OPENING NIGHT
The 13th
Directed by Ava DuVernay
USA, 2016
World Premiere
The title of Ava DuVernay’s extraordinary and galvanizing documentary refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” The progression from that second qualifying clause to the horrors of mass criminalization and the sprawling American prison industry is laid out by DuVernay with bracing lucidity. With a potent mixture of archival footage and testimony from a dazzling array of activists, politicians, historians, and formerly incarcerated women and men, DuVernay creates a work of grand historical synthesis. A Netflix original documentary.
CENTERPIECE
20th Century Women
Directed by Mike Mills
USA, 2016
World Premiere
Mike Mills’s texturally and behaviorally rich new comedy seems to keep redefining itself as it goes along, creating a moving group portrait of particular people in a particular place (Santa Barbara) at a particular moment in the 20th century (1979), one lovingly attended detail at a time. The great Annette Bening, in one of her very best performances, is Dorothea, a single mother raising her teenage son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), in a sprawling bohemian house, which is shared by an itinerant carpenter (Billy Crudup) and a punk artist with a Bowie haircut (Greta Gerwig) and frequented by Jamie’s rebellious friend Julie (Elle Fanning). 20th Century Women is warm, funny, and a work of passionate artistry. An A24 Release.
CLOSING NIGHT
The Lost City of Z
Directed by James Gray
USA, 2016
World Premiere
James Gray’s emotionally and visually resplendent epic tells the story of Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett (a remarkable Charlie Hunnam), the British military-man-turned-explorer whose search for a lost city deep in the Amazon grows into an increasingly feverish, decades-long magnificent obsession that takes a toll on his reputation, his home life with his wife (Sienna Miller) and children, and his very existence. Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji cast quite a spell, exquisitely pitched between rapture and dizzying terror. Also starring Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland, The Lost City of Z represents a form of epic storytelling that has all but vanished from the landscape of modern cinema, and a rare level of artistry.
MAIN SLATE
Aquarius
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Brazil/France, 2016, 142m
Portuguese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A highlight of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s follow-up to his acclaimed Neighboring Sounds revolves around the leisurely days of a 65-year-old widow, transcendently played by the great Brazilian actress Sônia Braga. Clara is a retired music critic and the only remaining resident of the titular apartment building in Recife. Trouble starts when an ambitious real estate promoter who has bought up all of Aquarius’s other units comes knocking on Clara’s door. She has no intention of leaving, and a protracted struggle ensues. Braga’s transfixing, multilayered performance and the film’s deliberate pacing and stylistic flourishes yield a sophisticated, political, and humane work.
Certain Women
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
USA, 2016, 107m
The seventh feature by Kelly Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff), a lean triptych of subtly intersecting lives in Montana, is a work of no-nonsense eloquence. Adapting short stories by Maile Meloy, Certain Women follows a lawyer (Laura Dern) navigating an increasingly volatile relationship with a disgruntled client; a couple (Michelle Williams and James Le Gros) in a marriage laden with micro-aggression and doubt, trying to persuade an old man (Rene Auberjonois) to sell his unused sandstone; and a young ranch hand (Lily Gladstone) fixated on a new-in-town night school teacher (Kristen Stewart). Shooting on 16mm, Reichardt creates understated, uncannily intimate dramas nestled within a clear-eyed depiction of the modern American West. An IFC Films release.
Elle
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
France/Germany/Belgium, 2016, 131m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Paul Verhoeven’s first feature in a decade—and his first in French—ranks among his most incendiary, improbable concoctions: a wry, almost-screwball comedy of manners about a woman who responds to a rape by refusing the mantle of victimhood. As the film opens, Parisian heroine Michèle (a brilliant Isabelle Huppert) is brutally violated in her kitchen by a hooded intruder. Rather than report the crime, Michèle, the CEO of a video game company and daughter of a notorious mass murderer, calmly sweeps up the mess and proceeds to engage her assailant in a dangerous game of domination and submission in which her motivations remain a constant source of mystery, humor, and tension. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Fire at Sea / Fuocoammare
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi
Italy/France, 2016, 108m
English and Italian with English subtitles
Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary observes Europe’s migrant crisis from the vantage point of a Mediterranean island where hundreds of thousands of refugees, fleeing war and poverty, have landed in recent decades. Rosi shows the harrowing work of rescue operations but devotes most of the film to the daily rhythms of Lampedusa, seen through the eyes of a doctor who treats casualties and performs autopsies, and a feisty but anxious pre-teen from a family of fishermen for whom it is simply a peripheral fact of life. With its emphasis on the quotidian, the film reclaims an ongoing tragedy from the abstract sensationalism of media headlines. A Kino Lorber release.
Graduation / Bacalaureat
Directed by Cristian Mungiu
Romania, 2016, 127m
Romanian with English subtitles
Cristian Mungiu’s expertly constructed drama concerns a doctor desperate for his daughter to escape corruption-plagued Romania by accepting a scholarship offer from a British university (after-the-fact layer of irony courtesy of Brexit), contingent on her high school final exams. But after she’s assaulted, perhaps for past sins of her father, the doctor must decide whether he will take advantage of his position to ensure that she receives high marks, despite her trauma. Parents anxious about their children’s education will appreciate the moral dilemma the film poses. Like Mungiu’s superb 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (NYFF ’07), Graduation resonates beyond national boundaries. A Sundance Selects release.
Hermia and Helena
Directed by Matías Piñeiro
Argentina/USA, 2016, 87m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Shooting outside his native Argentina for the first time, New York–based Matías Piñeiro fashions a bittersweet comedy of coupling and uncoupling that doubles as a love letter to his adopted city. Working on a Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on an artist residency, Camila (Agustina Muñoz) finds herself within a constellation of shifting relationships (an old flame, a new one, a long-lost relative). Mingling actors from the director’s Buenos Aires repertory with stalwarts of New York’s independent film scene (Keith Poulson, Dustin Guy Defa, Dan Sallitt), Hermia and Helena offers the precise gestures, mercurial moods, and youthful energies of all Piñeiro’s cinema, with an emotional depth and directness that make this his most mature work yet.
I, Daniel Blake
Directed by Ken Loach
UK, 2016, 100m
U.S. Premiere
Unable to work after suffering a heart attack, Daniel (Dave Johns) must apply to the government for benefits. But with the seemingly endless documentation he has to provide, his lack of familiarity with computers, and the condescending attitudes of the functionaries to whom he must repeat the same information in one soul-killing encounter after another, he is all but defeated from the beginning, as is his new comrade in misery, Katie (Hayley Squires). English director Ken Loach’s thoroughly shattering film, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, will strike a chord with anyone who has ever tried to negotiate their way through the labyrinth of bureaucracy. A Sundance Selects release.
Julieta
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
Spain, 2016, 99m
Spanish with English subtitles
Pedro Almodóvar explores his favorite themes of love, sexuality, guilt, and destiny through the poignant story of Julieta, played to perfection by Emma Suárez (younger) and Adriana Ugarte (middle-aged), over the course of a 30-year timespan. Just as she is about to leave Madrid forever, the seemingly content Julieta has a chance encounter that stirs up sorrowful memories of the daughter who brutally abandoned her when she turned eighteen. Drawing on numerous film historical references, from Hitchcock to the director’s own earlier Movida era work, Almodóvar’s twentieth feature, adapted from three short stories by Alice Munro (“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”), is a haunting drama that oscillates between disenchanted darkness and visual opulence. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Manchester by the Sea
Directed by Kenneth Lonergan
USA, 2016, 137m
Casey Affleck is formidable as the volatile, deeply troubled Lee Chandler, a Boston-based handyman called back to his hometown on the Massachusetts North Shore after the sudden death of his brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), who has left behind a teenage son (Lucas Hedges). This loss and the return to his old stomping grounds summon Lee’s memories of an earlier, even more devastating tragedy. In his third film as a director, following You Can Count on Me (2000) and Margaret (2011), Kenneth Lonergan, with the help of a remarkable cast, unflinchingly explores grief, hope, and love, giving us a film that is funny, sharply observed, intimately detailed yet grand in emotional scale. An Amazon Studios Release.
Moonlight
Directed by Barry Jenkins
USA, 2016, 110m
Barry Jenkins more than fulfills the promise of his 2008 romantic two-hander Medicine for Melancholy in this three-part narrative spanning the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of a gay African-American man who survives Miami’s drug-plagued inner city, finding love in unexpected places and the possibility of change within himself. Moonlight offers a powerful sense of place and a wealth of unpredictable characters, featuring a fantastic ensemble cast including André Holland, Trevante Rhodes, Naomie Harris, and Mahershala Ali—delivering performances filled with inner conflict and aching desires that cut straight to the heart. An A24 release.
My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea
Directed by Dash Shaw
USA, 2016, 75m
U.S. Premiere
No matter your age, part of you never outgrows high school, for better or worse. Dash Shaw, known for such celebrated graphic novels as Bottomless Belly Button and New School, brings his subjective, dreamlike sense of narrative; his empathy for outsiders and their desire to connect; and his rich, expressive drawing style to his first animated feature. Packed with action but seen from the inside out, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is about friends overcoming their differences and having each other’s backs in times of crisis, and its marvelously complex characters are voiced by Jason Schwartzman, Lena Dunham, Reggie Watts, Maya Rudolph, and John Cameron Mitchell.
Neruda
Directed by Pablo Larraín
Chile/Argentina/France/Spain, 2016, 107m
Spanish and French with English subtitles
Pablo Larraín’s exciting, surprising, and colorful new film is not a biopic but, as the director himself puts it, a “Nerudean” portrait of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s years of flight and exile after his 1948 denunciation of his government’s leadership. Larraín’s heady blend of fact and fancy (the latter embodied in an invented character, straight out of detective fiction, played by Gael García Bernal) is many things at once: a loving, kaleidoscopic recreation of a particular historical moment; a comical cat-and-mouse game; and a pocket epic. Featuring Luis Gnecco, a dead ringer for the poet and a formidable actor, alongside a terrific cast. A release of The Orchard.
Paterson
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
USA, 2016, 118m
U.S. Premiere
Paterson (Adam Driver) is a bus driver who writes poetry drawn from the world around him. Paterson is also the name of the New Jersey city where he works and lives with his effervescent and energetic girlfriend (Golshifteh Farahani). And Paterson is the title of the great epic poem by William Carlos Williams, whose spirit animates Jim Jarmusch’s exquisite new film. This is a rare movie experience, set to the rhythm of an individual consciousness absorbing the beauties and mysteries and paradoxes and joys and surprises of everyday life, at home and at work, and making them into art. An Amazon Studios release.
Personal Shopper
Directed by Olivier Assayas
France, 2016, 105m
French and English with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Kristen Stewart is the medium, in more ways than one, for this sophisticated genre exploration from director Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria). As a fashion assistant whose twin brother has died, leaving her bereft and longing for messages from the other side, Stewart is fragile and enigmatic—and nearly always on-screen. From an opening sequence in a haunted house with an intricately constructed soundtrack to a high-tension, cat-and-mouse game on a trip from Paris to London and back set entirely to text messaging, Personal Shopper brings the psychological and supernatural thriller into the digital age. An IFC Films release.
The Rehearsal
Directed by Alison Maclean
New Zealand, 2016, 75m
U.S. Premiere
Alison Maclean (Jesus’ Son) returns to her New Zealand filmmaking roots with a multilayered coming-of-age story about a young actor (James Rolleston) searching for the truth of a character he’s playing onstage and the resulting moral dilemma in his personal life. Set largely in a drama school, featuring Kerry Fox as a diva-like teacher who tries to shape her student’s raw talent, The Rehearsal, adapted from the novel by Eleanor Catton, demystifies actors and acting in order to reveal the moments where craft becomes art. The same happens with Maclean’s understated but penetrating filmmaking. Her concentration on the quotidian yields a finale that borders on the sublime.
Sieranevada
Directed by Cristi Puiu
Romania, 2016, 173m
Romanian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A decade after jumpstarting the Romanian New Wave with The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Cristi Puiu returns with a virtuosic chamber drama set largely within a labyrinthine Bucharest apartment where a cantankerous extended family has gathered forty days after its patriarch’s death (and three days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris). Rituals and meals are anticipated and delayed, doors open and close, and the camera hovers at thresholds and in corridors. As claustrophobia mounts, heated, humorous exchanges—about the old Communist days and the present age of terror—coalesce into a brilliantly staged and observed portrait of personal and social disquiet.
Son of Joseph / Le fils de Joseph
Directed by Eugène Green
France/Belgium, 2016, 113m
French with English Subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The American-born expatriate filmmaker Eugène Green exists in his own special artistic orbit. All Green’s films share a formal rigor and an increasingly refined modulation between the playfully comic, the urgently human, and the transcendent, and they are each as exquisitely balanced as the baroque music and architecture that he cherishes. His latest movie, Son of Joseph, is perhaps his most buoyant. A nativity story reboot that gently skewers French cultural pretensions, it features newcomer Victor Ezenfis as a discontented Parisian teenager in search of a father, Mathieu Amalric and Fabrizio Rongione as his, respectively, callous and gentle alternative paternal options, and Natacha Régnier as his single mother. A Kino Lorber Films release.
Staying Vertical / Rester vertical
Directed by Alain Guiraudie
France, 2016, 100m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Léo (Damien Bonnard), a blocked filmmaker seeking inspiration in the French countryside for an overdue script, begins an affair with a shepherdess (India Hair), with whom he almost immediately has a child. Combining the formal control of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake with the shapeshifting fabulism of his earlier work, Alain Guiraudie’s new film is a sidelong look at the human cycle of birth, procreation, and death, as well as his boldest riff yet on his signature subjects of freedom and desire. The title has the ring of both a rallying cry and a dirty joke—fitting for a film that is, above all else, a rumination on what it means to be a human being, a vertical animal. A Strand Releasing release.
Things to Come / L’Avenir
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve
France/Germany, 2016, 100m
French with English subtitles
In the new film from Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden), Isabelle Huppert is Nathalie, a Parisian professor of philosophy who comes to realize that the tectonic plates of her existence are slowly but inexorably shifting: her husband (André Marcon) leaves her, her mother (Edith Scob) comes apart, her favorite former student decides to live off the grid, and her first grandchild is born. Hansen-Løve carefully builds Things to Come around her extraordinary star: her verve and energy, her beauty, her perpetual motion. Huppert’s remarkable performance is counterpointed by the quietly accumulating force of the action, and the result is an exquisite expression of time’s passing. A Sundance Selects release.
Toni Erdmann
Directed by Maren Ade
Germany, 2016, 162m
German with English subtitles
An audacious twist on the screwball comedy—here, the twosome is an aging-hippie prankster father and his corporate-ladder-climbing daughter—Toni Erdmann delivers art and entertainment in equal measure and charmed just about everyone who saw it at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Maren Ade's dazzling script has just enough of a classical comedic structure to support 162 minutes of surprises big and small. Meanwhile, her direction is designed to liberate the actors as much as possible while the camera rolls, resulting in sublime performances by Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek, who leave the audience suspended between laughter and tears. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
The Unknown Girl
Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Belgium, 2016, 106m
It’s a few minutes after closing time in a medical clinic in Seraing, Belgium. The buzzer rings. Doctor Jenny (Adèle Haenel) tells her assistant (Olivier Bonnaud) to ignore it. She is later informed that the girl she turned away was soon found dead on the riverside. From that moment, Jenny becomes a different kind of doctor, diagnosing not just her dispossessed patients’ illnesses but also the greater malady afflicting her community. And this is a different kind of movie for Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, in which the urgency pulses beneath the seemingly placid surface, and it is all keyed to Haenel’s extraordinary performance. A Sundance Selects release.
Yourself and Yours
Directed by Hong Sangsoo
South Korea, 2016, 86m
Korean with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Prolific NYFF favorite Hong Sangsoo boldly and wittily continues his ongoing exploration of the painful caprices of modern romance. Painter Youngsoo (Kim Joo-hyuk) hears secondhand that his girlfriend, Minjung (Lee Yoo-young), has recently had (many) drinks with an unknown man. This leads to a quarrel that seems to end their relationship. The next day, Youngsoo sets out in search of her, at the same time that Minjung—or a woman who looks exactly like her and may or may not be her twin—has a series of encounters with strange men, some of whom claim to have met her before . . . Yourself and Yours is a break-up/make-up comedy unlike any other, suffused with sophisticated modernist mystery.
SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Directed by Steve James
USA, 2016, DCP, 88m
In English, Mandarin, and Cantonese with English subtitles
Quick: what was the only bank that was actually prosecuted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis? The astonishing but correct answer is Abacus Federal Savings of Chinatown, founded in 1984 by Thomas Sung, which specializes in small loans to members of the Chinese-American community. The latest film from Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Life Itself) is a vivid chronicle of the legal battle mounted by Sung and his formidable daughters when the Manhattan DA’s office charged the bank with systemic fraud, larceny, and conspiracy. Abacus is a moving portrait of a family, a community, and a way of life; it is also a cautionary tale.
Thursday, Oct 6, 8:45pm (WRT)
Thursday, Oct 7, 6:15pm (BWA)
The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography
Directed by Errol Morris
USA, 2016, DCP, 76m
Errol Morris’s surprising new film is simplicity itself: a visit to the Cambridge, Massachusetts studio of his friend, the 20x24 Polaroid portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, who specifies on her website that she likes her subjects “to wear clothes (and to bring toys, skis, books, tennis racquets, musical instruments, and particularly pets…).” As this charming, articulate, and calmly uncompromising woman takes us through her fifty-plus years of remarkable but fragile images of paying customers, commissioned subjects, family, and close friends (including the poet Allen Ginsberg), the sense of time passing grows more and more acute. This is a masterful film.
Sunday, Oct 9, 6pm (WRT)
Monday, Oct 10, 9:15pm (BWA)
Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds
Directed by Alexis Bloom & Fisher Stevens
USA, 2016, DCP, 96m
Carrie Fisher and her mom Debbie Reynolds are now the best of friends (they live steps away from each other in their Beverly Hills compound) and the very definition of Hollywood royalty. But unlike today’s newly minted celebrities, they are both open books. After six decades of screen and stage stardom; a couple of disastrous marriages and assorted financial ups and downs for Reynolds; and, for Fisher, well-publicized drug addiction, bipolar disorder, and deity status (see: Star Wars), neither has anything left to hide. Bright Lights is an affectionate, often hilarious, and unexpectedly moving valentine to the mother-daughter act to end all mother-daughter acts. An HBO Documentary Films release.
Monday, Oct 10, 6pm (ATH)
Tuesday, Oct 11, 9:15pm (BWA)
The Cinema Travellers
Directed by Shirley Abraham & Amit Madheshiya
India, 2016, DCP, 96m
In Hindi and Marathi with English subtitles
Mohammed and Bapu are itinerant film showmen who travel through the Western Indian state of Maharashtra and show 35mm film prints on makeshift screens at village fairs. All the while, they struggle with both the growing possibility of obsolescence and the increasing fragility of their enormous rusty, clanking projectors, kept in barely working order by a repairman named Prakash (who has a beautiful invention: an “oil bath” projector). This colorful, five-years-in-the-making documentary is a real Last Picture Show, but its melancholy is leavened with joy and delight, and the wonder of still images coming to life at 24 frames per second. US Premiere
Wednesday, Oct 12, 9pm (FBT)
Thursday, Oct 13, 6:30pm (HGT)
Dawson City: Frozen Time
Directed by Bill Morrison
USA, 2016, DCP, 120m
Bill Morrison’s new film is a history in still and moving images charting the transformation of Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, a fishing camp at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers, into the epicenter of the Yukon gold rush at the turn of the last century. It is also a history of the 35mm film prints that were shipped to Dawson between the 1910s and 1920s, then hidden away and forgotten for 50 years until they were unearthed in the initial stages of a construction project, images from which are a key element in Morrison’s cinematic mosaic. Like all of Morrison’s work, Dawson City is a haunting experience that takes place in suspended, nonlinear time. North American Premiere
Sunday, Oct 2, 12pm (BWA)
Tuesday, Oct 4, 9pm (FBT)
Hissen Habré, A Chadian Tragedy
Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
France/Chad, 2016, DCP, 82m
In French, Chadian and Arabic with English subtitles
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s quiet, stately documentary begins with a personal sketch of the tragic history of his Central African home country, starting in the mid-1970s with the emergence of a romantic revolutionary figure named Hissen Habré, who seized power in 1982 and established a regime that became renowned throughout the world for its human rights abuses. From there, Haroun follows Clément Abaïfouta, a survivor of the regime who introduces us to resilient men and women whose memories and experiences are beyond horror. Two weeks after this film premiered at Cannes, Hissen Habré became the first world leader convicted of crimes against humanity by a court outside of his own country.
Tuesday, Oct 4, 6pm (WRT)
Wednesday, Oct 5, 9pm (FBT)
I Am Not Your Negro
Directed by Raoul Peck
USA/France/Belgium/Switzerland, 2016, DCP, 93m
Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has taken the 30 completed pages of James Baldwin’s final, unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, in which the author went about the painful task of remembering his three fallen friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, and crafted an elegantly precise and bracing film essay. Peck’s film, about the unholy agglomeration of myths, institutionalized practices both legal and illegal, and displaced white terror that have long perpetuated the tragic state of race in America, is anchored by the presence of Baldwin himself in images and words, read beautifully by Samuel L. Jackson in hushed, burning tones.
Saturday, Oct 1, 4:15pm (WRT)
Sunday, Oct 2, 9pm (FBT)
I Called Him Morgan
Directed by Kasper Collin
Sweden, 2016, DCP, 89m
On the night of February 19, 1972, Helen Morgan walked into the East Village bar Slug’s Saloon with a gun in her handbag. She came to see her common-law husband, the great jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, whom she had nursed through heroin addiction. They fought, he literally threw her out; then she walked back in and shot him, handed over her gun and waited for the police to arrive. Many years later, Helen was interviewed about her life with the brilliant but erratic musician, and the tapes of that interview are the backbone of this beautifully crafted and deeply affecting film from Kasper Collin (My Name Is Albert Ayler).
Sunday, Oct 2, 6pm (WRT)
Monday, Oct 3, 8:45pm (FBT)
Karl Marx City
Directed by Petra Epperlein & Michael Tucker
USA/Germany, 2016, DCP, 89m
In English and German with English subtitles
Having completed their series of Iraq War–era films (starting with Gunner Palace in 2004 and concluding with 2009’s How to Fold a Flag), the filmmaking team of Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker turn their attention to the former East Germany of Epperlein’s childhood, and specifically to the possibility that her father might have been one of the many thousands of citizens recruited as informers by the Stasi. Tucker and Epperlein make some bold stylistic choices (such as shooting in crystalline black and white), all of which pay off: the strange state of living under constant surveillance is both recalled and embodied in this uniquely powerful film.
Friday, Oct 14, 8:30pm (WRT)
Saturday, Oct 15, 12:30pm (FBT)
Patria O Muerte: Cuba, Fatherland or Death
Directed by Olatz López Garmendia
Cuba/USA, 2016, DCP, 57m
In English and Spanish with English subtitles
Olatz López Garmendia’s film is a sharp, vivid portrait of Cuba as it is right now, on the verge of change, seen through the eyes of a diverse group of brave individuals. On the one hand, we experience the corroded beauty of a landscape largely free of the commercially driven zoning and building that has befouled so much of the western world; on the other, we see the crumbling infrastructure, falling buildings, and desperate circumstances of a nation that’s been economically stalled by a longtime United States embargo and stubborn and repressive dictatorship. Most of all, Patria O Muerte: Cuba, Fatherland or Death is about people struggling to live freely. An HBO Documentary Films release.
Wednesday, Oct 12, 9:15pm (BWA)
Thursday, Oct 13, 6:45pm (FBT)
The Settlers
Directed by Shimon Dotan
France/Canada/Israel, 2016, DCP, 110m
Shimon Dotan’s film takes a good, hard look at the world of the Israeli settlers on the West Bank: the way they live, the worldview that many of them share, and, most crucially, the relaxed attitude of the Israeli government toward their presence since the first settlements in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Dotan lays out the facts with extraordinary care and lucidity, and allows us to see the progression of actions and reactions that led to the current volatile situation, one small step at a time. Perhaps the greatest astonishment of this generally astonishing film is the casual zealotry and racism, and the apparently untroubled certainty, of many of the settlers themselves.
Thursday, Oct 6, 6pm (WRT)
Friday, Oct 7, 9pm (HGT)
Two Trains Runnin’
Directed by Sam Pollard
USA, 2016, DCP, 80m
In the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, hundreds of young people—including James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were drawn to the deep South to take part in the Civil Rights movement. At the same moment, two groups of young men (including guitarist John Fahey and Dick Waterman, the great champion of the Blues) made the same trip in search of Blues legends Skip James and Son House. That these two quests coincidentally ended in the volatile state of Mississippi, whose governor famously referred to integration as “genocide,” is the starting point for Sam Pollard’s inventive, musically and historically rich film.
Thursday, Oct 13, 8:45pm (WRT)
Friday, Oct 14, 9:30pm (FBT)
Uncle Howard
Directed by Aaron Brookner
USA, 2016, DCP, 96m
While Aaron Brookner was working on the restoration of Burroughs: The Movie, his uncle Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs, he discovered an archive that Howard left uncatalogued. It encompassed unused footage, and much more: film and video diaries capturing the downtown New York, post-Beat mosaic of writers, filmmakers, performers, and artists in the 1970s and 1980s and the devastation of that community by AIDS, which took Howard’s life in 1989. A work of love and scholarship, Uncle Howard weaves contemporary interviews with this rediscovered footage: of the legendary “Nova Convention”; Robert Wilson rehearsing the aborted L.A. production of The Civil Wars; a twentysomething Jim Jarmusch, Howard’s NYU classmate, recording sound on Burroughs; and Howard’s lyrical video self-portrait, made near the end of his life.
Sunday, Oct 9, 5:30pm (BWA)
Monday, Oct 10, 9pm (FBT)
Wendy Whelan: Restless Creature
Directed by Linda Saffire & Adam Schlesinger
USA, 2016, DCP, 90m
In 1984, Wendy Whelan joined the New York City Ballet as an apprentice; by 1991, she had been promoted to Principal Dancer. She quickly became a revered and beloved figure throughout the dance world. Wrote Roslyn Sulcas, “her sinewy physicality, her kinetic clarity, and her dramatic, otherworldly intensity have created a quite distinct and unusual identity.” Linda Saffire and Adam Schlesinger’s film follows this extraordinary artist throughout a passage of life that all dancers must face, when she must confront the limitations of her own body and adapt to a different relationship with the art form she loves so madly.
Sunday, Oct 9, 3:30pm (WRT)
Monday, Oct 10, 6:15pm (BWA)
Whose Country?
Directed by Mohamed Siam
Egypt/USA/France, 2016, DCP, 60m
A remarkable, one-of-a-kind film from Egypt, Whose Country? has a point of view that grows in complexity as it proceeds, alongside the shifting fortunes and affiliations of the Cairo policeman who is the film’s subject and guide. By his side, we witness the fall of Mubarak, the rise and fall of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the rise of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The level of craft in this film is extraordinary, and so is the close attentiveness that the director pays to his difficult task: illuminating the compromised lives of the protagonist and his friends and the convulsive nation they call home.
Saturday, Oct 1, 9:30pm (WRT)
Sunday, Oct 2, 6:45pm (FBT)
SPECIAL EVENTS
Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
Directed by Lonny Price
USA, DCP, 95m
World Premiere
In 1981, Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince embarked on Merrily We Roll Along, a musical based on the 1934 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy told in reverse: the characters begin as disillusioned adults and end as starry-eyed adolescents. Though the original, much-ballyhooed production, which featured a cast of teenage unknowns, was panned by the critics and closed after just 16 performances, Merrily We Roll Along would go on to attain musical theater legend status. This alternately heartbreaking and euphoric film by original cast member Lonny Price features never-before seen footage of Prince and Sondheim at work on the show and revisits many of Price's fellow actors, all of them united by this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Stephen Sondheim, Lonny Price, and other special guests to appear in person.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Directed by Ang Lee
USA, 2016, DCP, 110m
World Premiere
Ang Lee's stunning adaptation of Ben Fountain's novel is the story of an Iraq war hero (newcomer Joe Alwyn) who comes home with his fellow members of Bravo Company for a victory tour. This culminates in a halftime show at a Thanksgiving Day football game - a high-intensity media extravaganza summoning memories of the trauma of losing his beloved sergeant in a firefight. Lee's brave, heartbreaking film goes right to the heart of a great division that haunts this country: between the ideal image of things as they should be and the ongoing reality of things as they are. Billy Lynn is also a step forward in the art of cinema, made with a cinematographic process years ahead of its time. With a brilliant supporting cast, including Kristen Stewart, Chris Tucker, Garrett Hedlund, with Vin Diesel and Steve Martin. A TriStar Pictures release.
Gimme Danger
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
USA, 2016, DCP, 108m
U.S. Premiere
"Music is life and life is not a business," said Iggy Pop when he and his surviving bandmates from The Stooges were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. Jim Jarmusch's cinematic offering to the punk gods of Ann Arbor traces the always raucous and frequently calamitous history of the Stooges from inception to the present. With the help of animator James Kerr, plus glimpses of Lucille Ball and a shirtless Yul Brynner amidst a bonanza of archival performance footage, photos, and interviews, Gimme Danger has the feeling of a night at Max's Kansas City. An Amazon Studios and Magnolia Pictures release. Iggy Pop and Jim Jarmusch to appear in person.
Hamilton's America
Directed by Alex Horwitz
USA, 2016, DCP, 84m
World Premiere
Lin-Manuel Miranda takes us inside the making of his groundbreaking American musical Hamilton, winner of eleven Tonys, as well as the Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award. We follow Miranda, his collaborators, and key members of the original cast on their exploration of the history that inspired the show, visiting locations from Valley Forge to the West Wing. We also track the show's journey, from the moment Miranda thrilled the Obamas at the White House in 2009 to the first year of its blockbuster run on Broadway. A PBS Great Performances documentary. Horwitz and special guests to appear in person.
FILM COMMENT AT NYFF EVENTS
Film Comment Presents:
A Quiet Passion
Directed by Terence Davies
U.K./Belgium, 2016, DCP, 125m
Swiftly following his glorious Sunset Song, the great British director Terence Davies turns his attention to 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson and ends up with perhaps an even greater triumph. A revelatory Cynthia Nixon embodies Dickinson with a titanic intelligence always threatening to burst forth from behind a polite facade, while Davies creates a formally audacious rendering of her life, from teenage skepticism to lonely death, using her poems (and a touch of Charles Ives) as soundtrack accompaniment. Both sides of Davies's enormous talent - his witty, Wildean sense of humor and his frightening vision of life's grim realities - are on full display in this consuming depiction of a creative inner world. Terence Davies and Cynthia Nixon to appear in person.
Film Comment Live: Living Cinema
For its September-October 2016 edition, Film Comment, the most important and renowned critical film magazine in the U.S. for more than 50 years, will come out of the gate with an issue devoted to the vitality of movies today, as well as an elaborate special section on films featured in the 54th New York Film Festival. For this panel a selection of the magazine's editors, new contributors, and longtime writers will join to discuss issues raised and questions asked in its pages.
Film Comment Live: Filmmakers Chat
In this special roundtable discussion, a selection of different directors from around the world whose films are screening in this year's New York Film Festival talk together in a discussion moderated by Film Comment editor Nicolas Rapold. It's the rare chance to see some of today's most important filmmakers in dialogue with each other, talking about their experiences watching and creating movies.
TWO SPECIAL "An Evening with . . ." CELEBRATIONS
The New York Film Festival tradition known as "An Evening with..." is a limited-seating event that includes an intimate dinner and conversation between an important star of the film world and NYFF Director Kent Jones. Past honorees include Pedro Almodóvar, Cate Blanchett, Ralph Fiennes, Nicole Kidman, Kate Winslet, and more. We're pleased to announce that this year we are offering two of these special nights, featuring two of the brightest young actors working today.
An Evening with Adam Driver
With his mainstream breakout in last year's Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Adam Driver has become a bona fide megastar. But those who have been following him for years, both in his Emmy-nominated role in the HBO series Girls, and in such past NYFF films as Frances Ha and Inside Llewyn Davis, have already been smitten with his artistic style. This year, festival audiences can see his wonderful leading performance in Jim Jarmusch's exquisite Paterson, as a poetry-writing New Jersey bus driver.
Sunday, October 2
An Evening with Kristen Stewart
For the past few years, Kristen Stewart has been quietly amassing an impressive body of work, starring in enigmatic roles in complex films, including the NYFF52 selection Clouds of Sils Maria, directed by Olivier Assayas, for which she became the first American actor to win the French César award. This year feels like a culmination of this extraordinary phase of her career: she starred in five movies in 2016, the best of which are featured at NYFF: Assayas's Personal Shopper, in which she appears in nearly every shot; Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women; and Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. All three films speak to an actor constantly willing to challenge herself and her fans.
Wednesday, October 5
RETROSPECTIVES
A BRIEF JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA
My Journey Through French Cinema
Directed by Bertrand Tavernier
France, 2016, 190m
Bertrand Tavernier is truly one of the grand old men of the movies. His experience is vast, his knowledge is voluminous, his love is inexhaustible, and his perspective is matched only by that of Martin Scorsese. This magnificent epic history has been a lifetime in the making. Tavernier knows his native cinema inside and out, from the giants like Renoir, Godard, and Melville (for whom he worked as an assistant) to now overlooked and forgotten figures like Edmund T. Gréville and Guy Gilles, and his observations and reminiscences are never less than penetrating and always deeply personal. A Cohen Media Group release.
Angels of Sin / Les anges du péché
Directed by Robert Bresson
France, 1943, 96m, French with English subtitles
Robert Bresson's first feature, made during the occupation, was this melodrama about a nun (Renée Faure) from a wealthy background who zeroes in on the distressed condition of a poor young female prisoner (Jany Holt) who has been sent to the convent for rehabilitation. Les anges du péché, co-written by Bresson with the French dramatist Jean Giraudoux and the Dominican priest and author Raymond Léopold Bruckberger, is an emotionally overpowering experience. If we don't quite recognize the Bresson we would come to know, this is also a formidable debut from a filmmaker who, in David Bordwell's words, had "proven his virtuosity" and, in the process, created what Jacques Becker recognized as "a whole new style." A Janus Films release.
Antoine and Antoinette / Antoine et Antoinette
Directed by Jacques Becker
France, 1947, 84m, French with English subtitles
This postwar comedy about a young Parisian couple (Roger Pigaut and Claire Mafféi) who buy and lose a winning lottery ticket sings with the energies of working-class life. Antoine et Antoinette is temperamentally close to the great American pre-Code films of the early 30s, but it is made with a verve and grace that could only originate with one individual sensibility. To quote Godard on the occasion of Jacques Becker's death at the age of 53: "There are several good ways of making French films. Italian style, like Renoir. Viennese, like Ophuls. New Yorker, like Melville. But only Becker was and is as French as France." A Rialto Pictures release.
Deadlier Than the Male / Voici le temps des assassins
Directed by Julien Duvivier
France, 1956, 113m, French with English subtitles
Julien Duvivier's final collaboration with Jean Gabin is the gut-wrenching and ultimately tragic story of a Parisian restaurant owner who one day finds a young woman (Danièle Delorme) claiming to be the daughter of his ex-wife on his doorstep. Deadlier Than the Male, whose original French title is a quote from Rimbaud's "Illuminations," is, like all the best Duvivier films, beautifully crafted and visualized (Truffaut reckoned that it was his very best), with excellent location shooting in Les Halles. And in the words of Delorme, who passed away last year at the age of 89, the film "immortalized our youth and a certain type of moviemaking." A Pathé release.
Les enfants terribles
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
France, 1950, 106m, French with English subtitles
Jacques Rivette claimed that on the night he happened upon the set of this adaptation of Jean Cocteau's 1929 novel about the alternate world created by an orphaned brother and sister, director Jean-Pierre Melville was nowhere in sight and Cocteau himself was directing the crew. The tension between director and writer was ongoing, but it was also productive, because the final film - in Manny Farber's words, a "macabre melodrama about incestuous adolescence" that "rates top honors in every film department" - is an unlikely, incongruous mesh of their two vastly different sensibilities. To quote Truffaut, "The best novel of Jean Cocteau became the best film of Jean-Pierre Melville." With Édouard Dermit and Nicole Stéphane. A Janus Films release.
La Marseillaise
Directed by Jean Renoir
France, 1938, 132m, French with English subtitles
Jean Renoir's 1938 film about the beginnings of the French Revolution, made with the support of France's most powerful labor union, is, in François Truffaut's words, a "neorealist fresco" that continually shuttles between characters throughout the social spectrum: peasants living in the mountains, emigrés from Coblenz, Louis XVI (Renoir's brother Pierre) and his courtiers. A glorious and, today, lesser-known film from one of the cinema's greatest directors, whose goal, according to André Bazin, "is to go beyond the historical images to uncover the mundane human reality." With Louis Jouvet and Renoir regulars Gaston Modot, Nadia Sibirskaïa, and Julien Carette. Print courtesy of French Cultural Services. A Rialto Pictures release.
Safe Conduct / Laissez-passer
Directed by Bertrand Tavernier
France/Germany/Spain, 2002, 170m, French with English subtitles
Bertrand Tavernier's vigorous and varied portrait of Occupation-era filmmaking in France achieves a Breugelesque richness of perspective - this is a story told by a director deeply in love with his subject. Tavernier's hero is ace assistant director Jean-Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin), who helps directors like Maurice Tourneur (Philippe Morier-Genoud) bring their most difficult visual ideas to life, negotiates his way through the German hierarchy at Continental Films, and works for the Resistance. With Denis Podalydès in the role of screenwriter (and future Tavernier collaborator) Jean Aurenche, Dardenne regular Olivier Gourmet as producer Roger Richebé, and Laurent Schilling as the screenwriter Charles Spaak.
HENRY HATHAWAY
23 Paces to Baker Street
Directed by Henry Hathaway
USA, 1956, 103m
In this ingenious, light yet genuinely suspenseful mystery, Van Johnson plays a blind American playwright living in London who sits down for a drink in his neighborhood pub one night and overhears a casual plan to commit murder. A beautifully mounted London travelogue in color and Scope, 23 Paces to Baker Street is among the best of the numerous British-set American studio pictures of the era, featuring a succession of expertly mounted set-pieces (the best of which are set in a bustling department store and an abandoned building). With Cecil Parker and Vera Miles as Johnson's partners in detection. A 20th Century-Fox release.
The Dark Corner
Directed by Henry Hathaway
USA, 1946, 99m
This 1946 melodrama, about a Manhattan P.I. (Mark Stevens) whose adoring secretary (Lucille Ball, who clashed with Hathaway on the set) helps to clear him of a false murder accusation, is the essence of what has come to be known as film noir, from Joseph MacDonald's stark, shadowy images to the title itself. Made in the wake of Laura's massive success, the film also stars Clifton Webb as the posh owner of a Manhattan art gallery and features the same clash between the upper crust and the hard-boiled. With William Bendix as the menacing hood on Stevens' tail. A 20th Century-Fox release.
Down to the Sea in Ships
Directed by Henry Hathaway
USA, 1949, 120m
This lovely film, about a sea captain (Lionel Barrymore) who sets out on a final whaling voyage from New Bedford in 1878 with his grandson (Dean Stockwell) and his young successor (Richard Widmark), is a perfect blend of Hathaway's special artistry and Fox's meticulous period craftsmanship. Hathaway and Barrymore had their difficulties on set (assistant director Richard Talmadge doubled for Barrymore in many of his more demanding scenes), but the actor gives a deeply moving performance in his final starring role. Hathaway achieved many technical wonders throughout his career, and the sequence in which the ship runs through a field of icebergs in dense fog is one of his most remarkable. A 20th Century Fox release.
Fourteen Hours
Directed by Henry Hathaway
USA, 1951, 92m
An exciting low-budget film shot on the streets of lower Manhattan, Fourteen Hours is based on the true story of William Warde, who jumped to his death in 1938 after a policeman had spent hours trying to talk him down from a 17th floor ledge at the old Gotham Hotel (now the Peninsula). Richard Basehart (whose wife Stephanie died during production) gives a brilliant performance as the suicidal young man, Paul Douglas is the cop, and the film is packed with formidable character performances (from the likes of Agnes Moorehead, Howard Da Silva, and newcomer Grace Kelly) and vividly cast faces in the crowd below, including those of Ossie Davis, Joyce Van Patten, Brian Keith, and John Cassavetes. A 20th Century-Fox release.
From Hell to Texas
Directed by Henry Hathaway
USA, 1958, 100m
A peaceful cowboy (Don Murray) who kills a man in self-defense is stalked across Texas by the man's father, a powerful cattle baron (R.G. Armstrong). He is sheltered along the way by a gentle rancher (Chill Wills) and his daughter (Diane Varsi). This unheralded film, one of Hathaway's very best, has much in common with Peckinpah's work, but it has a hard-edged relentlessness of its own. From Hell to Texas features a raw, emotional performance from Dennis Hopper as Armstrong's younger son. The legend goes that Hopper and Hathaway had an "artistic disagreement" resulting in dozens of takes, but if so, they got over it: they worked together twice more in the next decade. A 20th Century-Fox release.
Garden of Evil
Directed by Henry Hathaway
USA/Mexico, 1951, 103m
Gary Cooper, Richard Widmark, and Cameron Mitchell are a trio of gold hunters approached by a desperate woman (Susan Hayward) with a generous offer to find her husband (Hugh Marlowe), who is trapped in their gold mine in an area deep in unforgiving Mexican hill country, known as the "Garden of Evil." Hathaway's westerns are all on the tough side, and this film, shot on location in Tepotzotlán, Guanajuato, and in jungles near Acapulco and Parícutin, is one of the toughest. Tavernier considers Garden of Evil one of the finest westerns ever made. With a score by Bernard Herrmann. A 20th Century-Fox release.
Kiss of Death
Directed by Henry Hathaway
USA, 1947, 98m
Hathaway was one of the first Hollywood filmmakers to make a practice of shooting on location - his environments are always integral to the life of the story. This 1947 film, about a jewel thief (Victor Mature) targeted by the mob when he cooperates with the DA, was shot all over New York, from the criminal courts building on Centre Street to the Bronx, and became one of the most influential of the postwar docudramas. Hathaway wanted a local hood named Harry the Hat to play the psychopathic killer Tommy Udo, but he was forced to work with a newcomer named Richard Widmark. They clashed in the beginning, and then cooperated on a truly terrifying character creation. A 20th Century-Fox release.
Niagara
Directed by Henry Hathaway
USA, 1953, 98m
This 1953 suspense melodrama about matching crimes of passion, produced and co-written by Billy Wilder's former partner Charles Brackett and shot in vibrant Technicolor, is set in the very particular world of honeymoon cottages on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Joseph Cotten is the brooding, damaged Korean war vet, and his young wife is played by Marilyn Monroe. "Zanuck was convinced Marilyn Monroe was a passing phenomenon," said Hathaway of his lead actress, in the role that truly made her a star. "She didn't know she was as good as she was." A 20th Century-Fox release.
North to Alaska
Directed by Henry Hathaway
USA, 1960, 122m
Production on this big, boisterous entertainment package was hampered by wayward screenwriters, John Wayne going over schedule on The Alamo, a writers' strike, and the replacement of original director Richard Fleischer with Hathaway. But the finished film, about a gold prospector (Wayne) who goes to Seattle to retrieve his partner's fiancée and comes back to Nome with a good time saloon girl (Capucine), is so buoyant, funny, and perfectly keyed to its glorious natural settings that it all feels seamless. With Ernie Kovacs, Stewart Granger in one of his best performances as the partner, and, in the role that brought him the Harvard Lampoon's coveted "Uncrossed Heart" award for Least Promising Actor, Fabian. A 20th Century-Fox release.
Rawhide
Directed by Henry Hathaway
USA, 1951, 89m
This tightly structured nail-biter, about the siege of a desert relay station by a group of escaped convicts, launched a long-running TV show with Clint Eastwood and set a template for the western suspense film for years to come, from High Noon through 3:10 to Yuma all the way up to last year's The Hateful Eight. Tyrone Power is the boss's son who is learning the ropes, Susan Hayward is the woman traveling with her niece, Hugh Marlowe is the leader of the gang, and his fellow convicts are played by Jack Elam, George Tobias, and the brilliant Dean Jagger. A 20th Century-Fox release.
The Shepherd of the Hills
Directed by Henry Hathaway
USA, 1941, 98m
This beautifully crafted Technicolor film, about two warring families in the Ozarks and the benign stranger who suddenly appears in their midst, crosses paths with John Ford (Hathaway's friend) in its casting (John Wayne and Harry Carey are the stars, and Ward Bond and John Qualen play supporting roles), its rural setting, and its careful attention to community and the passage of time. Yet the film, the third adaptation of Harold Bell Wright's once-renowned novel, has a very different kind of energy and a rich sense of the uncanny. Shepherd, which Hathaway was instructed to cut down for length, was his last film for Paramount. A Paramount Pictures release.
Spawn of the North
Directed by Henry Hathaway
USA, 1938, 110m
George Raft, Henry Fonda, and Dorothy Lamour star in this boisterous action film about rival fishing crews fighting for dominance of the Alaskan seas, with support from John Barrymore, Akim Tamiroff, and a wondrous mix of technical wizardry and stunning second-unit work (and some lovely Frank Loesser tunes as a bonus). If the story has something of the flavor of a Hawks film, that's because the screenplay is co-written by Jules Furthman, but Hathaway looks at the friendships and rivalries and romantic entanglements of his characters from his own special angle: his maritime community is wild, loose, and free, no matter the consequences. A Paramount Pictures release.
REVIVALS
L’argent
Directed by Robert Bresson
1983, France, 83m
Robert Bresson’s final film, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s story The Forged Coupon, is simultaneously bleak and luminous, and sharp enough to cut diamonds. The story of a counterfeit bill’s passage from hand to hand and the resulting tragic consequences is rendered with a clean force that would be startling from a filmmaker of any age; coming from one in his early 80s, it was, and still is, astonishing. L’argent burns white hot—not with anger but with a perfect clarity of purpose: to direct us to see that habitual human callousness is what keeps us out of paradise. Restored in 2K, scanned in 4K from the original negative. A Janus Films release.
Restored by MK2, in 2K from a 4K scan of the original negative.
The Battle of Algiers
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
1966, Italy/Algeria, 120m
Gillo Pontecorvo’s account of the popular uprising that led to Algerian independence from the French took “documentary realism” to a new level, electrifying and polarizing audiences throughout the world. Pontecorvo created a de-centralized structure in which the events themselves took center stage, cast the film almost entirely with non-actors, and filmed in grainy black-and-white to create a heightened “you are there” immediacy. Banned in France, embraced by the Black Panthers, and studied by the Pentagon following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, The Battle of Algiers, based on the book Souvenirs de la bataille d’Alger by Saadi Yacef (who also plays a character based on himself), returns in a new 4K restoration. A Rialto Pictures release.
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna and Istituto Luce – Cinecittà at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in collaboration with Surf Film, Casbah Entertainment Inc. and CultFilms.
Harlan County USA
Directed by Barbara Kopple
1976, USA, 103m
The mighty Barbara Kopple’s 1976 film, an impassioned documentary record of the year-long Brookside, Kentucky, miners’ strike that came to be known as “Bloody Harlan,” celebrates its 40th anniversary with a return to the festival where it had its premiere—before going on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary. Kopple and her crew spent a year and half in Harlan County, often under volatile conditions—she would later learn that there had been a price on her head. “It was an astounding experience,” she has said. “I learned what life-and-death was all about.” She also made a great film. A Cabin Creek Films release.
The restoration of Harlan County USA was funded by New York Women in Film & Television in 2004 through a Women's Film Preservation Fund Legacy Grant and underwritten by the Academy Film Archive.
Jacques Rivette Shorts
Aux quatre coins
Jacques Rivette, France, 1949, 20m
French intertitles with English subtitles
Le quadrille
Jacques Rivette, France, 1950, 40m
French intertitles with English subtitles
Le divertissement
Jacques Rivette, France, 1952, 45m
French intertitles with English subtitles
Rediscovered by Véronique Rivette this year and digitally restored by the Cinémathèque française, these three shorts offer a fascinating glimpse of the earliest stages of Jacques Rivette’s artistic development. In these “practice films,” the late New Wave master searches for the themes and approach to mise-en-scène that would later define his inexhaustibly rich oeuvre. Aux quatre coins is pure visual experimentation, while Le quadrille—co-written by and co-starring a baby-faced Jean-Luc Godard—is a chamber drama with two men and two women in a room, their relations expressed as a game of suggestive glances and the lighting and stubbing-out of cigarettes. Le divertissement presages Rivette’s gift for rendering Paris as a labyrinth of intrigues. Together, these films provide a crucial perspective on Rivette’s creativity before Cahiers du Cinéma and his incomparable filmmaking career.
The films have been restored by Les Films du Veilleur and the Cinémathèque française, in partnership with the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, le laboratoire Hiventy, Festival Côté Court, and the Forum des Images—Mairie de Paris, with the support of CNC. Special thanks to Véronique Rivette, and Samantha Leroy and Emilie Cauquy (Cinémathèque française).
The Living Idol
Directed by Albert Lewin
1957, USA, 100m
Albert Lewin began as a critic, went to work for Samuel Goldwyn in the 1920s, became Irving Thalberg’s right-hand man in the 1930s, and produced a handful of excellent films before becoming a director at age 48. Each of his six movies is rarefied, proudly literary, mythic, meticulously art-directed, and delicately haunting. His last—and strangest—is The Living Idol, based on his own novel about an archeologist who comes to believe that a jaguar in captivity is the physical manifestation of a Mayan god. This is not a great film, but it is a very unusual and a uniquely compelling one: it feels like an emanation from an alternate world of moviemaking. A Cohen Media Group release.
Memories of Underdevelopment
Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
1968, Cuba, 97m
When Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 film was finally released here in 1973, it startled film critics and casual moviegoers alike. No one was expecting such a film out of Castro’s Cuba: a sharp, funny, pro-revolutionary period piece (the action is set in 1961, right after the Bay of Pigs) with a disaffected intellectual hero (Sergio Corrieri) who, as Vincent Canby wrote, “moves through Havana as if he were a scuba diver exploring the ruins of a civilization he abhorred but cannot bear to leave.” The English critic Derek Malcolm wrote that Memories of Underdevelopment is “one of the best films ever made about the skeptical individual's place in the march of history.” A World Cinema Project release.
A presentation by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), Les Films du Camélia, and the Cineteca di Bologna. Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory and financed by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project.
One-Eyed Jacks
Directed by Marlon Brando
1961, USA, 141m
The only film directed by Marlon Brando, an adaptation of Charles Neider’s novel (inspired by the life of Billy the Kid), is an unorthodox western that’s as fresh, unpredictable, and physical as Brando’s lead performance. This visually stunning production—the last Paramount film shot in VistaVision—could for many years be seen only in substandard public domain prints and discs. It has now been beautifully restored by Universal, with the support of The Film Foundation, and under the supervision of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. The formidable cast includes Karl Malden, Katy Jurado, Slim Pickens, Ben Johnson, Timothy Carey, Elisha Cook Jr., and the wonderful Mexican actress Pina Pellicer.
Restored by Universal Studios in collaboration with The Film Foundation. Special thanks to Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg for their consultation on this restoration.
Panique
Directed by Julien Duvivier
1947, France, 91m
“If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema,” wrote Jean Renoir, “I would place a statue of Julien Duvivier above the entrance.” Duvivier made 70 films between 1919 and 1967, many of them landmarks of French cinema. His first postwar project, a High Noir adaptation of Georges Simenon’s Mr. Hire’s Engagement (later adapted by Patrice Leconte as Monsieur Hire) stars Michel Simon as a reviled voyeur framed for a murder by the girl he adores. Widely considered the finest Simenon adaptation but criticized at the time for its bleakness, the long-unseen Panique has finally been given the vivid restoration it deserves. A Rialto Pictures release.
Restored from a nitrate interpositive by TF1 Droits Audiovisuels at Digimage.
Taipei Story
Directed by Edward Yang
1985, Taiwan, 110m
Edward Yang’s second feature stars Hou Hsiao-hsien (who cowrote the script and mortgaged his house to fund the production) as a former baseball player who has come home to manage the family textile business, and Tsai Chin as his property-developer girlfriend. “The two main characters represent the past and the future of Taipei,” said Yang. “I tried to bring enough controversial questions onto the screen, so that viewers would ask themselves about their own lives.” Taipei Story is early evidence of Olivier Assayas’s assessment of Yang, who died far too young, as “the great Chinese filmmaker of modernity.” A World Cinema Project release.
Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at Cineteca di Bologna/L’immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique and Hou Hsiao-hsien.
Ugetsu Monogatari
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
1953, Japan, 94m
Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 adaptation of two 18th-century Japanese ghost stories (tempered with elements from Guy de Maupassant) is a peak in the history of cinema, a work of multiple mysteries, terrors, wonders, and ecstatic flights that takes audiences where few films do: to the realm of the unnameable. Ugetsu’s power can be felt in even the most degraded prints, but this restoration, made from a master positive print and a dupe negative, allows us to really see and appreciate the exquisite visual beauty achieved by the director and his cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa.
Restored by The Film Foundation and KADOKAWA Corporation at Cineric Laboratories. Special thanks to Masahiro Miyajima and Martin Scorsese for their consultation on this restoration. Restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in association with the Film Foundation and KADOKAWA Corporation.
EXPLORATIONS
The Death of Louis XIV
Directed by Albert Serra
France/Portugal/Spain, 2016, 115 min
U.S. Premiere
The great Jean-Pierre Léaud, synonymous with French cinema for over half a century, delivers a majestic, career-capping performance as the longest-reigning French monarch during his final days. Albert Serra’s elegant, engrossing contemplation of death and its representation finds the extravagantly wigged Sun King slowly wasting away from gangrene in his bedchamber, surrounded by devoted servants, pets and a retinue of hopeless doctors. Filled with ravishing candlelit images and painstaking details gleaned from Saint-Simon’s memoirs and other historical texts, Louis XIV is as darkly funny as it is moving, revealing the absurdity of the rule-bound royal court, but even more so of death itself.
Thursday, Oct 6, 6pm (ATH)
Friday, Oct 7, 6pm (HGT)
Everything Else
Directed by Natalia Almada
Mexico, 2016, 90m
North American Premiere
The first fiction feature by accomplished documentarian Natalia Almada is inspired by Hannah Arendt’s idea that bureaucratic dehumanization is the worst form of violence. Oscar nominee Adriana Barraza (Babel) gives a haunting, unsentimental performance as Dona Flor, an elderly government clerk who punishes her clients as unreasonably as life has punished her. But when she loses the last living creature she cares for, she goes into crisis. Almada reveals a cross-section of Mexico City’s population, creating an intimate portrait of one woman among the multitude who remain resilient despite oppression and corruption.
Friday, Oct 14, 6pm (WRT)
Saturday, Oct 15, 4pm (HGT)
I Had Nowhere to Go
Directed by Douglas Gordon
Germany, 2016, 97m
U.S. Premiere
Autobiography and biography merge in this often shattering, sometimes absurdly funny collaboration between two polymath artists, Douglas Gordon and Jonas Mekas. Gordon’s unlikely project, to bring to the screen Mekas’s prose memoir of his first decade in exile from Lithuania and journey from post-WWII displaced persons camps to New York, where he finds his vocation as a filmmaker, yields an operatic experience of sound and image. The film—which features Mekas reading his own text in haunting, musical voice-over—attests to one extraordinary man’s experience of loss and desire to make a new life, yet also resonates as a tale of the diaspora in which tens of millions exist today.
Thursday, Oct 13, 6pm (WRT)
Friday, Oct 14, 9:15pm (BWA)
Kékszakállú
Directed by Gastón Solnicki
Argentina, 2016, 72m
U.S. Premiere
The new film from Argentinian director Gastón Solnicki (Papirosen) is a singularity: a playful portrait of spiritual lethargy. Partly inspired by Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle (vivid passages are heard throughout the film), it is comprised of moments that seem to have been drawn from memory, with an elliptical continuity that moves according to forms, colors, sounds, and states of being. There is no protagonist in Kékszakállú, but several young women blanketed under layers of sunlit lassitude and politely tamped down discomfort. Nevertheless, this is a joyful experience, moving inexorably toward liberation.
Tuesday, Oct 4, 8:45pm (WRT)
Wednesday, Oct 5, 8:45pm (BWA)
Mimosas
Directed by Oliver Laxe
Spain/Morocco/France/Qatar, 2016, 93m
U.S. Premiere
An intense young man (the haunting Shakib Ben Omar) is tasked with escorting a caravan to safety. Taking a taxi far into the Moroccan desert, he seems to travel to another time as well, joining a band of travelers on horseback—and the dead body they are transporting—on a trek through the treacherous Atlas Mountains. Oliver Laxe’s stunningly shot, suggestively ambiguous follow-up to his acclaimed debut, You All Are Captains, is at once a quest story, a landscape study, and a Western with shades of the uncanny. With the openness of a parable, Mimosas doesn’t dramatize so much as embody the mysteries of faith. Winner of the Grand Prize at the 2016 Cannes’ Critics Week.
Wednesday, Oct 5, 9pm (WRT)
Thursday, Oct 6, 6:45pm (FBT)
The Ornithologist
Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues
Portugal/France/Brazil, 2016, 118 min
U.S. Premiere
In his most audacious film since his groundbreaking debut O Fantasma, João Pedro Rodrigues reimagines the myth of Saint Anthony of Padua as a modern-day parable of sexual and spiritual transcendence. On a bird-watching expedition in the remote wilderness of northern Portugal, Fernando (Paul Hamy) capsizes his canoe and loses his bearings. His ensuing odyssey, both intensely physical and wildly metaphysical, involves sadistic Chinese pilgrims, a deaf-mute shepherd named Jesus, pagan tribes, Amazons on horseback, and a glorious variety of feathered friends. Shot entirely outdoors and in magnificent ’Scope by Rui Pocas, The Ornithologist is a bracing exercise in queer hagiography, a cheerfully blasphemous tale of a religious awakening.
Wednesday, Oct 12, 9pm (WRT)
Thursday, Oct 13, 9:15pm (BWA)
SHORTS
Shorts Program 1: Narrative
Showcasing emerging filmmakers, this narrative program features seven unique films from seven countries in six different languages. Programmed by Dilcia Barrera & Gabi Madsen TRT: 103m
Saturday, Oct 1, 4pm (BWA)
Sunday, Oct 2, 6pm (BWA)
The Girl Who Danced with the Devil / A moça que dançou com o Diabo
João Paulo Miranda Maria, Brazil, 2016, 15m
A girl from a very religious family seeks her own paradise.
Be Good for Rachel
Ed Roe, USA, 2015, 19m
World Premiere
Tonight Rachel is double-booked: a babysitting job and a nervous breakdown.
Univitellin
Terence Nance, France, 2016, 15m
A classic love story in a far-from-classic reworking.
Little Bullets / Küçük Kursunlar
Alphan Eseli, Turkey, 2016, 14m
World Premiere
Forced to flee Syria for the border region of Southeast Anatolia, a mother and daughter struggle to accept their newly found safety.
Dobro
Marta Hernaiz Pidal, Bosnia and Herzegovina/Mexico, 2016, 15m
U.S. Premiere
Selma is determined to get rid of the Romani woman sitting on her apartment’s entrance steps.
Land of the Lost Sidekicks
Roger Ross Williams, USA, 2016, 6m
World Premiere
When his home is magically transformed into a dark forest filled with animated characters from classic Disney movies, a young boy learns to confront his fears.
And the Whole Sky Fit in a Dead Cow’s Eye / Y todo el celo cupo en el ojo de la vaca muerta
Francisca Alegria, Chile/USA, 2016, 19m
World Premiere
Emeteria is visited by a ghost she believes has come to take her to the afterlife. But he has more devastating news.
Shorts Program 2: International Auteurs
This program features new work by four of the most adventurous directors in international cinema today. Programmed by Dennis Lim TRT: 96m
Saturday, Oct 1, 6:45pm (BWA)
Sunday, Oct 2, 8:45pm (BWA)
A Brief History of Princess X
Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal/France, 2016, 7m
U.S. Premiere
Abrantes’s pseudo-doc on Constantin Brancusi’s most infamous sculpture is a short, sweet, and appropriately inappropriate look at how eroticism and scandal played roles in the history of modern art.
Sarah Winchester, Phantom Opera / Sarah Winchester, Opera Fantôme
Bertrand Bonello, France, 2016, 24m
North American Premiere
A film to stand in for an opera unmade: Bonello’s moody, baroque meditation on the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune plays like a ballet-cum-horror film, an ornate tapestry of enigmatic images, chilling synths, and traces of a tragic and eccentric life.
The Hedonists
Jia Zhangke, China, 2016, 25m
U.S. Premiere
Jia takes on an eclectic tone and tries out some bold new tricks in this comic short commissioned by the Hong Kong International Film Festival, following three unemployed coal miners searching for work in the Shanxi region.
From the Diary of a Wedding Photographer / Myomano Shel Tzlam Hatonot
Nadav Lapid, Israel, 2016, 40m
North American Premiere
Lapid’s latest provocation delves headlong into the absurdities and neuroses of matrimonial rites as an Israeli wedding photographer repeatedly finds himself embroiled in psychodramas with the brides and grooms who hire him.
Shorts Program 3: Genre Stories
This is the second annual edition of a program focusing on the best in new horror, thriller, sci-fi, pitch-black comedy, twisted noir, and fantasy shorts from around the world. Programmed by Laura Kern TRT: 83m
Saturday, Oct 1, 9:15pm (BWA)
Monday, Oct 3, 9:30pm (BWA)
The Signalman
Daniel Augusto, Brazil, 2015, 15m
U.S. Premiere
In a story adapted from Dickens, a reclusive railway worker’s routine is mysteriously disrupted.
Can’t Take My Eyes Off You
Johannes Kizler & Nik Sentenza, Germany, 2016, 11m
North American Premiere
A single mother and her teenage daughter must contend with something far more fraught than their relationship.
New Gods
Jack Burke, UK, 2016, 15m
World Premiere
Sickness challenges the resiliency of a utopian existence.
Quenottes (Pearlies)
Pascal Thiebaux & Gil Pinheiro, Luxembourg/France, 2015, 13m
Small, furry, and ferocious, the tooth fairy will defend its enamel treasures at any cost.
What Happened to Her
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, USA, 2016, 15m
A biting, beautifully gruesome exploration of female corpses, as portrayed nude on screen.
Imposter
Adam Goldhammer, Canada, 2016, 14m
World Premiere
Since Father’s disappearance, Mother hasn’t quite seemed herself . . .
Shorts Program 4: New York Stories
This program, now in its second year, showcases work from some of the most exciting filmmakers living and working in New York today, including established names and ones to watch. Programmed by Dan Sullivan TRT: 71m
Sunday, Oct 2, 3:30pm (WRT)
Tuesday, Oct 4, 6:15pm (BWA)
Kitty
Chloë Sevigny, USA, 2016, 35mm, 15m
North American Premiere
Sevigny’s highly anticipated directorial debut is an adaptation of a Paul Bowles short story, a hypnotic and ethereal fairy tale for today about a young girl’s feline reveries.
I Turn to Jello
Andrew T. Betzer, USA, 2016, 15m
World Premiere
A metropolitan nightmare unfurls as a nervous cellist (Eleanore Pienta) cracks under pressure at an audition—and again, and again, and . . .
Dramatic Relationships
Dustin Guy Defa, USA, 2016, 6m
North American Premiere
Scenes from the working life of a male director: Defa sophisticatedly lampoons masculinity in filmmaking with this sly, surprising meta-movie.
This Castle Keep
Gina Telaroli, USA, 2016, 14m
World Premiere
The shapeshifting latest from the multi-hyphenate Telaroli is a moving elegy for that which gets lost over the years in a changing city.
Los Angeles Plays New York
John Wilson, USA, 2016, 18m
World Premiere
This hilarious documentary concerns the world of NYC-set courtroom reality shows filmed in L.A.
The Honeymoon
Tommy Davis, USA, 2016, 3m
World Premiere
A campy and cryptic love letter that features a new, quintessentially American take on Morse code.
Shorts Program 5: Documentaries
For its first documentary shorts program, NYFF showcases a selection of the most innovative nonfiction storytelling today, from profound personal chronicles to treatments of significant global issues. Programmed by Dilcia Barrera & Gabi Madsen TRT: 89m
Monday, Oct 3, 6:30pm (BWA)
Tuesday, Oct 4, 9:15pm (BWA)
Legal Smuggling with Christine Choy
Lewie Kloster, USA, 2016, 4m
World Premiere
Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Christine Choy undergoes a wild adventure when she illegally—and accidentally—smuggles cigarettes across the Canadian border.
El Buzo
Esteban Arrangoiz, Mexico, 2015, 16m
Chief diver of the Mexico City sewerage system, Julio César Cu Cámara must repair pumps and dislodge garbage from the gutters to maintain the circulation of sewer waters.
Jean Nouvel: Reflections
Matt Tyrnauer, USA, 2016, 15m
World Premiere
A meditative portrait of Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel and his creation process.
Rotatio
Ian McClerin, USA, 2015, 4m
As part of a healing process from trauma, Shannon May Mackenzie turned words into visual art, constructing a six-foot circle out of sentences and phrases.
The Vote
Mila Aung-Thwin & Van Royko, Canada, 2016, 10m
World Premiere
Strict military rule and international sanctions kept Myanmar sealed off from the world for decades. The Vote observes residents of the bustling city of Yangon as they navigate their first democratic election in over 50 years.
Brillo Box (3¢ off)
Lisanne Skyler, USA, 2016, 40m
Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box sculpture makes its way from a family’s living room to a record-breaking Christie’s auction in this exploration of how we navigate the ephemeral nature of value. An HBO Documentary Films release.
CONVERGENCE
EXPERIENCES AND INSTALLATIONS
Cardboard City
Kiira Benzing, Stina Hamlin
Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality, 2016, USA, 3m
Cities are in a constant state of flux, waxing and waning along with their populations. Many consider these cycles of growth and decline part of the appeal of urban living, but change has consequences for those not able to keep up. Such is the case with the subjects of Cardboard City, a community of artists forced out of their Gowanus studios due to skyrocketing rents and runaway development. Blending virtual reality, augmented reality, and user-generated content, the piece is a hands-on interactive installation that uses these artists' stories as a jumping-off point, before inviting viewers to become creators and add buildings, memories, and stories to an ever evolving cityscape.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, October 1 & 2
EKO
Interlude, Sandeep Parikh, Casey Donahue, Daniel Scheinert, Billy Chew
Interactive Video Installation, 2016, USA
Interactive video projects often weigh mechanics against storytelling, creating an unbalanced final product: it's a technical achievement or a quality story, but rarely both. EKO, a new video platform that responds to the viewer's input, may finally have balanced the scales. Audiences are invited to experience a trio of interactive shorts built on this new platform: The Gleam, an interactive documentary about a small town paper; That Moment When, a comedy that asks the viewer to navigate a battery of awkward conversations; and Now/Then, a Rashomon-inspired story focused on the various perspectives swirling around a relationship on the rocks.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, October 1 & 2
Giant
Milica Zec, Winslow Turner Porter III
Virtual Reality, 2016, USA, 10m
Virtual reality has been so central to recent discussions of interactive storytelling that it's easy to forget that the form is still relatively new. With the ability to drop the viewer into an immersive environment, it's no wonder that early conversations about VR stories focus on the empathy between audiences and subjects. This is used to startling effect in Giant. Transported to a basement shelter in an active war zone, we watch - and listen - as parents try to distract their daughter from the thunder of bombs. This is more than a film rendered in 360 degrees; it's a testament to the power of this nascent form of storytelling.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, October 1 & 2
Late Shift
Baptiste Planche, Tobias Weber
Audience-Directed Narrative Feature, 2016, Switzerland, 80m
Are games and films on a collision course? It's a question asked every time emergent technologies broaden what's possible with a little code, a story, and the will to blend the two. Yet while cinematic games are commonplace, game-like films are not. The high-octane thriller Late Shift aims to change that. A parking attendant's world is turned upside down when he's forced to take part in a brazen heist, and the audience makes choices to shape the story via an app. The branching narrative is flawlessly executed, creating an in-theater experience as enjoyable for the casual viewer as the hardcore "player." U.S. Premiere
Howard Gilman Theater, Sunday October 2, 5:30pm
Lives in Transit
Global Lives Project
Video Installation, 2015/2016, USA
The San Francisco–based Global Lives Project produces long-form documentaries that capture the rich diversity of human experience and engender cross-cultural dialogue and understanding. Each 24-hour film provides a window onto a single day in the life of its subject. This latest iteration of the project, Lives in Transit, focuses on ten individuals who in their own ways are responsible for moving people and products throughout the world. Presented as a large-scale video installation, Lives in Transit is more than an exploration of ten unique people - it is a dynamic ground-level examination of our hyper-connected world. World Premiere
Walter Reade Theater's Furman Gallery, October 1-16
Priya's Mirror
Ram Devineni, Dan Goldman, Paromita Vohra, Shubra Prakash, Vikas Menon
Augmented Reality Installation, 2016, USA/India
Launched in 2014, Priya's Shakti was a first-of-its-kind fusion of augmented reality, comic books, and social engagement. The story of Priya, a rape survivor and modern-day superhero, shattered taboos that exist in India on the subject of violence against women. The second volume of this ongoing series, Priya's Mirror sees the heroine joining forces with acid attack survivors to take on the demon king Ahankar. As with its predecessor, Priya's Mirror makes use of augmented reality to bring the 2D world of the comic to vivid life and unlock a number of interactive story elements. World Premiere
Walter Reade Theater's Furman Gallery, October 1-16
Ricerca VR
Yo-Yo Lin, Will Cherry, Steve Dabal, Elle Callahan, Michael Matchen
Virtual Reality, 2016, USA, 15m
It's no coincidence that we are so moved by stories about quests. The search - for love, for forgiveness, for meaning - is an essential aspect of our humanity. In Ricerca (Italian for "search"), a man scours his memories for something lost, traversing a lush world rendered with a vibrant mix of 2D and stop-motion animation. Originally presented as a large-scale video installation, the reimagined piece employs virtual reality to extend its life beyond the gallery space, raising a compelling question: what will the relationship be between VR and the world of fine art?
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, October 1 & 2
Sherlock Holmes & The Internet of Things
Lance Weiler, Nick Fortugno
Immersive Storytelling Experience, 2016, USA
While one imagines that real criminal investigators hope for the shortest distance between crime and conviction, readers of detective fiction care more about the journey: the more twists the better. The same could be said for this ever-evolving storytelling experiment. Since its launch, participants from 20 countries have taken part in a project that uses the emergent web of connected digital devices to investigate mysteries with the world's favorite consulting detective. For the second year, NYFF invites audiences to step into Holmes's shoes to solve a string of crimes across Lincoln Center's campus.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, October 1 (1:00pm, 2:30pm, 4:00pm)
Sound Hunters
François Le Gall, Nicolas Blies
Immersive Storytelling Experience, 2015, France
Long before Lawrence Lessig, Austin Kleon, and Malcolm Gladwell each dubbed this the Age of the Remix, T. S. Eliot wrote, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." With Sound Hunters, the audience makes music by recording and remixing the sounds of the world around them. Created by François Le Gall and Nicolas Blies, this multifaceted project does more than make music from the audio of everyday life; each uploaded sound is a window onto its author's world, and every song created by the Sound Hunter community is as much a remix of distinctive life experiences as of unique audio elements.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, October 1 & 2
SPECIAL TALKS
ILMxLAB
Hilmar Koch and Nick Rasmussen, ILMxLAB
Founded in 2015, ILMxLAB fuses the talents of Lucasfilm, Industrial Light and Magic, and Skywalker Sound to create a new, collaborative space to experiment with stories across all visual media platforms - those we know well and those just being established. The lab encourages exploration, and, yes, even failure as a means for discovering new ways to tell and experience stories. Discovery is at the very heart of the lab's work. Hilmar Koch and Nick Rasmussen will share some of their personal discoveries from their journey so far and reflect on the promise and perils of working at the frontiers of storytelling.
Saturday, October 1, 4:00pm
The Psychology of Storytelling: Lindsay Doran
Oscar-nominated producer and studio executive Lindsay Doran brings more than 30 years of experience in the movie business to bear on this examination of what the field of Positive Psychology can teach us about the secrets of writing a satisfying movie - and how our "deep-seated fear of the saber-tooth tiger" keeps them secret. Doran has served as the President of United Artists and as the President of Sydney Pollack's Mirage Productions. Doran's first film credit was on the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. As a producer, her credits include Dead Again, Sense and Sensibility, Nanny McPhee, and Stranger Than Fiction.
Monday October 3, 2016, 6:30pm
The State of the (Interactive) Art
StoryCode's Mike Knowlton, interactive theater director Michael Rau, filmmaker Ram Devineni, and more
The NYC Transmedia Meetup was founded as a monthly gathering of creative professionals looking to discuss the emerging field of multi-platform storytelling. By 2011, the group had evolved from a loose confederation of storytellers into a community that would become known as StoryCode. That same year, NYFF launched its Convergence section. On the fifth anniversary of both programs, StoryCode cofounder Mike Knowlton and a panel of key players from the New York interactive scene - Convergence veterans, game designers, immersive theater directors, virtual reality producers, and interactive filmmakers - reflect on where we've been and imagine where we're headed.
Saturday October 1, 2:30pm
Traveling While Black: Special Preview Event
Roger Ross Williams, Bonnie Nelson Schwartz, Lina Srivastava, Yasmin Elayat
Published in 1936, the Green Book became an essential tool for African American travelers. The book consisted of a coast-to-coast listing of bars, hotels, and other businesses that were black-friendly in the age of Jim Crow. Traveling While Black presents a contemporary exploration of the issues related to restricted movement in modern-day America with a suite of experiences including a traveling museum exhibit, virtual reality films, and live events. Academy Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams will present a sneak peek of this compelling project, including a live performance, a teaser of the project's first VR piece, and a panel discussion.
Tuesday, October 4, 6:30 pm
PROJECTIONS (aka VIEWS FROM THE AVANT-GARDE)
Program 1: THE SPACES BETWEEN THE WORDS
Friday, October 7, 4:00pm
Saturday, October 8, 3:00pm
TRT: 81m
REGAL
Karissa Hahn, USA, 2015, 16mm, 2m
An old Regal Cinemas pre-show animation is further degraded as it's run through a ringer of format transfers, each layer representing a different viewing space.
Steve Hates Fish
John Smith, UK, 2015, 5m
Recorded from a smartphone screen, its translation app running on the wrong settings and struggling to interpret North London street signs in French and convert them to English, Steve Hates Fish turns errors into unintentional poetry.
Real Italian Pizza
David Rimmer, Canada, 1971, 16mm, 13m
Scenes outside a Manhattan pizza joint, shot over eight months from a fourth-floor apartment window. Men stand eating their slices and drinking their sodas alone; groups of friends and neighborhood acquaintances, mostly black, hang out, talking and laughing; a few cops, all white, march a man away in handcuffs; summer turns to winter. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.
Now: End of Season
Ayman Nahle, Lebanon, 2015, 20m
U.S. Premiere
In the cosmopolitan Turkish city of Izmir, thousands of Syrians fleeing Assad, ISIS, and the proxy forces lined up behind them, bide their time, waiting to cross the Aegean Sea. On the soundtrack, voices from a previous war.
See a Dog, Hear a Dog
Jesse McLean, USA, 2016, 18m
World Premiere
This tragicomic analysis of communication between humans, animals, and machines was made with original video footage, computer animations, and internet media, including YouTube dog videos, chatbot dialogue windows, and images from iTunes visualizer.
Twixt Cup and Lip
Stephen Sutcliffe, UK, 2016, 23m
World Premiere
This sound and video collage, produced in conjunction with a museum exhibit about Yorkshire playwright and novelist David Storey, draws from BBC outtakes, Edwardian-nostalgic commercial design, and other sources of mid-century British middlebrow to consider the vagaries of class mobility.
Program 2: BEYOND LANDSCAPE
Friday, October 7, 6:30pm
Saturday, October 8, 5:15pm
TRT: 78m
Burning Mountains That Spew Flame / Montañas Ardientes Que Vomitan Fuego
Helena Girón and Samuel Delgado, Spain, 2016, 14m
U.S. Premiere
Scientific claims made by 17th-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher and political ones made by the Invisible Committee are examined in this journey into the volcanoes of Lanzarote.
Bending to Earth
Rosa Barba, USA/Germany, 2015, 35mm, 15m
Helicopter shots circle variously colored shapes carved into desert landscapes. We discover these manmade inscriptions are storage cells for radioactive material designed to eventually return to the soil.
Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon
Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan, 2016, 16mm, 10m
U.S. Premiere
Delivering exactly what his title promises - but not necessarily in the order you'd expect - Nishikawa presents 20 sequences shot along Japan's Yahagi River; images tautly suspended between stillness and movement, darkness and light.
Canadian Pacific I
David Rimmer, Canada, 1974, 16mm, 9m
Scenes taken from a single, second-floor view of Vancouver Harbor, recorded over three winter months, pieced together with subtle dissolves so as to resemble one ten-minute shot. "Its formalism is very unimposing," wrote Jonas Mekas, "like in a Hudson School painting."
Jáaji Approx.
Sky Hopinka, USA, 2015, 8m
Hopkina's video address to his father is made of landscape images saturated with dark shadow and dreamy light, and features his father's own words taken from recordings of Hocak language songs and chants.
Bad Mama, Who Cares
Brigid McCaffrey, USA, 2016, 35mm, 12m
World Premiere
Geologist Ren Lallatin inhabits different spaces - of brilliant snow and blazing sun, rundown towns and little-trodden deserts - in this structural-lyrical landscape film shot on richly tinted film.
Ears, Nose and Throat
Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 2016, 10m
Everson returns to his hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, in this unblinking look at the simultaneity of the tragic and the mundane in black American life. The subject is the 2010 murder of 25-year-old DeCarrio Couley, who appeared in a number of Everson's earlier films.
Program 3: THE ILLINOIS PARABLES
Friday, October 7, 8:45pm
TRT: 70m
The Illinois Parables
Deborah Stratman, USA, 2016, 16mm, 60m
Eleven episodes from the history of Illinois stand in for the United States at large. Working in her essayistic, political mode, Deborah Stratman synthesizes an array of materials into a rigorous yet playful consideration of the catastrophe of the state and the resilience of those who make up the nation.
Preceded by
The Horses of a Cavalry Captain / Die Pferde des Rittmeisters
Clemens von Wedemeyer, Germany, 2015, 10m
North American Premiere
During World War II, Wehrmacht captain Harald von Vietinghoff-Riesch traveled in advance of the army scouting for barracks. An amateur cinematographer, he also made 16mm images behind the front. Part of a larger project, Die pferde des Rittmeisters, made by Vietinghoff-Riesch's grandson, presents footage of the cavalry horses, the artist's commentary never letting us forget that these attractive creatures were also Nazi machines.
Program 4: FADE OUT
Saturday, October 8, 2:00pm
Saturday, October 8, 7:30pm
TRT: 76m
Old Hat
Zach Iannazzi, USA, 2016, 16mm, 8m
A scrapbook of 16mm images made on the fly, the length of each determined by the position of the Bolex spring when the shot begins. Some shove past as quickly as slides in a carousel advanced at top speed; others - etching the explosive ascent of fireworks in high-contrast white, or the arc of the setting sun on the mirrored glass of an office tower - linger.
Flowers of the Sky
Janie Geiser, USA, 2016, 9m
U.S. Premiere
Named after a medieval term for comets, Flowers of the Sky finds a seemingly infinite number of ways of looking at and into two mid-century postcards depicting the Freemasonic Order of the Eastern Star, using a macro lens and a variety of printing and masking techniques.
Answer Print
Mónica Savirón, USA, 2016, 16mm, 5m
World Premiere
Answer Print is assembled with pieces of deteriorating 16mm color stock. Not only the images themselves but also the world that produced them and which they reproduce - here suspended in the red aspic of faded color dye - threatens to disappear.
Athyrium filix-femina (for Anna Atkins)
Kelly Egan, Canada, 2016, 35mm, 5m
World Premiere
This homage to botanist and photography pioneer Anna Atkins was made in cyanotype photograms and reanimated film stills on stock exposed in the sun. Handcrafted with historically domestic, feminine tools, it's structured as a narrative in quilting patterns.
Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper
David Rimmer, Canada, 1970, 16mm, 9m
This classic work of Canadian structural cinema consists of an eight-second shot of a woman in a factory unrolling a spool of cellophane in sheets, which crash like waves toward the camera. Rimmer loops the image, replaying it in segments that give it different visual and aural treatments. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.
Ghost Children
Joao Vieira Torres, Brazil/France, 2016, 17m
North American Premiere
Ghost Children presents seven reminiscences of early childhood, read in seven different voices, as the camera presses close against the faded dye and exaggerated grain of family photographs from the early 1980s. The film encourages the audience to interrogate assumptions about gender, memory, performance, and death.
Cilaos
Camilo Restrepo, France, 2016, 13m
U.S. Premiere
A woman takes her mother's dying wish to the father she never knew; he is dead but not gone from the Réunion Islands village of Cilaos, historically a Maroon community. With the collaboration of renowned singer Christine Salem, Restrepo develops a trans-diasporic narrative form built on the slave rhythms of Réunionese maloya and Colombian mapalé.
Luna e Santur
Joshua Gen Solondz, USA, 2016, 35mm, 11m
U.S. Premiere
Mingling sex and death with the supernatural and subnaturalistic, this visually assaultive threnody alternates white hot light with furious streaks of cruddy black goop, pushing the eye and the ego to their breaking points.
Program 5: SITE AND SOUND
Saturday, October 8, 4:15pm
Sunday, October 9, 12:30pm
TRT: 84m
Indefinite Pitch
James N. Kienitz Wilkins, USA, 2016, 23m
A procession of black and silvery white stills of New England's Androscoggin River unspools alongside an anxious monologue on movies, memory, and minor history.
Europa, Mon Amour (2016 Brexit Edition)
Lawrence Lek, UK, 2016, 14m
North American Premiere
This guided, two-part meditation on Brexit unfolds in a computer-simulated hallucination of the London district of Dalston, a place with no people but filled with drones and fires.
Strange Vision of Seeing Things
Ryan Ferko, Canada/Serbia, 2016, 14m
U.S. Premiere
Time-spaces of post-Yugoslav Serbia: the empty lobby of a defunct industrial conglomerate's headquarters in Belgrade; an unseen man describing tripping on acid during the 1999 NATO bombings; a mother and her young son visit ruins left by that same campaign. At first they appear in crisp HD, but cracks form, revealing dimensions beneath the smooth surface.
Foyer
Ismaïl Bahri, France/Tunisia, 2016, 32m
U.S. Premiere
A white haze flutters on-screen, accompanied by street sounds in Tunis. Indistinct shapes appear as passersby engage the cameraman about his project and their lives. He tells one of them, "The wind does the editing."
Program 6: ALL THE CITIES OF THE NORTH
Saturday, October 8, 6:45pm
All the Cities of the North / Svi severni gradovi
Dane Komljen, Serbia/Bosnia-Herzegovina/Montenegro, 2016, 100m
North American Premiere
In the darkly wooded grounds and concrete boxes of what was once a Yugoslav resort complex, two men share an enigmatic, tender life. A stranger comes to town; things change, but how, what, and why remain ambiguous. In Komljen's richly suggestive, quietly moving elegy to lost utopias, no words are exchanged, and speech only comes in monologues, taking up questions on the architecture and administration of human sociality.
Program 7: POP CULTURE CLASH
Saturday, October 8, 9:30pm
Sunday, October 9, 3:00pm
TRT: 63m
A Boy Needs a Friend
Steve Reinke, USA, 2015, 22m
This latest installment of Final Thoughts, the series of unreliably narrated queer video essays that Reinke intends to continue until his death, takes love and friendship as its main subjects. Onto this he latches a long chain of endless digressions, which include, among much else, Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates, the pleasures of needlepoint, and the design of an anal tattoo.
Spotlight on a Brick Wall
Alee Peoples and Mike Stoltz, USA, 2016, 16mm, 8m
An abstracted nightclub performance, its constituent parts - stand-up comedy, a capella, a laconic bass-and-drum rock duo, a slapstick mime - wrenched apart and recombined.
Return to Forms
Zachary Epcar, USA, 2016, 10m
World Premiere
The surfaces and shapes of typical international contempo yuppie style are defamiliarized, staged in and around a condo in an unnamed urban environment.
Dream English Kid, 1964–1999 AD
Mark Leckey, UK, 2015, 16mm, 23m
North American Premiere
Dream English Kid traces the cultural developments in the life of a working-class English boy, between the start of the Nuclear Test Ban and Azzido Da Bass's first EP, as a collage of images and sounds, locating the broadly shared within the idiosyncratic and personal.
Program 8: DORSKY AND HILER
Sunday, October 9, 1:00pm
Sunday, October 9, 5:00pm
TRT: 65m
Autumn
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2016, 16mm, 26m
World Premiere
"Autumn, photographed during the last months of the drought year, 2015, is a stately, but intimate, seasonal tome, a celebration of the poignancy and mystery of our later years." - Nathaniel Dorsky
The Dreamer
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2016, 16mm, 19m
World Premiere
"This year our midsummer's night was adorned with a glorious full moon. The weeks and days preceding the solstice were magically alive with crisp, cool breezes, bright warm sunlight, and a general sense of heartbreaking clarity. The Dreamer is born out of this most poignant San Francisco spring." - Nathaniel Dorsky
Bagatelle II
Jerome Hiler, USA, 2016, 16mm, 20m
World Premiere
"With Bagatelle II, I seem to have come full circle by returning to the so-called polyvalent style of my earliest film endeavors from 50 years ago. The film actually includes material from all the intervening decades. It's both up to the moment yet life-spanning, with a thread of deep affection for the special characteristics of 16mm film." - Jerome Hiler
Program 9: EVENT HORIZONS
Sunday, October 9, 3:15pm
Sunday, October 9, 7:00pm
TRT: 81m
Há Terra!
Ana Vaz, Brazil/France, 2016, 13m
U.S. Premiere
The camera jerks quickly across a field in the Brazilian Sertão, homing in on a young Maroon woman crouching in the tall grass. A hand feels around in the brush, caressing the earth. From these two images, Ana Vaz's film proceeds on tracks that neither fully merge nor completely diverge, expressing the incommensurability of filmmaker and subject.
Kindah
Ephraim Asili, USA/Jamaica, 2016, 12m
World Premiere
Shot between the Maroon village of Accompong, Jamaica, and Hudson, New York, the alternately sparse and exultantly polyrhythmic Kindah is part of a series of films examining the filmmaker's relationship to the African diaspora. The title alludes to the mango tree that symbolizes common kinship in the Jamaican Maroon culture.
In Titan's Goblet
Peter Hutton, USA, 1991, 16mm, 9m
Titled after a painting by Thomas Cole, this work of Hudson River School landscape filmmaking by the late Peter Hutton is a study of ships and smoke on the water.
An Aviation Field / Um Campo de Aviação
Joana Pimenta, Portugal/USA/Brazil, 2016, 13m
U.S. Premiere
Using warm, darkly saturated 16mm images shot on the volcanic island of Fogo, Cape Verde, and in modernist Brasilia, and sounds that range between trebly crackle and aquatic gurgle, Pimenta constructs a surreal and mythical landscape from the remnants of Portuguese colonialism.
Electrical Gaza
Rosalind Nashashibi, UK, 2015, 18m
Commissioned by London's Imperial War Museum, Electrical Gaza combines vérité documentary scenes of public life in Gaza shot by Nashashibi in 2014, portraits of her crew, and uncanny, painterly computer animations modeled from the footage, rendering it unreal - as the Israeli government would claim and Palestinians would like to make it.
Event Horizon
Guillermo Moncayo, France, 2015, 16m
A story modeled on 19th-century ethnography and colonialist travel literature unfolds in titles written in a mythological register. Lush images and sounds accrue a level of detail that refuses knowledge and courts being.
Program 10: FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF . . .
Sunday, October 9, 5:30pm
TRT: 55m
From the Notebook of…
Robert Beavers, Italy/Switzerland, 1971/1998, 35mm, 48m
North American Restoration Premiere
An essential film by one of cinema's living masters, forged from the brilliant light of Florence streets and the shadow of an old pensionne, this astounding work of public science and private experience was inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks. According to P. Adams Sitney, this is "the first film of [Beavers'] artistic maturity."
Preceded by
For Christian
Luke Fowler, UK/USA, 2016, 16mm, 7m
Fowler's portrait of New York School composer Christian Wolff continues his investigation into the legacies of 20th-century avant-garde music. Short, handheld shots taken at Wolff's New Hampshire farm are assembled in diagonal relation to a soundtrack that features snippets of conversation with Wolff and passages from his compositions.
Program 11: THE HUMAN SURGE
Sunday, October 9, 7:30pm
TRT: 97m
The Human Surge / El auge del humano
Eduardo Williams, Argentina/Brazil/Portugal, 2016, 97m
U.S. Premiere
A twenty-something in Argentina loses his warehouse job. Boys in Maputo, Mozambique, perform half-hearted sex acts in front of a webcam. A woman in the Philippines assembles electronics in a small factory. Williams's inquisitive camera is in constant motion, as are his rootless characters, who wander aimlessly, make small talk, futz with their phones, and search for a working Internet connection. Unfolding within the unfree time between casual jobs, this wildly original rumination on labor and leisure in the global digital economy seems to take place in both the immediate present and the far horizon of the foreseeable future. Winner of the top prize in the 2016 Locarno Film Festival's Filmmakers of the Present section.
DIRECTORS DIALOGUES
