New York Film Festival

Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman will make its World Premiere as the Opening Night film of the 57th New York Film Festival (September 27 – October 13), at Alice Tully Hall on Friday, September 27, 2019. The Irishman will be released in select theaters and on Netflix later this year.

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It is here – the poster for the 56th New York Film Festival (September 28 – October 14), collaboratively designed by cinematographer Ed Lachman and visual artist JR.  NYFF posters are a yearly artistic signature of the festival, and Lachman and JR join an impressive legacy of artists whose work has been commissioned for it, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, and last year’s artist, Richard Serra. “This year’s poster came together in the best imaginable way—spontaneously, at last year’s festival,” said New York Film Festival Director Kent Jones. “Dan Stern, our board president, was talking to Ed Lachman, one of the best DPs alive, a visual artist, and a regular at the NYFF, and asked him if he had any interest in doing a poster for this year. Ed thought it over, got back to Dan, and told him that he and JR—who was at the festival with his amazing collaboration with Agnès Varda, Faces Places—had been discussing the possibility of a collaboration, and they’d agreed that the NYFF poster presented them with a great opportunity. The result is better than we could ever have imagined, a real thing of beauty, and it’s going to be a favorite.” On the partnership and thought process behind this year’s poster, Ed Lachman explains, “Being at the Festival is the highlight of the year for me, when I’m not working. It’s a place to meet, share, and experience what cinema can be. The opportunity to create the poster for the New York Film Festival and collaborate with JR was a formidable experience and similar to filmmaking, where one works with other visual artists to create a project. I’ve had the greatest respect and admiration for his work over the years, both visually and how he engages communities he’s portraying within a social context, which I think is so important in today’s world, to find how we’re all connected, rather than separated and divided.” According to Lachman, “The idea came together using JR’s emblematic eyes . . . What is cinema without the mind, the heart, and the eyes of the filmmakers? Using the director’s eyes can symbolize the creative force behind the images and the stories that the Festival has championed and represented to New York over the years, supported by the audience holding the placards of their eyes, and what can be more New York than our alleyways?” A revered and award-winning cinematographer, Ed Lachman has shot more than 100 narrative, experimental, and documentary titles in the United States and internationally. He is known for his collaborations with Todd Haynes, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Altman, Paul Schrader, Todd Solondz, Sofia Coppola, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Ulrich Seidl, and Jean Luc-Godard, among others. Lachman’s work has garnered him numerous honors including Academy Award nominations for his work on Carol (2015) and Far from Heaven (2002), as well as an Emmy nomination for the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011). He has been honored with the American Society of Cinematographers Lifetime Achievement Award, Telluride Medallion Award, Gotham Award, and this year at Cannes with the 2018 Angenieux ExcelLens in Cinematography Award. Lachman is also known as a visual artist who has had installations, videos, and photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, the Ludwig Museum in Germany, and many other museums and galleries throughout the world. JR exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors. In 2006, he created Portrait of a Generation, images of suburban “thugs” that he posted in huge formats in the bourgeois districts of Paris. In 2007, with Marco, he made Face 2 Face, large portraits of Israelis and Palestinians standing facing each other in eight Palestinian and Israeli Cities, considered the biggest illegal exhibition ever. In 2011, he received the TED Prize. Later that same year, he created Inside Out, a global participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into works of art. As of September 2017, over 350,000 people from more than 140 countries have participated, through mail or gigantic photo booths. His recent projects include a collaboration with New York City Ballet; the feature documentary Faces Places, co-directed with Nouvelle Vague legend Agnès Varda; seemingly “erasing” the pyramid outside of the Louvre; giant scaffolding installations at the 2016 Rio Olympics; an exhibition on the abandoned hospital of Ellis Island; and a gigantic installation at the U.S.-Mexico border fence. As he remains anonymous and doesn’t explain his enlarged full-frame portraits, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passerby/interpreter. A special thank you to photographers David Godlis and Julie Cunnah for their photo contributions to the poster. Chantal Akerman photo courtesy of Kenneth Saunders/The Guardian. 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 Rauschenberg, 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 Laurie Anderson, 2015 Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2016 Richard Serra, 2017

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The lineup for Shorts and Talks during the 56th New York Film Festival will feature films from nine countries as well as from burgeoning talent here in New York, the shorts section presents 21 films in four different programs. NYFF Talks will bring wide-ranging conversations with directors featured in NYFF56 to the public. HBO® is the presenting sponsor of NYFF Talks, which includes Directors Dialogues and On Cinema. This year’s Directors Dialogues feature conversations with Centerpiece filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, Main Slate filmmakers Jia Zhangke and Alice Rohrwacher (NYFF54 Filmmaker in Residence), and Spotlight on Documentary director Errol Morris. High Life director Claire Denis is this year’s On Cinema talk, an in-depth discussion with NYFF Director Kent Jones. HBO® also sponsors NYFF Live, which will be announced in September. The Shorts selection includes two International Programs, featuring a mix of narrative, animation, and documentary work by established and emerging directors; annual thriller program Genre Stories; and New York Stories, featuring some of the most exciting filmmakers living and working in New York today. Highlights include the world premieres of To the Unknown and The North Wind’s Gift, directed by Michael Almereyda (Experimenter, NYFF53); The Chore, directed by Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus (The Layover, NYFF55); Quarterbacks, directed by Jason Giampietro (Unpresidented, NYFF55), and Eleanore Pienta’s Ada.

SHORT FILM

International Shorts I

Anteu João Vladimiro, Portugal/France, 29m Portuguese with English subtitles North American Premiere This vividly stylized and formally audacious work from Portuguese director João Vladimiro follows the life of a young man as he gradually becomes the last living person of his village. Here There Is No Earth Martin Diccico, USA/Turkey, 2018, 6m Turkish with English subtitles North American Premiere A testimony about a shepherd’s fatal encounter at the Turkish-Armenian border provides a haunting perspective on the countries’ physical and invisible lines of separation. jeny303 Laura Huertas Millán, Colombia/France, 2018, 7m Spanish with English subtitles North American Premiere Footage of an abandoned Bauhaus-style building accompanies confessionals from Jeny, a self-described living work of art, in this fleeting meditation on architecture and biography. Man in the Well / Jing li of ren Hu Bo, China, 2017, 16m Mandarin with English subtitles U.S. Premiere Desperation and ruin pervade this unsettling short from the late novelist-turned-filmmaker Hu Bo (An Elephant Sitting Still), in which two starving children encounter a dead body. Tourneur Yalda Afsah, Germany, 2018, 15m U.S. Premiere Yalda Afsah’s nonverbal documentary beholds the strange, subtly tense proceedings of a bullfight in the south of France, in which young men confront the animal inside the arena.

International Shorts II

Black Dog Joshua Tuthill, USA, 2017, 15m New York Premiere Through its uncanny blend of archival footage and stop-motion animation, Black Dog evokes a nightmarish conception of an American family during the 1960s Space Race. Down There Zhengfan Yang, China, 2018, 11m U.S. Premiere A single long take observes the collective psychology of an apartment building after a quiet night is interrupted by an off-screen sound. Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin / Le Discours d’acceptation glorieux de Nicolas Chauvin Benjamin Crotty, France, 2018, 27m North American Premiere Benjamin Crotty’s latest is this hilarious and unpredictable portrait of Nicolas Chauvin—a possibly apocryphal Napoleonic soldier whose name is the basis for the word chauvinism—as he recounts his travails via a lifetime achievement award speech. Let Us Now Praise Movies / Y ahora elogiemos las películas Nicolás Zukerfeld, Argentina, 2017, 15m Spanish with English subtitles North American Premiere A young critic balances his time between a day job at a stationary store and managing a film magazine in this amusingly intelligent homage to the small yet boundless moments so many films leave out. Veslemøy’s Song Sofia Bohdanowicz, Canada, 2018, 9m U.S. Premiere Shot on hand-processed black-and-white film, Sofia Bohdanowicz’s wry, wistful narrative-doc follows a young woman (Deragh Campbell) as she investigates the legacy of the once celebrated Canadian musician Kathleen Parlow.

Genre Stories

Acid Just Philippot, France, 2017, 18m NY Premiere As contaminated rain threatens to wipe out humanity, a married couple desperately battle to keep their young son safe. Child of the Sky Phillip Montgomery, USA, 2018, 15m NY Premiere Lost in the desert, a woman gets lured into a nightmarish world of cult violence in this deeply chilling Mesopotamian myth–infused tale told through ferocious dance movements. Helsinki Mansplaining Massacre Ilja Rautsi, Finland, 2018, 15m NY Premiere A female car-crash survivor offers a very definitive response to the incessant “educating” by the infantile male chauvinists of the household that’s taken her in. The Slows Nicole Perlman, USA, 2018, 20m NY Premiere In a regenerating post-apocalyptic world, the only remaining traces of naturally reproduced life face extinction. Toto Danny Lee, USA, 2018, 17m NY Premiere The career of an embittered former horror star (M. Emmet Walsh) who longs for his glory days comes gruesomely full circle. New York Stories TRT: 63m Ada Eleanore Pienta, USA, 2018, 11m World Premiere In her funny, expressive, and dialogue-free directorial debut, actress Eleanore Pienta plays an eccentric woman trying to get from point A to point B and, in the process, finding New York City an obstacle course of casual hostility and bizarre behaviors. The Chore Ashley Connor & Joe Stankus, USA, 2018, 8m World Premiere Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus’s latest quotidian miniature follows two brothers going grocery shopping together, musing on the products they come across, reminiscing about the past, and, finally, comparing notes on snickerdoodle recipes. God Never Dies / Dios Nunca Muere Barbara Cigarroa, USA/Ireland, 2018, 14m Spanish with English subtitles Filmed in New York’s Hudson Valley, Barbara Cigarroa’s captivating work of docu-fiction offers a rare, real glimpse into the secluded life of a migrant farmworker as she struggles to raise two children on her own. The North Wind’s Gift Michael Almereyda, USA, 2018, 19m World Premiere Michael Almereyda’s contemporary riff on an Italian folktale (shot in black-and-white 16mm by Sean Price Williams), in which a magic microwave ensnares a starving family and their landlord, is a delightfully peculiar moral tale of greed, trickery, and the elemental forces of nature. Quarterbacks Jason Giampietro, USA, 2018, 6m World Premiere In Giampietro’s comic latest, some friends’ dinner conversation about the impending NFL Draft becomes a frank discussion of the state of race relations within the league and amongst its fans. To the Unknown Michael Almereyda, USA, 2018, 6m World Premiere Almereyda’s reading of Kenneth Koch’s “To the Unknown” transforms footage of the everyday into a moving tribute to one of the New York School’s most treasured and inventive poets.

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