/UK, 2015, digital projection, 8m
“Responding to Derek Jarman’s visual strategies and montage techniques, Radio at Night carves out a sensual and sonic space of representation. The video is an assemblage of distorting and looping audiovisual material, including industrial documentation, medical imaging, news broadcasts, and a specially composed soundtrack sung in C minor.”—James Richards
All That Is Solid
Louis Henderson, France/UK/Ghana, 2014, DCP, 15m
“As technological progress pushes forward, piles of obsolete computers are discarded and recycled. Sent to the coast of West Africa, these computers are thrown into wastegrounds such as Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana. The e-waste is recovered and burned to extract the precious metals contained within. Eventually the metals are melted and reformed into new objects to be sold—it is a strange system of recycling, a kind of reverse neocolonial mining, whereby the African is searching for mineral resources in the materials of Europe. Through showing these laborious processes, the video challenges the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology, revealing the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins.”—Louis Henderson
Mad Ladders
Michael Robinson, USA, 2015, digital projection, 9m
“A modern prophet’s visions of mythical destruction and transformation are recounted across a turbulent geometric ceremony of rising curtains, swirling setpieces, and unveiled idols from music television’s past. Together, these parallel cults of revelation unlock a pathway to the far side of the sun.”—Michael Robinson World Premiere
Erysichthon
Jon Rafman, Canada, 2015, digital projection, 8m
“Erysichthon is the third and final film in a Dante-esque adventure across the far-flung corners of the Web. Plunging into the depths of Internet obsessions and transgressions, the videos assemble an unsettling parade of images from the mundane to the erotic to the violent, presenting the full breadth and depth of human desires as mediated by the flow of data.”—Jon Rafman World Premiere
Slow Zoom Long Pause
Sara Magenheimer, USA, 2015, digital projection, 13m
“Q: How do we know it’s real? A: It feels real
Q: What if fake feels real? A: Then it’s real
Q: What color is the sound of your name? A: Peach
Q: What comes next? A: A
Q: Can you think of a thing that itself is a symbol, too? A: A
Q: Do you know anyone whose name is just one letter? A: I
Q: If your first name was only one letter, which letter would it be? A: I”
—Sara Magenheimer
World Premiere
Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen
Cécile B. Evans, UK, 2014, digital projection, 22m
“Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen is narrated by the failed CGI rendering of a recently deceased actor (PHIL). In an intensification of so-called hyperlink cinema, the lives of a group of digital agents—render ghosts, spambots, holograms—unfold across various settings, genres, and modes of representation. Multiple storylines build, converge, and collapse around overarching ideas of existence without anatomy: the ways in which we live and work within the machine. Throughout, questions are raised about what it means to be materially conscious today and the rights of the personal data we release.”
—Cécile B. Evans
Program #10
Sunday, October 4, 6:00pm
TRT: 84m
Santa Teresa & Other Stories
Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias, Dominican Republic/Mexico/USA, 2015, DCP, 65m
“This film arises from the urgent need to talk about violence from another position, conscious of the over-used statement ‘Third World society places violence at the center of its meaning.’ Accordingly, let’s forget the modes of representation that my cinema has used and consider that where an idea manages to take control and become hegemonic, an anarchic rebellion of multiple narratives, colors, and formats emerges in a drive toward permanent revolution. The Caribbean reinvented European tongues; my montage is inspired by that far-from-standard orality, mutating constantly into different modes of representation as it stalks its freedom.”—Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias U.S. Premiere
Bunte Kuh
Ryan Ferko, Faraz Anoushahpour & Parastoo Anoushahpour, Canada, 2015, DCP, 6m
“Through a flood of images and impressions, a narrator attempts to recall a family holiday. Produced in Berlin and Toronto, Bunte Kuh combines a found postcard, a family photo album, and original footage to weave together the temporal realities of two separate vacations.”—Ryan Ferko, Faraz Anoushahpour & Parastoo Anoushahpour
The Everyday Ritual of Solitude Hatching Monkeys
Basim Magdy, Egypt, 2014, digital projection, 13m
“Layered and manually altered 16mm footage intertwines with the soundtrack and the narrative, presented through subtitles, to tell the story of a man who moves away from the sea to escape death by water. He soon finds himself alone when his co-workers go to the beach and never return. Society becomes a stranger and his imagination becomes his only friend. He dials a random number and a romantic conversation about loneliness and the absurdity of reality ensues. His world starts acquiring meaning as he realizes part-time-singer monkeys are running the show.”—Basim Magdy World Premiere
Program #11
Sunday, October 4, 8:30pm
Sunday, October 4, 9:00pm
TRT: 98m
THE SKY TREMBLES AND THE EARTH IS AFRAID AND THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS
Ben Rivers, UK/Morocco, 2015, 35mm, 98m
A labyrinthine and epic film that moves between documentary, fantasy, and fable, shot against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the Moroccan Sahara, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets. Rivers’s work contains multiple narratives, the major strand being an adaptation of “A Distant Episode,” the savage short story by Paul Bowles. The film also features the enigmatic young film director Oliver Laxe, whose on-screen presence becomes interwoven with the multiple narratives that co-exist amid the various settings of Rivers’s cinematic exploration. U.S. Premiere
AMPHITHEATER
Program A
Friday, October 2, 12:00-6:00pm, 9:00-11:00pm, Q&A 9:00pm
TRT: 38m (on loop)
Chums from Across the Void
Jim Finn, USA, 2015, DCP, 18m
“Little Radek, the step-dancing Bolshevik; Machera, the Andean Robin Hood; and Maria Spiridonova, the Russian socialist assassin are your guides for Past Leftist Life Regression therapy. In this third Inner Trotsky Child video, narrator Lois Severin—a former Trotskyite turned suburban housewife—attempts to radicalize the personal fulfillment and self-help scene. Like the Christian fundamentalist activists in the 1970s who prepared the way for the Reagan Revolution, the Inner Trotsky Child movement was a way to cope with life in the Prime Material Plane of Corporate Capitalism and to create a 21st-century revolution of the mind.”—Jim Finn World Premiere
The Two Sights
Katherin McInnis, USA, 2015, DCP, 4m
“Between 1015 and 1021 C.E., the great Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) wrote The Book of Optics (while feigning madness and under house arrest). The Book of Optics debunks theories that the eyes emit rays, or that objects project replicas of themselves, and accurately describes the strengths and weaknesses of human vision. Translations of this work reached the West in the 13th century and influenced Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, and Descartes. The Two Sights is a false translation of this work, using images from the LIFE magazine photo archive.”—Katherin McInnis World Premiere
A Disaster Forever
Michael Gitlin, USA, 2015, digital projection, 16m
“Derived from a 25-year-old cassette tape, transcribed and reenacted on a recording stage, A Disaster Forever positions us on the unfamiliar terrain of an idiosyncratic cosmology. Turning between prismatic abstractions and hand-painted entanglements, a world-system is suspended in the play of light by a voice that floats loose in a cinema for the ear.”—Michael Gitlin World Premiere
Program B
Saturday, October 3, 12:00-6:00pm, 9:00-11:00pm, Q&A 5:00pm
TRT: 34m (on loop)
Terrestrial
Calum Michel Walter, USA, 2015, digital projection, 11m
“The observations of an object in motion: A mobile device captures the trajectories of objects liberated from and bound to earth, against a backdrop of uniquely human dissonance. Terrestrial is in part an attempt to articulate a desire to transcend bodily limits with things like mobile devices and machines etc. while acknowledging an unavoidable level of dysfunction.The film was inspired by an incident in 2014 where a Blue Line train in Chicago failed to stop at its final destination, the O’Hare airport, and eventually came to a stop halfway up the escalator at the airport’s entrance. Terrestrial reimagines this crash as an earthbound machine’s failed takeoff.”—Calum Michel Walter U.S. Premiere
Noite Sem Distância
Lois Patiño, Portugal/Spain, 2015, DCP, 23m
“An instant in the memory of landscape: the smuggling that for centuries crossed the line between Portugal and Galicia. The Gerês Mountains knows no borders, and rocks cross from one country to another with insolence. Smugglers also disobey this separation. The rocks, the river, the trees: silent witnesses that help them to hide. They just have to wait for the night to cross the distance that separates them.”—Lois Patiño North American Premiere
Program C
Sunday, October 4, 12:00-6:00pm, 9:00-11:00pm, Q&A 3:00pm
TRT: 37m (on loop)
Rabbit Season, Duck Season
Michael Bell-Smith, USA, 2014, digital projection, 5m
“In Rabbit Season, Duck Season, a scene from the 1951 Warner Bros. cartoon “Rabbit Fire” is retold as an allegory for the present day. The cartoon’s iconic encounter between the hunter, the rabbit, and the duck frames a web of tightly constructed sequences that move across various forms of video, including traditional animation, live action, and 3-D animation. A loose essay film, the video adopts a variety of tones and genres to touch upon themes of resistance, taste, the construction of meaning, and the exhaustion of choice.”—Michael Bell-Smith
All My Love All My Love
Hannah Black, UK, 2013-15, digital projection, 7m
“In a famous experiment intended to mechanize the procedures of parenting and love, baby monkeys were given ‘wire mothers.’ The experiment failed, just like real mothers sometimes fail. It continues to be cheaper for the complex procedures of care to be performed by women, often impoverished women of color. But the vanguard of tech keeps producing new technologies of love: the Gchat that fills the empty space of a solitary day, for example, or the dancing robot in the video. The ambivalent need for contact remains, as a wound or a breach, threaded through all our relations. The living mother is also a technology, i.e., a social form, and one day she too might be rendered obsolete.”—Hannah Black North American Premiere
Velvet Peel 1
Victoria Fu, 2015, USA, digital projection, 13m
“Velvet Peel 1 depicts performing bodies in cinematic space interacting with flat layers of digital effects. Featuring performers Polina Akhmetzyanova and Matilda Lidberg, their movements are based on physical enactments of touchscreen interfaces. The figures are composited in a variety of settings—scenes from previous exhibition venues and contexts where the work was installed, the artist’s studio during production, appropriated footage from the Internet, desktop screensavers, and abstracted 16mm color film. Layered together to create a “viable” or “habitable” cinematic space, the scenes are simultaneously deconstructed by making the layers of post-production visible, and the flatness of surfaces called to the fore.
OM Rider
Takeshi Murata, USA, 2014, digital projection, 12m
“In a vast desert bathed in neon hues, a misfit werewolf blasts syncopated techno rhythms into the night. Meanwhile, an old man sits at a large, round table in a void-like space, rigidly sipping coffee and rolling snake-eyed dice as the faint sound of the werewolf’s pulsating, phantasmic synth grows louder. Hopping onto his motorcycle, the werewolf tears full speed ahead over forbidding terrain while his hoary counterpart becomes increasingly anxious…”—Takeshi Murata
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53rd New York Film Festival Convergence Completes Lineup, Incl. THE DOG HOUSE Virtual-Reality Dinner Party
The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the complete details for the 53rd New York Film Festival Convergence, which will take place on September 26 and 27. The highly anticipated annual program delves into the world of immersive storytelling with a mix of unique films, panels, and live interactive experiences.
“This is our fourth year as part of the New York Film Festival and I couldn’t be more excited about the lineup for 2015. There’s a lot of attention focused on virtual reality right now so we are really pleased to feature the U.S. premiere of The Dog House, a 360-degree film that’s going to start a lot of conversations. The program isn’t restricted to virtual worlds either, with several incredible live experiences like Temping, an immersive theater piece designed for one audience member at a time,” said NYFF Convergence programmer Matt Bolish. “The hope as always is to give our audience a chance to experience a wide variety of participatory storytelling projects.”
Audiences can explore a multitude of non-traditional film experiences, such as playing a selection of indie storytelling games in the GameScape arcade, assuming the role of master detective Sherlock Holmes to help to solve a string of crimes around the Lincoln Center campus in Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things, or attending a performance of filmmaker/writer/singer Cory McAbee’s Small Star Seminar, an anti-motivational event featuring optimistic songs about quitting, accepting our limitations, and the power of sitting quietly. Immersive theater piece Temping, which will be showcased only a few times, will take lucky sole audience members on a strange and comedic journey.
Complementing the experiential programs is a series of talks and panels—all free and open to the public—featuring notable storytellers of all stripes (from Lucasfilm, StoryCode, Storyline Entertainment, Pixar, NPR, and more) discussing their work and the evolving state of storytelling in the interactive age. The presentations will also include the World Premiere of the interactive presentation of The Deeper They Bury Me, which plunges audiences into the world of Herman Wallace, who was held in solitary for over 40 years at Louisiana’s notorious Angola penitentiary.
NYFF53 CONVERGENCE EVENTS AND DESCRIPTIONS
Experiences and Installations
The (Dis)Honesty Project Presents The Truth Box
Created by Dan Ariely & Yael Melamede
Step inside and tell us the truth… about a lie. The Truth Box is a traveling story booth and part of the larger (Dis)Honesty Project, a collaboration between behavioral scientist Dan Ariely and filmmaker Yael Melamede that aims to improve our behavior and ethics. The Truth Box explores the complex impact dishonesty has on our lives, asking participants to sit inside and come clean, on camera, about a lie they have told. Excerpts of stories recorded will be shared on http://thedishonestyproject.com and through social media.
The Doghouse
Created by Johan Knattrup Jensen, Mads Damsbo & Dark Matters (pictured in main image)
Few technologies have elicited as much debate as virtual reality. How will this powerful technology change the way we make and consume films? Audiences can get a taste of a possible future with The Doghouse. A table is set for five, and on each plate rests a virtual-reality headset. Slipping them on plunges the viewer into a fully immersive experience—one of five unique points of view within the same film. Mom and Dad are meeting the older brother’s new girlfriend for the first time while the younger brother just tries to avoid an inevitable disaster. This unique 360-degree cinema experience places its audience right in the middle of a home-cooked family drama and challenges our notions of what short films are… and what they may be in the very near future. U.S. Premiere
Gamescape
Human beings are hardwired to tell stories. We spin tales about everything in our lives from the mundane to the extraordinary. Some of the most compelling stories being told today are coming from game designers blending sharp narrative and gameplay in new and exciting ways. This selection of gripping, engaging, and even revolutionary independent storytelling games was co-curated by the NYU Game Center and is free and open to the public. Presented with Support from the NYU Game Center.
Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things
Created by Lance Weiler & Nick Fortugno
Step into the shoes of Sherlock Holmes for this collaborative storytelling experiment in which participants attempt to solve a string of crimes unfolding throughout Lincoln Center. Do you have what it takes to become a 21st-century Sherlock Holmes? A prototype developed and run by the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab, Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things is part of a massive connected crime scene taking place in over 20 countries this fall. For more information, visit sherlockholmes.io. Presented in partnership with the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab.
Temping
Created by Wolf 359; Directed by Michael Rau
Somewhere in a filing cabinet in Delaware or Indiana, there is a chart that breaks down how long we’re expected to live. Most of us will never see it… nor would we want to. But what if your job was to update these charts, to record the beginnings and ends of thousands of lives? What if you found the formula to predict your own lifespan? Sarah Jane Tully, a 50-year-old actuary, is taking her first vacation in years, and you’ve been hired to take her place. Temping, the strange and comic tale of an employee’s inner life written by Michael Yates Crowley, is performed for an audience of one by a Windows PC, a corporate phone, a laser printer, and the Microsoft Office Suite. Filling in at Sarah Jane’s cubicle, you’ll update client records, send e-mails, and eavesdrop on intra-office romance. Each performance is unique, depending on which tasks you accomplish and which of your co-workers you decide to trust. Congratulations, you’re the new temp! Get ready to work.
Panels and Presentations
Brand Meets Story: How Filmmakers and Brands Are Reinventing Digital Content (Panel)
Moderated by Bob Garfield
The digital-video era has opened up vast opportunities for audiences to enjoy powerful short-form content. Some brands have responded by recruiting professional filmmakers to work in the story-focused new arena of “content marketing.” Bob Garfield, Host of NPR’s “On The Media,” will moderate a discussion with Marjorie Schussel, Corporate Marketing Director for Toyota, along with Academy Award–nominated filmmakers Steve James (Hoop Dreams) and Kief Davidson (Open Heart) and Oscar winner Ross Kauffman (Born into Brothels). They will discuss the partnership and process they established to develop a form of marketing that marries the freedom of creativity with meaningful brand communication goals in order to tell “stories that matter.” Includes World Premiere screenings of three compelling new short films, and a cocktail reception to follow.
A Conversation with Diana Williams (Talk)
Featuring Diana Williams (Lucasfilm, Roller Coaster Entertainment)
The camera opens on a field of stars before revealing a pair of spaceships locked in a deadly chase. Inside the pursued ship, a pair of iconic droids scuttle between rebel crewmen. “We’re doomed,” says C-3PO. “They’ll be no escape for the princess this time!” That exchange stuck with a young Diana Williams—what else had Princess Leia been up to?—and it set her on a course to become a storyteller in her own right. Williams has produced the acclaimed films Our Song and Another First Step; developed The Gatecrashers, a cross-platform storyworld, and Chinafornia, an animated Web series; and collaborated on motion comics for Torchwood, among others. In 2014, she joined the Lucasfilm Story Group, the team charged with developing narrative cohesion and connectivity within the Star Wars universe. Williams will take the stage to discuss her career and personal evolution as a storyteller, from feature filmmaker to cross-platform storyworld builder.
The Deeper They Bury Me (Interactive Presentation)
Written and directed by Angad Singh Bhalla & Ted Biggs; Produced by Anita Lee for the National Film Board of Canada, Storyline Entertainment
An interactive encounter with one of America’s most renowned political prisoners, The Deeper They Bury Me plunges users into the universe of Black Panther activist Herman Wallace, who was held in solitary for over 40 years at Louisiana’s notorious Angola penitentiary. Within the time allotted for a prison phone call—20 precious minutes—users navigate between his tiny cell and his dream of freedom, a fantasy home he envisions through a collaborative art project with artist Jackie Sumell. Sparse, poetic animation evokes his segregated New Orleans childhood and his courageous efforts to build community within a prison system that keeps over 2.3 million citizens behind bars. Join the creators of this compelling portrait of defiance for an immersive live presentation of the interactive experience and a panel discussion featuring leading activists and thinkers. World Premiere.
Immersive Storytelling Goes Global: A Live StoryCode Dispatch (Panel)
Moderated by Mike Knowlton (Co-founder, StoryCode)
StoryCode’s growth into six continents over the past three years has been fueled by an international appetite for new storytelling methods, tools, and experiments. Though still in its infancy, this worldwide phenomenon takes on myriad forms in each region it conquers. StoryCode chapter organizers will share happenings and breakthroughs around the country and the world, and discuss where we are headed in terms of emerging genres, cross-pollination of disciplines, technology, and artistic achievement. Panelists include Kel O’Neill (StoryCode LA), Diliana Alexander (StoryCode Miami), Michael Epstein (StoryCode San Francisco), and Kelli Anderson (StoryCode Washington DC).
The Making of a Connected Crime Scene (Talk)
Presented by Lance Weiler & Nick Fortugno
Join Lance Weiler and Nick Fortugno for a special collaborative think-and-do session. Over the course of 90 minutes, attendees will see and experience the inner workings of what it takes to build a massive collaborative effort like Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things. The presentation will pull back the curtain on a yearlong experiment with 1,000 collaborators working in 20-plus countries. Learn methods and solutions that can help you design and build immersive, engaging storytelling projects.
Producing for Impact: Finding the Story (Panel)
Moderated by Colin Fitzpatrick (Guardian Labs, WNET, Al Jazeera America)
As nonfiction crosses platforms, producers have more options than ever to reach, inspire, and activate audiences. The way a production is presented allows producers to realize specific audience end goals previously unobtainable without immense budgets. Tactics using comprehensive data visualization, compelling personal narratives, and sourcing from social media allow journalism and documentary producers today to appeal to emotion as well as the facts when creating issue-driven stories. Producers on this panel will discuss their own projects—from documentary film and interactive docs to social programs and digital newsrooms—and how to create meaningful and moving stories with goals beyond business as usual. Presented in partnership with The Producers Guild of America New Media Council & PGA East Documentary Committee.
Pry
Created by Danny Cannizzaro & Samantha Gorman (Performance)
Danny Cannizzaro and Samantha Gorman will perform excerpts from Pry, an app experience that fuses cinema, video game, and the novella into what the LA Weekly calls “Charlie Kaufman by way of an acid trip.” Six years ago, James, a demolition expert, returned from the Gulf War. Explore James’s mind as his vision fails and the past collides with the present. What happens to story when instead of turning a page, readers open or shut the protagonist’s eyes, pull apart his memories, or read his thoughts infinitely scrolling in every direction? For more, go to prynovella.com.
Small Star Seminar (Performance)
Presented by Cory McAbee
For the first solo music project created by Cory McAbee (Crazy and Thief, The American Astronaut), the filmmaker/musician takes the stage as a motivational speaker who urges people to give up their goals, stop reaching for the stars, and start looking for the stars within their own minds. “Small Star Seminar” features optimistic songs about quitting, accepting one’s own limitations, and the power of sitting quietly. McAbee will address the theory of “Deep Astronomy” and answer questions from the audience. Part of a larger storytelling project, the performance will be documented for an upcoming feature film written and directed by McAbee.
The Working Screenwriter (Talk)
Presented by Mike Jones (Pixar)
Big dreams, wild risks, and seven-figure sales are all part of the typical screenwriter mythos. Yet most of these writers have had a different career, one where a few highs barely make up for the many lows. Working screenwriters must look at the long arc of a career where no models exist. How does a life in the screen trade fit into an everyday life? How do writers maintain their spark among constant rejection, wide financial fluctuations, and family stress? How does failure affect style? And how does a writer change? Mike Jones has never made seven figures. Yet for 15 years he has maintained a screenwriter’s turbulent life while writing for independent producers, major studios, and now Pixar. In this talk, Jones will outline how he built a steady career through checkered success, but became a better storyteller through failure.
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53rd New York Film Festival Shorts Lineup + Michael Moore, Jia Zhangke , Todd Haynes, Hou Hsiao-hsien Confirmed as Speakers
The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the complete NYFF Shorts Programs and filmmaker talks for the 53rd New York Film Festival, taking place September 25 – October 11, 2015.
This year, the festival has created four distinct categories for the 53rd New York Film Festival Shorts Programs: Animation, International, New York and Horror. The NYFF Shorts Program 1: International will spotlight a selection of mostly North American premieres from around the world, with voices from Argentina, Australia, Chile, and more. The new Shorts Program 2: Horror will scare up some screams with a handful of tales from the dark side, including Territory by Vincent Paronnaud (co-director of 2007’s Cannes winner and NYFF45 Closing Night, Persepolis), about a sheepherder and his dog witnessing unspeakable terrors. Shorts Program 3: Animation section will showcase stunning and bold recent works, including the World Premiere of Pixar’s latest gem, Sanjay Patel’s Sanjay Super Team, about modern superheroes and Hindu traditions clashing in the daydreams of a young Indian boy.
Shorts Program 4: New York is a new category celebrating the short-form works produced in New York by local filmmakers. The festival is thrilled to announce that the inaugural edition of this program will be sponsored by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. This year’s exciting selections include the World Premieres of Zia Anger’s black comedy My Last Film, starring Lola Kirke, Mac DeMarco, and Rosanna Arquette; and Pacho Velez & Daniel Claridge’s Dragstrip. Velez is the co-director of Manakamana, which screened at NYFF51.
The festival’s annual master class, On Cinema, will feature a conversation between NYFF Director of Programming Kent Jones and one of the world’s greatest living directors, Hou Hsiao-hsien, on Saturday, October 10. In a rare visit to New York, on the occasion his latest film The Assassin screening at NYFF53, the director will discuss some of the works that have marked, haunted, and influenced him as an artist. In the Revivals section, the festival will also present his 1983 Taiwanese New Wave drama, The Boys from Fengkuei.
The popular FREE Directors Dialogues returns with three diverse, notable filmmakers, paired with a NYFF selection committee member as they discuss their careers, their craft and views on their own approach to making movies, as well as the current state of filmmaking. This year’s lineup will feature sit-downs with Jia Zhangke (Mountains May Depart) on Tuesday, September 29; Michael Moore (Where To Invade Next) on Sunday, October 4; and Todd Haynes (Carol) on Saturday, October 10. All of these director’s newest films are screening in the Main Slate of the NYFF53.
SHORTS PROGRAM
NYFF SHORTS PROGRAM 1: INTERNATIONAL (TRT: 85M)
Featuring films by a selection of new talents, this year’s lineup of shorts includes lyrical work from Australia and Chile, a pair of Buenos Aires–set romps from Argentine co-productions, and a bittersweet goodbye story from Austria. Programmed by Sarah Mankoff.
La Novia de Frankenstein
Agostina Gálvez & Francisco Lezama, Portugal/Argentina, 2015, DCP, 13m
Spanish with English subtitles
Ivana works for an agency that rents out apartments out to English-speaking tourists, but her sticky finger side-hustle suggests self-employment might be more her style. North American Premiere
Monaco
David Easteal, Australia, 2015, DCP, 13m
A young man goes door to door in search of an automotive apprenticeship, and spending his free time kicking up dust doing donuts with his buddies in the outskirts of Melbourne. North American Premiere
Carry On
Rafael Haider, Austria, 2015, DCP, 22m
German with English subtitles
When his donkey gets sick, an old farmer is hesitant to betray his fondness for the animal to his matter-of-fact wife who insists on putting the donkey down.
Marea de Tierra
Manuela Martelli & Amirah Tajdin, Chile/France, 2015, DCP, 15m
Spanish with English subtitles
On the southern Chilean archipelago of Chiloe, a lovelorn teenage girl on vacation swaps tales of heartbreak with a group of local women who gather seaweed. North American Premiere
The Mad Half Hour
Leonardo Brzezicki, Argentina/Denmark, 2015, DCP, 22m
Juan suddenly balks at commitment, prompting his boyfriend to lead him on a romantic night of wandering city streets. Named for the time of day when house cats go inexplicably wild. North American Premiere
NYFF SHORTS PROGRAM 2: HORROR (TRT: 93M)
In a program brand-new to the NYFF focusing on the best in genre film—horror, thrillers, sci-fi, twisted noir, and fantasy shorts from around the world—this handful of tales from the dark side features a period piece of terror in distant lands from the co-director of Persepolis, a haunted psyche that reveals itself in very strange ways, a lesson in being bad, horror-film love turned life-threatening, and some silent but deadly revenge. Programmed by Laura Kern.
Territory / Territoire
Vincent Paronnaud, France, 2014, DCP, 22m
French with English subtitles
A sheepherder and his trusty dog witness unspeakable horrors in a remote valley of the French Pyrenees in 1957.
We Wanted More
Stephen Dunn, Canada, 2013, DCP, 16m
Laryngitis may be a singer’s worst nightmare, but battling deep anxieties about life’s sacrifices can be even more terrifying.
Sânge
Percival Argüero Mendoza, Mexico, 2015, DCP, 19m
Spanish with English subtitles
Upon viewing the mysterious, bone-chilling titular film, a young woman’s horror obsession—taken far from seriously by her boyfriend—blends dangerously with reality. U.S. Premiere
How to Be a Villain
Helen O’Hanlon, UK, 2015, DCP, 16m
In this delightfully demented homage to the golden days of monster movies, Supervillain (a perfect Terence Harvey) leads us on a thrilling guided tour of the ways of evil.
Ramona
Andrei Cretulescu, Romania, 2015, DCP, 20m
One dark night, a no-nonsense blonde carries out a mission of brutal vengeance.
NYFF SHORTS PROGRAM 3: ANIMATION (TRT: 56M)
An eclectic mix of styles and themes, this program of animated shorts brings New York audiences a selection of stunning recent works from around the globe. Please note: this program is not for children! Programmed by Matt Bolish and Sarah Mankoff.
Lingerie Show
Laura Harrison, USA, 2015, HDCAM, 8m
Drug-addict Lorraine and her boyfriend Caesar are having a nightmarish 24 hours until Lorraine calls up her sister, CiCi, for help.
Hot Bod
Claire van Ryzin, USA, 2014, DCP, 4m
When a lonely man accidentally ingests a grow-your-own-girlfriend expandable water toy, he becomes extremely popular with the coolest dude in town.
Whole
William Reynish, Denmark, 2014, DCP, 12m
Danish with English subtitles
After a bad breakup leaves her heartbroken and depressed, Mira goes on a psychedelic trip in search of her spirit animal in order to feel whole again.
Denis the Pirate
Sam Messer, USA, 2015, DCP, 11m
A man tells the story of his great-great-great-great grandfather, Denis the Pirate, and his sidekick monkey, Babe Ruth, with whom he terrorized the Caribbean islands. World Premiere
Sanjay’s Super Team
Sanjay Patel, USA, 2015, DCP, 7m
In the latest short from Pixar, modern superheroes and Hindu traditions clash in the daydreams of a young Indian boy. World Premiere
Palm Rot
Ryan Gillis, USA, 2014, DCP, 7m
While investigating a mysterious explosion deep in the Everglades, a crop duster’s discovery of a lone surviving crate sets off a series of unfortunate events.
Food
Siqi Song, USA, 2014, DCP, 4m
We are what we eat—from cheeseburgers to chocolate-covered pretzels—in this stop-motion documentary that explores how we choose the foods we consume.
Rolling
Matt Christensen, USA, 2014, DCP, 3m
A blissed-out squirrel rolls through a meadow of objects.
NYFF SHORTS PROGRAM 4: NEW YORK (TRT: 75m)
A new addition to the New York Film Festival, this program showcases recent short-form work from some of the most exciting filmmakers living and working in New York today, an eclectic mix of familiar faces, established names, and unheralded ones to watch. Programmed by Florence Almozini and Dan Sullivan and sponsored by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.
Hernia
Jason Giampietro, USA, 2015, DCP, 12m
Jason Giampietro’s latest hilarious short follows neurotic hypochondriac Rudy (Stephen Gurewitz), who is convinced he is suffering from a hernia, as he heads out into the night in search of sympathy from his friends, all of whom have lost their patience with him.
Riot
Nathan Silver, USA, 2015, DCP, 4m
The hyper-prolific Nathan Silver’s first documentary draws on his family’s home movies to revisit his directorial debut at the age of 9, as his efforts to dramatize the 1992 L.A. riots are undermined by an uncooperative cast and the intrusions of his mother. U.S. Premiere
Sundae
Sonya Goddy, USA, 2015, DCP, 7m
In this impeccable cringe comedy, an irritated mother drives around in an unfamiliar neighborhood bribing her taciturn 5-year-old son with ice cream in exchange for crucial information. World Premiere
Dragstrip
Pacho Velez & Daniel Claridge, USA, 2015, DCP, 4m
Comprised of images of racing aficionados—drivers, mechanics, and fans alike—in New Lebanon, NY, as they behold the sport they love, this film offers a rare opportunity to look at others in the act of observation, transforming the screen into a kind of ethnographic mirror. World Premiere
Special Features
James N. Kienitz Wilkins, USA, 2014, DCP, 10m
James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s funny and heady work of lo-fi sleight-of-hand centers on an interview between the filmmaker and a man describing a unique experience, but his entertaining reminiscence proves to be not at all what it seems.
Six Cents in the Pocket
Ricky D’Ambrose, USA, 2015, DCP, 14m
This hypnotic work of contemporary cinematic modernism—something like Robert Bresson in Park Slope, but not exactly—concerns a young man apartment-sitting for friends as talk of a plane crash ominously lingers in the air. World Premiere
Bad at Dancing
Joanna Arnow, USA, 2015, DCP, 11m
The Silver Bear winner at this year’s Berlinale comically chronicles the psychodrama and boundary-testing that arises between a needy young woman (Joanna Arnow) and her more confident roommate (Eleanore Pienta) when the latter gets a boyfriend (Keith Poulson).
My Last Film
Zia Anger, USA, 2015, DCP, 9m
An exhilarating whatsit and freewheeling black comedy, Anger’s latest takes aim at the independent film scenes in NY and LA with no-holds-barred ferocity, formal ingenuity, and an eyebrow-raising cast that includes Lola Kirke, Mac DeMarco, and Rosanna Arquette. World Premiere
Review
Dustin Guy Defa, USA, 2015, DCP, 4m
A young woman recounts a story to a group of friends who listen with rapt attention, but the tale sounds very familiar… Another masterful and clever work by one of the world’s premier shorts filmmakers. World Premiere
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26 Films Including World Premiere of Steven Spielberg’s BRIDGE OF SPIES on Main Slate for 53rd New York Film Festival
26 films will comprise the Main Slate official selection of the 53rd New York Film Festival (NYFF) taking place September 25 to October 11. The 2015 Main Slate will host four World Premieres: Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (pictured above), starring Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance in the Cold War story of the 1962 exchange of a U-2 pilot for a Soviet agent; Laura Israel’s Don’t Blink: Robert Frank, a documentary portrait of the great photographer and filmmaker; as well as the previously announced Opening Night selection The Walk and Closing Night selection Miles Ahead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-2x3r1m2I4
Award-winning films from Cannes will be presented to New York audiences for the first time, including Best Director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin; Todd Haynes’s Carol, starring Best Actress winner Rooney Mara; Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of a Man, starring Best Actor winner Vincent Lindon; Jury Prize winner The Lobster; Un Certain Regard Best Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Journey to the Shore; and Un Certain Talent Prize winner Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Treasure.
Other notables among the many filmmakers returning to NYFF with new works include Michael Moore with Where To Invade Next, which takes a hard and surprising look at the state of our nation from a fresh perspective; NYFF mainstay Hong Sangsoo, who will present his latest masterwork, Right Now, Wrong Then, about the relationship between a middle-aged art-film director and a fledgling artist; and French director Arnaud Desplechin, who is back with the funny and heartrending story of young love My Golden Days, starring Mathieu Amalric and newcomers Quentin Dolmaire and Lou Roy-Lecollinet.
Two filmmakers in this year’s lineup make their directorial debuts: Don Cheadle with Miles Ahead, a remarkable portrait of the artist Miles Davis (played by the Cheadle), during his crazy days in New York in the late-70s, and Thomas Bidegain withLes Cowboys, a film reminiscent of John Ford’s The Searchers, in which a father searches for his missing daughter across a two-decade timespan—pre- to post-9/11—from Europe to Afghanistan and back.
Several titles also add a comedic layer to this year’s lineup, including Rebecca Miller’s Maggie’s Plan, a New York romantic comedy starring Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore, Bill Hader, and Maya Rudolph; the moving and hilarious Mia Madre from Nanni Moretti, starring John Turturro; Michel Gondry’s Microbe & Gasoline, a new handmade-SFX comedy that follows two adolescent misfits who build a house on wheels and travel across France; and Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Treasure, a modern-day fable in which two men look for buried treasure in their backyard.
Opening Night
The Walk
Robert Zemeckis, USA, 2015, 3-D DCP, 100m
Robert Zemeckis’s magical and enthralling new film, the story of Philippe Petit (winningly played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his walk between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, plays like a heist movie in the grand tradition of Rififi and Bob le flambeur. Zemeckis takes us through every detail—the stakeouts, the acquisition of equipment, the elaborate planning and rehearsing that it took to get Petit, his crew of raucous cohorts, and hundreds of pounds of rigging to the top of what was then the world’s tallest building. When Petit steps out on his wire, The Walk, a technical marvel and perfect 3-D re-creation of Lower Manhattan in the 1970s, shifts into another heart-stopping gear, and Zemeckis and his hero transport us into pure sublimity. With Ben Kingsley as Petit’s mentor. A Sony Pictures release. World Premiere
Centerpiece
Steve Jobs
Danny Boyle, USA, 2015, DCP, TBC
Anyone going to this provocative and wildly entertaining film expecting a straight biopic of Steve Jobs is in for a shock. Working from Walter Isaacson’s biography, writer Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, Charlie Wilson’s War) and director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) joined forces to create this dynamically character-driven portrait of the brilliant man at the epicenter of the digital revolution, weaving the multiple threads of their protagonist’s life into three daringly extended backstage scenes, as he prepares to launch the first Macintosh, the NeXT work station and the iMac. We get a dazzlingly executed cross-hatched portrait of a complex and contradictory man, set against the changing fortunes and circumstances of the home-computer industry and the ascendancy of branding, of products, and of oneself. The stellar cast includes Michael Fassbender in the title role, Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak, Jeff Daniels as John Sculley, Katherine Waterston as Chrisann Brennan and Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld. A Universal Pictures release.
Closing Night
Miles Ahead
Don Cheadle, USA, 2015, DCP, 100m
Miles Davis was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. And how do you make a movie about him? You get to know the man inside and out and then you reveal him in full, which is exactly what Don Cheadle does as a director, a writer, and an actor with this remarkable portrait of Davis, refracted through his crazy days in the late-70s. Holed up in his Manhattan apartment, wracked with pain from a variety of ailments and sweating for the next check from his record company, dodging sycophants and industry executives, he is haunted by memories of old glories and humiliations and of his years with his great love Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). Every second of Cheadle’s cinematic mosaic is passionately engaged with its subject: this is, truly, one of the finest films ever made about the life of an artist. With Ewan McGregor as Dave Brill, the “reporter” who cons his way into Miles’ apartment. A Sony Pictures Classics release. World Premiere
Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 125m
Portuguese with English subtitles
An up-to-the minute rethinking of what it means to make a political film today, Miguel Gomes’s shape-shifting paean to the art of storytelling strives for what its opening titles call “a fictional form from facts.” Working for a full year with a team of journalists who sent dispatches from all over the country during Portugal’s recent plunge into austerity, Gomes (Tabu, NYFF50) turns actual events into the stuff of fable, and channels it all through the mellifluous voice of Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate), the mythic queen of the classic folktale. Volume 1 alone tries on more narrative devices than most filmmakers attempt in a lifetime, mingling documentary material about unemployment and local elections with visions of exploding whales and talking cockerels. It is hard to imagine a more generous or radical approach to these troubled times, one that honors its fantasy life as fully as its hard realities. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere
Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 131m
Portuguese with English subtitles
In keeping with its subtitle, the middle section of Miguel Gomes’s monumental yet light-footed magnum opus shifts into a more subdued and melancholic register. But within each of these three tales, framed as the wild imaginings of the Arabian queen Scheherazade and adapted from recent real-life events in Portugal, there are surprises and digressions aplenty. In the first, a deadpan neo-Western of sorts, an escaped murderer becomes a local hero for dodging the authorities. The second deals with the theft of 13 cows, as told through a Brechtian open-air courtroom drama in which the testimonies become increasingly absurd. Finally, a Maltese poodle shuttles between various owners in a tear-jerking collective portrait of a tower block’s morose residents. Attesting to the power of fiction to generate its own reality, the film treats its fantasy dimension as a license for directness, a path to a more meaningful truth. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere
Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 125m
Portuguese with English subtitles
Miguel Gomes’s sui generis epic concludes with arguably its most eccentric—and most enthralling—installment. Scheherazade escapes the king for an interlude of freedom in Old Baghdad, envisioned here as a sunny Mediterranean archipelago complete with hippies and break-dancers. After her eventual return to her palatial confines comes the most lovingly protracted of all the stories in Arabian Nights, a documentary chronicle of Lisbon-area bird trappers preparing their prized finches for birdsong competitions. Right to the end, Gomes’s film balances the leisurely art of the tall tale with a sense of deadline urgency—a reminder that for Scheherazade, and perhaps for us all, stories can be a matter of life and death. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere
The Assassin
Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/China/Hong Kong, 2015, DCP, 105m
Mandarin with English subtitles
A wuxia like no other, The Assassin is set in the waning years of the Tang Dynasty when provincial rulers are challenging the power of royal court. Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi), who was exiled as a child so that her betrothed could make a more politically advantageous match, has been trained as an assassin for hire. Her mission is to destroy her former financé (Chang Chen). But worry not about the plot, which is as old as the jagged mountains and deep forests that bear witness to the cycles of power and as elusive as the mists that surround them. Hou’s art is in the telling. The film is immersive and ephemeral, sensuous and spare, and as gloriously beautiful in its candle-lit sumptuous red and gold decor as Hou’s 1998 masterpiece, Flowers of Shanghai. As for the fight scenes, they’re over almost before you realize they’ve happened, but they will stay in your mind’s eye forever. A Well Go USA release. U.S. Premiere
Bridge of Spies
Steven Spielberg, USA, 2015, DCP, 135m
The “bridge of spies” of the title refers to Glienicke Bridge, which crosses what was once the borderline between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. In the time from the building of the Berlin Wall to its destruction in 1989, there were three prisoner exchanges between East and West. The first and most famous spy swap occurred on February 10, 1962, when Soviet agent Rudolph Abel was traded for American pilot Francis Gary Powers, captured by the Soviets when his U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Sverdlovsk. The exchange was negotiated by Abel’s lawyer, James B. Donovan, who also arranged for the simultaneous release of American student Frederic Pryor at Checkpoint Charlie. Working from a script by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen, Steven Spielberg has brought every strange turn in this complex Cold War story to vividly tactile life. With a brilliant cast, headed by Tom Hanks as Donovan and Mark Rylance as Abel—two men who strike up an improbable friendship based on a shared belief in public service. A Touchstone Pictures release. World Premiere
Brooklyn
John Crowley, UK/Ireland/Canada, 2015, 35mm/DCP, 112m
In the middle of the last century, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) takes the boat from Ireland to America in search of a better life. She endures the loneliness of the exile, boarding with an insular and catty collection of Irish girls in Brooklyn. Gradually, her American dream materializes: she studies bookkeeping and meets a handsome, sweet Italian boy (Emory Cohen). But then bad news brings her back home, where she finds a good job and another handsome boy (Domhnall Gleeson), this time from a prosperous family. On which side of the Atlantic does Eilis’s future live, and with whom? Director John Crowley (Boy A) and writer Nick Hornby haven’t just fashioned a great adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel, but a beautiful movie, a sensitively textured re-creation of the look and emotional climate of mid-century America and Ireland, with Ronan, as quietly and vibrantly alive as a silent-screen heroine, at its heart. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release.
Carol
Todd Haynes, USA, 2015, DCP, 118m
Todd Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel stars Cate Blanchett as the titular Carol, a wealthy suburban wife and mother, and Rooney Mara as an aspiring photographer who meet by chance, fall in love almost at first sight, and defy the closet of the early 1950s to be together. Working with his longtime cinematographer Ed Lachman and shooting on the Super-16 film he favors for the way it echoes the movie history of 20th-century America, Haynes charts subtle shifts of power and desire in images that are alternately luminous and oppressive. Blanchett and Mara are both splendid; the erotic connection between their characters is palpable from beginning to end, as much in its repression as in eagerly claimed moments of expressive freedom. Originally published under a pseudonym, Carol is Highsmith’s most affirmative work; Haynes has more than done justice to the multilayered emotions evoked by it source material. A Weinstein Company release.
Cemetery of Splendour
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Malaysia, 2015, DCP, 122m
Thai with English subtitles
The wondrous new film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (whose last feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, was a Palme d’Or winner and a NYFF48 selection) is set in and around a hospital ward full of comatose soldiers. Attached to glowing dream machines, and tended to by a kindly volunteer (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) and a young clairvoyant (Jarinpattra Rueangram), the men are said to be waging war in their sleep on behalf of long-dead feuding kings, and their mysterious slumber provides the rich central metaphor: sleep as safe haven, as escape mechanism, as ignorance, as bliss. To slyer and sharper effect than ever, Apichatpong merges supernatural phenomena with Thailand’s historical phantoms and national traumas. Even more seamlessly than his previous films, this sun-dappled reverie induces a sensation of lucid dreaming, conjuring a haunted world where memory and myth intrude on physical space. A Strand Releasing release. U.S. Premiere
Les Cowboys
Thomas Bidegain, 2015, France, DCP, 114m
French and English with English subtitles
Country and Western enthusiast Alain (François Damiens) is enjoying an outdoor gathering of fellow devotees with his wife and teenage children when his daughter abruptly vanishes. Learning that she’s eloped with her Muslim boyfriend, he embarks on increasingly obsessive quest to track her down. As the years pass and the trail grows cold, Alain sacrifices everything, while drafting his son into his efforts. The echoes of The Searchers are unmistakable, but the story departs from John Ford’s film in unexpected ways, escaping its confining European milieu as the pursuit assumes near-epic proportions in post-9/11 Afghanistan. This muscular debut, worthy of director Thomas Bidegain’s screenwriting collaborations with Jacques Audiard, yields a sweeping vision of a world in which the codes of the Old West no longer seem to hold. A Cohen Media Group release. U.S. Premiere
Don’t Blink: Robert Frank
Laura Israel, USA/Canada, 2015, DCP, 82m
The life and work of Robert Frank—as a photographer and a filmmaker—are so intertwined that they’re one in the same, and the vast amount of territory he’s covered, from The Americans in 1958 up to the present, is intimately registered in his now-formidable body of artistic gestures. From the early ’90s on, Frank has been making his films and videos with the brilliant editor Laura Israel, who has helped him to keep things homemade and preserve the illuminating spark of first contact between camera and people/places. Don’t Blink is Israel’s like-minded portrait of her friend and collaborator, a lively rummage sale of images and sounds and recollected passages and unfathomable losses and friendships that leaves us a fast and fleeting imprint of the life of the Swiss-born man who reinvented himself the American way, and is still standing on ground of his own making at the age of 90. World Premiere
Experimenter
Michael Almereyda, USA, 2014, DCP, 94m
Michael Almereyda’s brilliant portrait of Stanley Milgram, the social scientist whose 1961, Yale-based “obedience study” reflected back on the Holocaust and anticipated Abu Ghraib and other atrocities carried out by ordinary people who were just following orders, places its subject in an appropriately experimental cinema framework. The proverbial elephant in the room materializes on screen; Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) sometimes addresses the camera directly as if to implicate us in his studies and the unpleasant truths they reveal. Remarkably, the film evokes great compassion for this uncompromising, difficult man, in part because we often see him through the eyes of his wife (Winona Ryder, in a wonderfully grounded performance), who fully believed in his work and its profoundly moral purpose. Almereyda creates the bohemian-tinged academic world of the 1960s through the 1980s with an economy that Stanley Kubrick might have envied. A Magnolia Pictures release.
The Forbidden Room
Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson, Canada, 2015, DCP, 120m
The four-man crew of a submarine are trapped underwater, running out of air. A classic scenario of claustrophobic suspense—at least until a hatch opens and out steps… a lumberjack? As this newcomer’s backstory unfolds (and unfolds and unfolds in over a dozen outlandish tales), Guy Maddin, cinema’s reigning master of feverish filmic fetishism, embarks on a phantasmagoric narrative adventure of stories within stories within dreams within flashbacks in a delirious globe-trotting mise en abyme the equals of any by the late Raúl Ruiz. Collaborating with poet John Ashbery and featuring sublime contributions from the likes of Jacques Nolot, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, legendary cult electro-pop duo Sparks, and not forgetting muses Louis Negin and Udo Kier, Maddin dives deeper than ever: only the lovechild of Josef von Sternberg and Jack Smith could be responsible for this insane magnum opus. A Kino Lorber release.
In the Shadow of Women / L’Ombre des femmes
Philippe Garrel, France, 2015, DCP, 73m
French with English subtitles
The new film by the great Philippe Garrel (previously seen at the NYFF with Regular Lovers in 2005 and Jealousy in 2013) is a close look at infidelity—not merely the fact of it, but the particular, divergent ways in which it’s experienced and understood by men and women. Stanislas Merhar and Clotilde Courau are Pierre and Manon, a married couple working in fragile harmony on Pierre’s documentary film projects, the latest of which is a portrait of a resistance fighter (Jean Pommier). When Pierre takes a lover (Lena Paugam), he feels entitled to do so, and he treats both wife and mistress with disengagement bordering on disdain; when Manon catches Pierre in the act, her immediate response is to find common ground with her husband. Garrel is an artist of intimacies and emotional ecologies, and with In the Shadow of Women he has added narrative intricacy and intrigue to his toolbox. The result is an exquisite jewel of a film. U.S. Premiere
Journey to the Shore / Kishibe no tabi
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan/France, 2015, DCP, 127m
Japanese with English subtitles
Based on Kazumi Yumoto’s 2010 novel, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film begins with a young widow named Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu), who has been emotionally flattened and muted by the disappearance of her husband Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano). One day, from out of the blue or the black, Yusuke’s ghost drops in, more like an exhausted and unexpected guest than a wandering spirit. And then Journey to the Shore becomes a road movie: Mizuki and Yusuke pack their bags, leave Tokyo, and travel by train through parts of Japan that we rarely see in movies, acclimating themselves to their new circumstances and stopping for extended stays with friends and fellow pilgrims that Yusuke has met on his way through the afterworld, some living and some dead. The particular beauty of Journey to the Shore lies in its flowing sense of life as balance between work and love, existence and nonexistence, you and me. U.S. Premiere
The Lobster
Yorgos Lanthimos, France/Netherlands/Greece/UK, 2015, DCP, 118m
In the very near future, society demands that we live as couples. Single people are rounded up and sent to a seaside compound—part resort and part minimum-security prison—where they are given a finite number of days to find a match. If they don’t succeed, they will be “altered” and turned into an animal. The recently divorced David (Colin Farrell) arrives at The Hotel with his brother, now a dog; in the event of failure, David has chosen to become a lobster… because they live so long. When David falls in love, he’s up against a new set of rules established by another, rebellious order: for romantics, there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Welcome to the latest dark, dark comedy from Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth), creator of absurdist societies not so very different from our own. With Léa Seydoux as the leader of the Loners, Rachel Weisz as David’s true love, John C. Reilly, and Ben Whishaw. An Alchemy release.
Maggie’s Plan
Rebecca Miller, USA, 2015, DCP, 92m
Rebecca Miller’s new film is as wise, funny, and suspenseful as a Jane Austen novel. Greta Gerwig shines brightly in the role of Maggie, a New School administrator on the verge of completing her life plan with a donor-fathered baby when she meets John (Ethan Hawke), a soulful but unfulfilled adjunct professor. John is unhappily married to a Columbia-tenured academic superstar wound tighter than a coiled spring (Julianne Moore). Maggie and the professor commiserate, share confidences, and fall in love. And where most contemporary romantic comedies end, Miller’s film is just getting started. In the tradition of Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky, Miller approaches the genre of the New York romantic comedy with relish and loving energy. With Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph as Maggie’s married-with-children friends, drawn to defensive sarcasm like moths to a flame, and Travis Fimmel as Maggie’s donor-in-waiting. U.S. Premiere
The Measure of a Man / La Loi du marché
Stéphane Brizé, France, 2015, DCP, 93m
French with English subtitles
Vincent Lindon gives his finest performance to date as unemployed everyman Thierry, who must submit to a series of quietly humiliating ordeals in his search for work. Futile retraining courses that lead to dead ends, interviews via Skype, an interview-coaching workshop critique of his self-presentation by fellow jobseekers—all are mechanisms that seek to break him down and strip him of identity and self-respect in the name of reengineering of a workforce fit for an neoliberal technocratic system. Nothing if not determinist, Stéphane Brizé’s film dispassionately monitors the progress of its stoic protagonist until at last he lands a job on the front line in the surveillance and control of his fellow man—and finally faces one too many moral dilemmas. A powerful and deeply troubling vision of the realities of our new economic order. A Kino Lorber release. North American Premiere
Mia Madre
Nanni Moretti, Italy/France, 2015, DCP, 106m
Italian and English with English subtitles
Margherita (Margherita Buy) is a middle-aged filmmaker contending with shooting an international co-production with a mercurial American actor (John Turturro) and with the fact that her beloved mother (Giulia Lazzarini) is mortally ill. Underrated as an actor, director Nanni Moretti, offers a fascinating portrayal as Margherita’s brother, a quietly abrasive, intelligent man with a wonderfully tamped-down generosity and warmth. The construction of the film is as simple as it is beautiful: the chaos of the movie within the movie merges with the fear of disorder and feelings of pain and loss brought about by impending death. Mia Madre is a sharp and continually surprising work about the fragility of existence that is by turns moving, hilarious, and subtly disquieting. An Alchemy release. U.S. Premiere
Microbe & Gasoline / Microbe et Gasoil
Michel Gondry, France, 2015, DCP, 103m
French with English subtitles
The new handmade-SFX comedy from Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind) is set in an autobiographical key. Teenage misfits Microbe (Ange Dargent) and Gasoline (Théophile Baquet), one nicknamed for his size and the other for his love of all things mechanical and fuel-powered, become fast friends. Unloved in school and misunderstood at home—Microbe is overprotected, Gasoline is by turns ignored and abused—they decide to build a house on wheels (complete with a collapsible flower window box) and sputter, push, and coast their way to the camp where Gasoline went as a child, with a stop along the way to visit Microbe’s crush (Diane Besnier). Gondry’s visual imagination is prodigious, and so is his cultivation of spontaneously generated fun and off-angled lyricism, his absolute irreverence, and his emotional frankness. This is one of his freshest and loveliest films. With Audrey Tatou as Microbe’s mom. U.S. Premiere
Mountains May Depart
Jia Zhangke, China/France/Japan, 2015, DCP, 131m
Mandarin and English with English subtitles
The plot of Jia Zhangke’s new film is simplicity itself. Fenyang 1999, on the cusp of the capitalist explosion in China. Shen Tao (Zhao Tao) has two suitors—Zhang (Zhang Yi), an entrepreneur-to-be, and his best friend Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong), who makes his living in the local coal mine. Shen Tao decides, with a note of regret, to marry Zhang, a man with a future. Flash-forward 15 years: the couple’s son Dollar is paying a visit to his now-estranged mother, and everyone and everything seems to have grown more distant in time and space… and then further ahead in time, to even greater distances. Jia is modern cinema’s greatest poet of drift and the uncanny, slow-motion feeling of massive and inexorable change. Like his 2013 A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart is an epically scaled canvas. But where the former was angry and quietly terrifying, the latter is a heartbreaking prayer for the restoration of what has been lost in the name of progress. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere
My Golden Days / Trois Souvenirs de ma jeunesse
Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2015, DCP, 123m
French with English subtitles
Arnaud Desplechin’s alternately hilarious and heartrending latest work is intimate yet expansive, a true autobiographical epic. Mathieu Amalric—Jean-Pierre Léaud to Desplechin’s François Truffaut—reprises the character of Paul Dédalus from the director’s groundbreaking My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument (NYFF, 1996), now looking back on the mystery of his own identity from the lofty vantage point of middle age. Desplechin visits three varied but interlocking episodes in his hero’s life, each more surprising and richly textured than the next, and at the core of his film is the romance between the adolescent Paul (Quentin Dolmaire) and Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet). Most directors trivialize young love by slotting it into a clichéd category, but here it is ennobled and alive in all of its heartbreak, terror, and beauty. Le Monde recently referred to Desplechin as “the most Shakespearean of filmmakers,” and boy, did they ever get that right. My Golden Days is a wonder to behold. A Magnolia Pictures release. North American Premiere
No Home Movie
Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 2015, DCP, 115m
French and English with English subtitles
At the center of Chantal Akerman’s enormous body of work is her mother, a Holocaust survivor who married and raised a family in Brussels. In recent years, the filmmaker has explicitly depicted, in videos, books, and installation works, her mother’s life and her own intense connection to her mother, and in turn her mother’s connection to her mother. No Home Movie is a portrait by Akerman, the daughter, of Akerman, the mother, in the last years of her life. It is an extremely intimate film but also one of great formal precision and beauty, one of the rare works of art that is both personal and universal, and as much a masterpiece as her 1975 career-defining Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. U.S. Premiere
Right Now, Wrong Then
Hong Sangsoo, South Korea, 2015, DCP, 121m
Korean with English subtitles
Ham Chunsu (Jung Jaeyoung) is an art-film director who has come to Suwon for a screening of one of his movies. He meets Yoon Heejung (Kim Minhee), a fledgling artist. She’s never seen any of his films but knows he’s famous; he’d like to see her paintings and then go for sushi and soju. Every word, every pause, every facial expression and every movement, is a negotiation between revelation and concealment: too far over the line for Chunsu and he’s suddenly a middle-aged man on the prowl who uses insights as tools of seduction; too far for Heejung and she’s suddenly acquiescing to a man who’s leaving the next day. So they walk the fine line all the way to a tough and mordantly funny end point, at which time… we begin again, but now with different emotional dynamics. Hong Sangsoo, represented many times in the NYFF, achieves a maximum of layered nuance with a minimum of people, places, and incidents. He is, truly, a master. U.S. Premiere
The Treasure / Comoara
Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2015, DCP, 89m
Romanian with English subtitles
Costi (Cuzin Toma) leads a fairly quiet, unremarkable life with his wife and son. He’s a good provider, but he struggles to make ends meet. One evening there’s a knock at the door. It’s a stranger, a neighbor named Adrian (Adrian Purcarescu), with a business proposal: lend him some money to find a buried treasure in his grandparents’ backyard and they’ll split the proceeds. Is it a scam or a real treasure hunt? Corneliu Porumboiu’s (When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism, NYFF 2013) modern-day fable starts like an old Honeymooners episode with a get-rich-quick premise, gradually develops into a shaggy slapstick comedy, shifts gears into a hilariously dry delineation of the multiple layers of pure bureaucracy and paperwork drudgery, and ends in a new and altogether surprising key. Porumboiu is one of the subtlest artists in movies, and this is one of his wryest films, and his most magical.
Where To Invade Next
Michael Moore, USA, 2015, DCP, 110m
Where are we, as Americans? Where are we going as a country? And is it where we want to go, or where we think we have to go? Since Roger & Me in 1989, Michael Moore has been examining these questions and coming up with answers that are several worlds away from the ones we are used to seeing and hearing and reading in mainstream media, or from our elected officials. In his previous films, Moore has taken on one issue at a time, from the hemorrhaging of American jobs to the response to 9/11 to the precariousness of our healthcare system. In his new film, he shifts his focus to the whole shebang and ponders the current state of the nation from a very different perspective: that is, from the outside looking in. Where To Invade Next is provocative, very funny, and impassioned—just like all of Moore’s work. But it’s also pretty surprising. U.S. Premiere
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Film Society of Lincoln Center Unveils Official 53rd New York Film Festival Poster by Laurie Anderson
The Film Society of Lincoln Center unveiled the official 53rd New York Film Festival poster designed by artist Laurie Anderson. Laurie Anderson 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, Laurie Simmons. Looked upon as a yearly artistic “signature” for the film festival, NYFF posters have taken on a celebrated pop culture significance through the years. Please find a complete list of artists below.
“We are thrilled to welcome Laurie Anderson to the NYFF family, and to have an artist of her caliber carry on this 53-year tradition,” said FSLC Board Chairman Ann Tenenbaum. “Her innovative and daring work is a perfect representation of what we strive to achieve annually at the festival, and throughout the year at the Film Society.”
Laurie Anderson (pictured above) added: “The NYFF is such an eclectic and ecstatically wild mix of films, and I wanted to try to capture some of the variety of subjects and styles. The original piece this is based on, Follow the Sound, is 18 feet long with lots of plots and characters and fragments. I made this painting two years ago when I was feeling especially inspired by the scale of projected film and the possibilities of abrupt jump cuts. I’m so happy it’s the poster for this year’s festival.”
Anderson is one of America’s most renowned—and daring—creative pioneers. She is best known for her multimedia presentations and innovative use of technology. As a writer, director, visual artist, and vocalist she has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art, theater, and experimental music. Anderson’s latest film Heart of a Dogwill premiere this fall, and her upcoming installation Habeas Corpus will be at the Park Avenue Armory from October 2-4.
Her recording career, launched by “O Superman” in 1981, includes the soundtrack to her feature documentary Home of the Brave (1986) and the short Life on a String (2002). Anderson’s live shows range from simple spoken word to elaborate multimedia stage performances such as “Songs and Stories for Moby Dick” (1999). Anderson has published seven books and her visual work has been presented in major museums around the world.
In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first Artist in Residence of NASA, which culminated in her 2004 touring solo performance “The End of the Moon.” Recent projects include a series of audio-visual installations and a high-definition film,Hidden Inside Mountains, created for World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. In 2007, she received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for her outstanding contribution to the arts. In 2008, she completed a two-year worldwide tour of her performance piece “Homeland,” which was released as an album on Nonesuch Records in June 2010. Anderson’s solo performance “Delusion” debuted at the Vancouver Cultural Olympiad in February 2010. In October 2010 a retrospective of her visual and installation work opened in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and later traveled to Rio de Janeiro. In 2011 her exhibition of new visual work titled “Forty-Nine Days in the Bardo” opened in Philadelphia, and “Boat,” her first exhibition of paintings, premiered at the Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York. She has recently completed a three-year fellowship at both EMPAC, the multimedia center at RPI in Troy, NY, and PAC at UCLA. Anderson lives in New York City.
The poster will be available for purchase during the New York Film Festival (September 25 – October 11).
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
Laurie Simmons, 2014
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STEVE JOBS Selected as Centerpiece of the 53rd New York Film Festival | TRAILER
Steve Jobs, written by Academy Award® winner Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, Charlie Wilson’s War) and directed by Academy Award® winner Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours), has been selected as the Centerpiece of the upcoming 53rd New York Film Festival taking place September 25 to October 11, to screen on Saturday, October 3.
Boyle and Sorkin joined forces to create this film about the brilliant man at the epicenter of the digital revolution, working from Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography. Steve Jobs stars Michael Fassbender in the title role, Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak, Jeff Daniels as John Sculley, Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld, and Katherine Waterston as Chrisann Brennan.
New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said: “You hear that a bio of Steve Jobs is being produced, and of course you see multiple possible movies in your head . . . but not this one. Steve Jobs is dramatically concentrated, yet beautifully expansive; it’s extremely sharp; it’s wildly entertaining, and the actors just soar—you can feel their joy as they bite into their material.”
“I am honored that our film has been selected as the Centrepiece of this year’s festival,” said Boyle. “And thrilled and terrified too, unlike the subject of our film, who would have taken the whole thing very much in his stride. Steve Jobs was a thoroughly contradictory and complex character who forged our digital age. He’s the kind of brilliant, flawed character that Shakespeare would have relished writing about, and storytellers of all kinds will be fashioning and re-fashioning the mythology of the digital revolution for generations to come. I hope that festivalgoers enjoy our take.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEr6K1bwIVs
Sorkin and Boyle have created a dynamically character-driven portrait of the co-founder of Apple, weaving the multiple threads of their protagonist’s life into three daringly extended backstage scenes, as Jobs prepares to launch the first Macintosh, the NeXT workstation, and the iMac. The film is a dazzlingly executed cross-hatched portrait of Jobs, set against the changing fortunes and circumstances of the home computer industry and the ascendancy of branding, of products, and of oneself.
Steve Jobs is directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin working from Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography of the Apple founder. The producers are Mark Gordon, Guymon Casady, Scott Rudin, Boyle, and Christian Colson.
NYFF previously announced Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk as Opening Night, Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead as Closing Night and Luminous Intimacy: The Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, the first-ever complete dual retrospective of the experimental filmmakers.
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World Premiere of Don Cheadle’s MILES AHEAD to Close 53rd New York Film Festival
Don Cheadle’s directorial debut Miles Ahead will make its World Premiere as the Closing Night selection of the upcoming 53rd New York Film Festival taking place September 25 to October 11, 2016. Cheadle, who co-wrote the script, stars as the legendary musician opposite Emayatzy Corinealdi and Ewan McGregor.
New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said: “I admire Don’s film because of all the intelligent decisions he’s made about how to deal with Miles, but I was moved—deeply moved—by Miles Ahead for other reasons. Don knows, as an actor, a writer, a director, and a lover of Miles’ music, that intelligent decisions and well-planned strategies only get you so far, that finally it’s your own commitment and attention to every moment and every detail that brings a movie to life. ‘There is no longer much else but ourselves, in the place given us,’ wrote the poet Robert Creeley. ‘To make that present, and actual … is not an embarrassment, but love.’ That’s the core of art. Miles Davis knew it, and Don Cheadle knows it.”
Don Cheadle added: “I am happy that the selection committee saw fit to invite us to the dance. It’s very gratifying that all the hard work that went into the making of this film, from every person on the team, has brought us here. Miles’ music is all-encompassing, forward-leaning, and expansive. He changed the game time after time, and New York is really where it all took off for him. Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center… feels very ‘right place, right time.’ Very exciting.”
Miles Davis was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. And how do you make a movie about him? You get to know the man inside and out and then you reveal him in full, which is exactly what Don Cheadle does as a director, a writer, and an actor with this remarkable portrait of Davis, refracted through his crazy days in the late-70s. Holed up in his Manhattan apartment, wracked with pain from a variety of ailments and fiending for the next check from his record company, dodging sycophants and industry executives, he is haunted by memories of old glories and humiliations and of his years with his great love Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). Every second of Cheadle’s cinematic mosaic is passionately engaged with its subject: this is, truly, one of the finest films ever made about the life of an artist. With Ewan McGregor as Dave Brill, the “reporter” who cons his way into Miles’ apartment. The film was produced by Don Cheadle, Pamela Hirsch, Lenore Zerman. Along with Daniel Wagner, Robert Barnum, Vince Willburn and Daryl Porter.
NYFF previously announced Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk as the Opening Night selection and Luminous Intimacy: The Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, the first-ever complete dual retrospective of the experimental filmmakers.
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World Premiere of The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt to Open 53rd New York Film Festival | TRAILER
Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, will make its World Premiere as the Opening Night selection of the 53rd New York Film Festival taking place September 25 to October 11, 2015, and which will kick off at Alice Tully Hall.
A true story, the film is based on Philippe Petit’s memoir To Reach the Clouds and stars Golden Globe nominee Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit, the French high-wire artist who achieved the feat of walking between the Twin Towers in 1974. The Walk will be the second 3D feature selected for the Opening Night Gala since Ang Lee’s Life of Pi in 2012 and also marks Zemeckis’s return to the Festival after Flight, the 2012 Closing Night Gala selection. The film will be released in 3D and IMAX 3D on October 2, 2015.
The film also stars Academy Award® winner Ben Kingsley, James Badge Dale, Ben Schwartz, Steve Valentine, Charlotte Le Bon, Clement Sibony, Caesar Domboy and Benedict Samuel. Directed by Zemeckis, the screenplay is by Robert Zemeckis & Christopher Browne, based on the book To Reach the Clouds by Philippe Petit, and produced by Steve Starkey, Robert Zemeckis, and Jack Rapke.
Robert Zemeckis said: “I am extremely honored and grateful that our film has been selected to open the 53rd New York Film Festival. The Walk is a New York story, so I am delighted to be presenting the film to New York audiences first. My hope is that Festival audiences will be immersed in the spectacle, but also to be enraptured by the celebration of a passionate artist who helped give the wonderful towers a soul.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR1EmTKAWIw
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World Premiere of Laura Poitras’s Edward Snowden Documentary CITIZENFOUR Added to 2014 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.
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New films by David Cronenberg, Asia Argento, Jean-Luc Godard, Among Main Slate selection for the 2014 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
The WondersThe 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 & DescriptionsOpening 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.
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Keynote Speaker + First 3 Films Unveiled for 2014 NY Film Festival Convergence
The Last HijackUSC’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 27Living 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 27The 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 28North 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 28Futurestates (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