Thursday, August 16, 2012
2012 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL -- NYFF50!
THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
2012 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
NYFF 50
September 28-October 14
September 28-October 14
MAIN SLATE
The festival will open with Ang Lee's LIFE OF PI
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2012
and close with Zemeckis' FLIGHT starring Denzel Washington.
CLOSING NIGHT
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2012
The selections include major award winners at major prize-awarding festivals (NYFF itself does not award prizes... other than being accepted), films by important new directors and major returning directors, and films of many styles, from straight-forward narrative, to absurdist, surrealist cinema. The oldest filmmaker is 90 year old Alain Renais, who challenges with YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET. Renais is a returning filmmaker: his film MURIEL, OR THE TIME OF RETURN screened at the very first New York Film Festival!
A quartet of World Premieres among the main slate lineup include Alan Berliner’s unflinching essay on the fragility of being human, FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED, joining the Opening Night, Centerpiece and Closing Night Gala trio of Ang Lee’s LIFE OF PI, (Opening Night), David Chase’s NOT FADE AWAY (Centerpiece) and Robert Zemeckis’s FLIGHT (Closing Night).
Films that have won awards earlier this year at major festivals and are coming to NY for the first time include:
- The universally acclaimed winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, AMOUR, Michael Haneke’s portrait of a couple dealing with the ravages of old age, with Haneke returning to NYFF following the presentation of THE WHITE RIBBON in 2009;
- Christian Petzold’s Cold War thriller, BARBARA, a winner of the SIlver Bear for Best Director at this year’s Berlin Film Festival;
- Cristian Mungiu’s BEYOND THE HILLS, a portrait of dogma at odds with personal liberty in a society still emerging from the shadow of Communism, featuring screen newcomers Flutur and Stratan who shared the Best Actress prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Mungiu also received the Best Screenplay award. The presentation will also mark a return to the film festival by Mungiu (4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS, NYFF 2007).
- Two debut features include Antonio Mendez Esparza’s film about the US/Mexican border experience, HERE AND THERE, the winner of the Grand Prize at this year’s Critics Week in Cannes, and Song Fang’s film about a woman that travels from Beijing to Nanjing for a visit with her family, MEMORIES LOOK AT ME, the winner of the Best First Feature prize at this year’s Locarno Film Festival.
- Pablo Larrain’s engrossing political thriller NO, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, was the winner of the top prize in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, and
- Miguel Gomes’s surrealist drama TABU was the winner of the Alfred Bauer Prize (for a work of particular innovation) and FIPRESCI (International Film Critics) award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Additional returning NYFF filmmakers are; João Pedro Rodrigues (TO DIE LIKE A MAN, NYFF 2009) with THE LAST TIME I SAW MACAO; Olivier Assayas (CARLOS, NYFF 2010), with SOMETHING IN THE AIR; Lucien Castaing-Taylor (SWEETGRASS, NYFF 2009) and Véréna Paravel (FOREIGN PARTS, NYFF 2010), with LEVIATHAN; Abbas Kiarostami (CERTIFIED COPY, NYFF 2010), with LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE; and -- as mentioned -- the 90-year-old Alain Resnais, whose MURIEL, OR THE TIME OF RETURN screened at the very first New York Film Festival, returns with YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET.
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2012
Founded in 1963, the New York Film Festival is North America’s second oldest film festival, launching just as the auteur theory and European cinematic modernism were crashing upon the shores of American film culture. 50 years later, NYFF continues to introduce audiences to the most exciting, innovative and accomplished works of world cinema.
Additional special events, sidebars, panels and first–time programs will be announced in subsequent weeks as well as additional programming to complement the main-slate of films, including NYFF’s Masterworks programs and Views from the Avant-Garde, which will include additional works by Main Slate filmmakers João Pedro Rodrigues and Raul Ruiz.
The 50th New York Film Festival main-slate:
Opening Night Gala Selection
LIFE OF PI
Director: Ang Lee
Centerpiece Gala Selection
NOT FADE AWAY
Director: David Chase
Closing Night Gala Selection
FLIGHT
Director: Robert Zemeckis
AMOUR
Director: Michael Haneke
ARAF – SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN
Director: Yeşim Ustaoğlu
BARBARA
Director: Christian Petzold
BEYOND THE HILLS (După dealuri)
Director: Cristian Mungiu
BWAKAW
Director: Jun Robles Lana
CAESAR MUST DIE (Cesare deve morire)
Directors: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
CAMILLE REWINDS (Camille redouble)
Director: Noémie Lvovsky
THE DEAD MAN AND BEING HAPPY (El muerto y ser feliz)
Director: Javier Rebello
FILL THE VOID (Lemale et ha'halal)
Director: Rama Burshtein
FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED
Director: Alan Berliner
FRANCES HA
Director: Noah Baumbach
THE GATEKEEPERS (Shomerei Ha’saf)
Director: Dror Moreh
GINGER AND ROSA
Director: Sally Potter
HERE AND THERE (Aquí y Allá)
Director: Antonio Mendez Esparza
HOLY MOTORS
Director: Leos Carax
HYDE PARK ON HUDSON
Director: Roger Michell
KINSHASA KIDS
Director: Marc-Henri Wajnberg
THE LAST TIME I SAW MACAO (A Última Vez Que Vi Macau)
Director: João Pedro Rodrigues
LEVIATHAN
Directors: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
LINES OF WELLINGTON (Linhas de Wellington)
Director: Valeria Sarmiento
MEMORIES LOOK AT ME (Ji Yi Wang Zhe Wo)
Director: Song Fang
NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET (La Noche de enfrente)
Director: Raul Ruiz
NO
Director: Pablo Larrain
OUR CHILDREN (À perdre la raison)
Director: Joachim Lafosse
PASSION
Director: Brian De Palma
SOMETHING IN THE AIR (Après Mai)
Director: Olivier Assayas
TABU
Director: Miguel Gomes
YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET (Vous n'avez encore rien vu)
Director: Alain Resnais
The selection committee, chaired by Peña also includes: Melissa Anderson, Contributor, Village Voice; Scott Foundas, Associate Program Director, The Film Society of Lincoln Center; Todd McCarthy, Chief Film Critic, The Hollywood Reporter; and Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor, Film Comment and Sight and Sound.
General Public tickets will be available September 9th. There will be an advance ticketing opportunity for Film Society of Lincoln Center Patrons and Members prior to that date. For more information visit www.Filmlinc.com/NYFF or call 212 875 5601.
50TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Films & Descriptions
AMOUR (2012) 127min
Director: Michael Haneke
Country: Austria/France/Germany
The universally acclaimed winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, AMOUR is arguably Michael Haneke’s crowning achievement to date, a portrait of a couple dealing with the ravages of old age that is as compassionate as it is merciless. The great veteran French actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva are staggering as Georges and Anne, long-married music teachers living out their final years surrounded by the comforts of books and music in their warm Paris apartment. After Anne suffers a stroke, Georges attends to her with firmness shot through with love. The underlying unease, as well as some abrupt surprises, are hardly unexpected from Haneke, who challenges the viewer to confront the experience of his characters as directly as he does. But he rewards the effort with a film that is all the more moving for its complete avoidance of sentimentality. An unquestionable masterpiece. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
ARAF – SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN (2012) 124min
Director: Yeşim Ustaoğlu
Country: Turkey/France/Germany
The title refers as much to the film’s main location—a tiny Turkish town comprised of no more than a few houses and a large motorway rest stop where the locals work impossibly long hours—as it does to adolescence, the way station where the child transforms into an adult. What seems at first like a piece of low-key realism comes into dramatic focus when an adolescent girl begins an obsessive sexual relationship with a middle-aged trucker, fueling the fury of the teen-aged boy who hoped to marry her. Yesim Ustaoglu, whose debut feature JOURNEY TO THE SUN is one of the treasures of the New Turkish cinema, is not only a visual poet of her country’s harshly beautiful landscapes; she also depicts with great empathy and uncompromising honesty the heart’s desires and the body’s needs.
BARBARA (2012) 105min
Director: Christian Petzold
Country: Germany
Set in 1980, Christian Petzold’s latest masterfully controlled, absorbing work centers around a doctor—played by the incomparable Nina Hoss, in her fifth film with the director—exiled to a small town from East Berlin as punishment for applying for an exit visa from the GDR. Planning to flee for Denmark with her boyfriend, Barbara remains icy and withdrawn around her colleagues, particularly with the lead physician (the excellent Ronald Zehrfeld), who is hiding a secret of his own. With her patients, however, the guarded doctor is kind, warm, and protective, even risking her own safety for one of her charges. This subtle, perfectly calibrated Cold War thriller expertly details the costs of telling and withholding the truth. Winner of the SIlver Bear for Best Director at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. An Adopt Films Release.
BEYOND THE HILLS (După dealuri) (2012) 150min
Director: Cristian Mungiu
Country: Romania
This harrowing, visually stunning new film from director Cristian Mungiu (4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS) unfolds in and around a remote monastery where pious young women toil dutifully under the ever-watchful eye of an austere priest known as Papa (the excellent Valeriu Andriuta). As the film opens, Alina (Cristina Flutur) arrives to visit her friend Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), one of the nuns in training. As children, the two women lived together in an orphanage where the tough, short-tempered Alina served as a protector for her more delicate friend. Now, Alina wants Voichita to leave her cloistered life and return with her to Germany, but as the fateful hour draws near, Voichita seems disinclined to go, and so Alina stays on for a while, which is when the real trouble begins. Inspired by a case of alleged demonic possession that occurred in Romania’s Moldova region in 2005, BEYOND THE HILLS is not a supernatural film but rather an all too believable portrait of dogma at odds with personal liberty in a society still emerging from the shadow of Communism. For their remarkable lead performances, screen newcomers Flutur and Stratan shared the Best Actress prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Mungiu also received the Best Screenplay award. A Sundance Selects release.
BWAKAW (2012) 110min
Director: Jun Robles Lana
Country: Philippines
BWAKAW is the film you hope for at any festival, a work by an unknown director that comes out of nowhere to captivate and enthrall with its emotional truth, high humor and sage assessment of the human condition. Filipino cinema great Eddie Garcia gives a career-capping performance as Rene, a 70-plus single gent in a quiet provincial town who, having alienated almost everyone with his caustic comments, is resigned to seeing out his days alone, save for the company of his loyal canine companion (whose name gives the movie its title). Rene has his secrets but is disinclined to share them until he befriends a brawny tricycle taxi driver. Employing frequent outrageous humor, director Jun Robles Lana elegantly captures the quality of everyday life in this backwater while crafting a superior character study of a man who has allowed most of life to pass him by until an emotional jolt emboldens him to go where he's never dared venture before.
CAESAR MUST DIE (Cesare deve morire) (2012) 76min
Directors: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
Country: Italy
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Padre Padrone, The Night of the Shooting Stars) triumphantly reasserted their eminence among modern Italian directors by winning the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival with CAESAR MUST DIE. The sight of inmates putting on a play in prison is not entirely new, but beginning with the brilliant opening scenes of convicts with wildly differing accents and backgrounds auditioning for the immortal roles of Brutus, Anthony, Cassius and, most impressively and menacingly, the title character in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, this approach resonates in ways that both Pirandello and Brecht would have appreciated. The play’s director must not only help guide these amateurs in their performances, but is also forced to police real-life rivalries and rages that threaten to derail the production before it can ever be seen. Vital, provocative and entirely engaging, CAESAR marks a wonderful late-career triumph for this still-formidable brother act. An Adopt Films release.
CAMILLE REWINDS (Camille redouble) (2012) 110min
Director: Noémie Lvovsky
Country: France
Noémie Lvovsky’s ebullient twist on the comedy of remarriage transposes Frances Ford Coppola’s PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED to present day France, which means that when the titular Camille—who’s in the throes of divorcing her husband of 25 years—passes out drunk, she wakes up as a high school senior in the mid-1980s (leg warmers, “Walking on Sunshine” on the turntable, and no cell phones in sight.) Lvovsky is hilarious and touchingly vulnerable as Camille. Hard as she tries to avoid the classmate (Samir Guesmi) who she knows will become her first love, her husband, and the father of her daughter, and who will ditch her after she turns 40, she nevertheless winds up in his arms. Her double take, just before their lips meet for a first kiss the second time around, is indescribably delicious. In the tiny role of a watchmaker who may have set Camille’s time travel in motion, New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud is perfect.
THE DEAD MAN AND BEING HAPPY (El muerto y ser feliz) (2012) 94min
Director: Javier Rebello
Country: Spain/Argentina
For his third feature, the gifted Spanish director Javier Rebollo (WOMAN WITHOUT PIANO) has decamped to Argentina and created a literate, screwball road movie that Borges surely would have loved. The “dead man” of the title is Santos (veteran Spanish screen star José Sacristán), a cancer-stricken hired killer who flees his Buenos Aires hospital bed and sets off on one last assignment. It is a journey that takes him through an interior Argentina rarely glimpsed in movies, from the Cordoba resort town of La Cumbrecita (with its disproportionate—and disconcerting—population of elderly Germans) to the northern province of Santiago del Estero. Along the way, Santos finds himself joined by Alejandra (the wonderful Roxana Blanco), an attractive middle-aged woman who impulsively jumps into his vintage Ford Falcon at a gas station and soon thwarts him from his intended path. At one point, our curious couple stops off at a decrepit beach town described by one of the film’s dueling voice-over narrators as “a strange mix of paradise and apocalypse”—which, as it happens, also perfectly sums up Rebollo’s playful and unexpectedly moving reverie on love, death and the open highway.
FILL THE VOID (Lemale et ha'halal) (2012) 90min
Director: Rama Burshtein
Country: Israel
With her first dramatic feature, writer-director Rama Burshtein has created a work that is very likely unprecedented: a woman's view of Tel Aviv's ultra-orthodox Hasidic community from the inside. Typically, a story about a devout 18-year-old Israeli being pressured to marry the husband of her late sister, would include the option of the woman declaring her independence in the modern fashion. Such a choice is not even on the table in this cloistered, intimately rendered world where religious law, tradition and the rabbis' word are absolute. A graduate of the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem and Hassidic herself, Burshtein startlingly brings to life a world known to few in this provocative, undeniably talented debut from a most unlikely source.
WORLD PREMIERE
FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED (2012) 78min
Director: Alan Berliner
Country: USA
Sometime in the new millennium, Edwin Honig—the distinguished poet, translator, critic and university professor—began showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease, which gradually but inexorably brought on the loss of his memory, command of language and relation to the past. Filmmaker Alan Berliner—for whom Honig was a cousin, a friend and a mentor—documented their meetings over five years; his new film chronicles the steady decline of Honig’s mind and body, but also the strength and stamina of his spirit, as well as his innate charm and wonderfully playful way with words and sounds. Occasional moments of lucidity offer an insight as to the ways in which Honig attempts to make sense out of what is happening to him. FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED is an unflinching essay on the fragility of being human, and a stark reminder of the profound role that memory plays in all of our lives. An HBO Documentary Films release.
WORLD PREMIERE
FLIGHT (2012) 138min
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Country: USA
Triumphantly returning to live-action filmmaking for the first time since Cast Away 12 years ago, Robert Zemeckis teams with Denzel Washington on the tense and edgy thriller FLIGHT. In a brilliant, heart-stopping sequence, pilot Whip Whitacker (Washington), after an all-nighter of booze, sex and drugs, boldly guides a crippled airliner to a crash landing that nearly all the passengers survive. Although he is acclaimed as a hero, the legal, moral and ethical aspects of Whip’s behavior before and after the accident are much more ambiguous than initially meet the public eye. A study of addiction far more complex than the norm, FLIGHT is a compelling drama anchored by a great performance from one of our most distinguished actors. John Goodman, Don Cheadle, Melissa Leo and Kelly Reilly offer vibrant supporting turns in what is certain to be one of the most talked-about movies of the season. A Paramount Pictures release.
FRANCES HA (2012) 86min
Director: Noah Baumbach
Country: USA
Reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s celebration of the mystery and vulnerability of his muse Anna Karina in BANDE Á PART, Noah Baumbach’s love poem to Greta Gerwig is an effervescent, seeming effortless comedy about a young woman taking the first shaky, post-Ivy League steps in what will become her real life. Gerwig, who also co-wrote the script, proves herself far more articulate and funny than any of her former Mumblecore colleagues. Her Frances arrives in New York determined to become a post-modern dancer despite the fact that she’s constantly falling over her feet or putting one of them in her mouth. The movie is lightning-in-a-bottle–deft, sophisticated, and, in its myriad shades of digital gray, radiantly beautiful in a brand new way.
THE GATEKEEPERS (Shomerei Ha’saf) (2012) 90min
Director: Dror Moreh
Country: Israel
Since its stunning military victory in 1967, Israel has hoped to transform its battlefield success into the basis for long-lasting peace. Simply put, this hasn’t happened: 45 years later, violence continues unabated while the mistrust between both sides increases daily. In what can only be called an historic achievement, filmmaker Dror Moreh has brought together six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s Secret Service, who reflect on their successes and failures to maintain security while responding to the shifting politics and imperatives of the “peace process.” Each man weighs in on topics ranging from preemptive strikes to confronting terrorists both Palestinian and Israeli; their thoughts and responses are candid, well-informed and rarely short of remarkable. An insider’s guide—and what insiders!—to five decades of Israeli history, THE GATEKEEPERS will surely be one of the most widely and hotly discussed films of the year.
A Sony Pictures Classics release.
GINGER AND ROSA (2012) 89min
Director: Sally Potter
Country: UK
In 1962 London, two teenage girls, best friends since they were toddlers, are driven apart by a scandalous betrayal. Making her NYFF debut, writer-director Sally Potter (ORLANDO, ND/NF 1993) has crafted an intimate, riveting coming-of-age story—one made all the more powerful by a revelatory performance by Elle Fanning as the bright, anxious Ginger, increasingly affected by both the misery of her parents (deftly played by Alessandro Nivola and Christina Hendricks) and the era’s all-too-real fears of nuclear destruction. As her private dramas unfold against the backdrop of broader historical terrors, Ginger proves to be one of cinema’s most fascinating and formidable young heroines. Talented newcomer Alice Englert, the daughter of filmmaker Jane Campion, makes her impressive feature film debut as the troubled Rosa.
HERE AND THERE (Aquí y Allá) (2012) 110min
Director: Antonio Mendez Esparza
Country: Spain/USA/Mexico
Pedro returns home to a small mountain village in Guerrero, Mexico after years of working in the U.S. His daughters feel more distant that he imagined, but his wife Teresa is delighted he’s back. With the money he’s earned he can create a better life for his family, and maybe even start the band with his cousins he’s dreamed about for years. But work back home remains scarce, and the temptation of heading back north of the border remains as strong as ever. Antonio Mendez Esparza has made a most remarkable debut; rarely, if ever, has a film about US/Mexican border experience felt so fresh or authentic. Using non-professionals, Mendez Esparza gets remarkably nuanced performances that gives a richness of nuance and detail to each of his characters that goes way beyond cliché and stereotype. Winner of the Grand Prize at this year’s Critics Week in Cannes.
HOLY MOTORS (2012) 115min
Director: Leos Carax
Country: France
This unclassifiable, expansive movie from Leos Carax (Lovers on the Bridge)—his first feature in 13 years—operates on the exhilarating logic of dreams and emotions. After a prologue in which Carax himself, clad in pajamas, walks through a corridor that leads to a theater full of silent spectators, HOLY MOTORS segues to actor Denis Lavant, Carax’s longtime collaborator, playing a mysterious man named Oscar who inhabits 11 different characters over the course of a single day. This shape-shifter is shuttled from appointment to appointment in Paris in a white-stretch limo driven by the soignée Edith Scob (EYES WITHOUT A FACE); not on the itinerary is an unplanned reunion with Kylie Minogue. To summarize the film any further would be to take away some of its magic; the most accurate précis comes from its own creator, who aptly described HOLY MOTORS after its world premiere in Cannes as “a film about a man and the experience of being alive.” An Indomina release.
HYDE PARK ON HUDSON (2012) 95min
Director: Roger Michell
Country: UK
Bill Murray provides a career-topping performance as President Franklin D. Roosevelt in this captivating, winningly acted comedy-drama that pulls back the curtain on the complicated domestic arrangements at FDR’s beautiful New York country estate. Told from the perspective of Roosevelt's little-known sixth cousin Margaret “Daisy” Suckley (Laura Linney), a member of the president's intimate inner circle of women, HYDE PARK ON HUDSON revolves around the royal visit of King George VI (yes, him again!) to the United States on the eve of World War II. In a film both buoyantly comic and inescapably serious, screenwriter Richard Nelson and director Roger Michell (NOTTING HILL, VENUS) subtly examine the tricky dynamics of the chief executive's relationships with his wife, mother and devoted female staff while also taking stock of his ego, shrewd manipulations and consummate ability to win people's favor and confidence—most notably in the case of the insecure young king. It's an entrancing peek at a time when the personal secrets of our leaders were well and truly kept. A Focus Features release.
KINSHASA KIDS (2012) 85min
Director: Marc-Henri Wajnberg
Country: Belgium/France
Perhaps the most ebullient “musical” you’ll see this year, Marc-Henri Wajnberg’s singular documentary/fiction hybrid follows a group of street kids—kicked out of their homes for being “witch children”—in the titular Congolese capital. These ever-resourceful youngsters decide to form a band and team up with Bebson, an eccentric impresario and one-time recording star; he’s just one of many unforgettable adults who, whether as informal instructors, fellow musicians, or menacing pursuers, impact the lives of these indefatigable tykes. Completely devoid of sentimentality and condescension, KINSASHA KIDS celebrates and honors both the resilience of its young protagonists and the chaotic city in which they live.
THE LAST TIME I SAW MACAO (A Última Vez Que Vi Macau) (2012) 82min
Director: João Pedro Rodrigues
Country: Portugal/France
This stunning amalgam of playful film noir and Chris Marker–like cine-essay from João Pedro Rodrigues (TO DIE LIKE A MAN, NYFF 2009) and João Rui Guerra da Mata explores the psychic pull of the titular former Portuguese colony. After a spectacular opening scene, in which actress Cindy Scrash lip-synchs, as tigers pace behind her, to Jane Russell’s “You Kill Me”—from Josef von Sternberg’s MACAO (1952), a key reference here—the film shifts to da Mata’s off-screen recollections of growing up in this gambling haven in the South China Sea. He’s come back to Macao to help a friend who later vanishes—a mystery that begets not only poetic ruminations on time, place, and memory but also magnificent compositions of flora, fauna, and cityscapes. Rodrigues will also have his work presented during NYFF’s soon-to-be-announced Views From the Avant-Garde schedule.
LEVIATHAN (2012) 87min
Directors: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
Country: USA
Having previously immersed us into the worlds of Montana sheep herding and Queens auto salvaging, respectively, NYFF alumni Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgrass) and Véréna Paravel (Foreign Parts) team for another singular anthropological excavation, this time set inside one of the world’s most dangerous professions: the commercial fishing industry. Taking to the high seas of the North Atlantic—Herman Melville territory—the filmmakers capture this harsh, unforgiving world in all of its visceral, haunting, cosmic detail, using an arsenal of cameras that pass freely from film crew to ship crew, and swoop from below sea level to literal bird’s-eye views. The result is a hallucinatory sensory experience quite unlike any other. To paraphrase Francis Coppola describing his Apocalypse Now, LEVIATHAN isn’t a movie about commercial fishing; it is commercial fishing.
WORLD PREMIERE
LIFE OF PI (2012)
Director: Ang Lee
Country: USA
Based on the book that has sold more than seven million copies and spent years on the bestseller list, Academy Award winner Lee's LIFE OF PI takes place over three continents, two oceans, many years, and a wide world of imagination. Lee’s vision, coupled with game-changing technological breakthroughs, has turned a story long thought un-filmable into a totally original cinematic event and the first truly international all-audience motion picture. LIFE OF PI follows a young man who survives a disaster at sea and is hurtled into an epic journey of adventure and discovery. While marooned on a lifeboat, he forms an amazing and unexpected connection with the ship¹s only other survivor…a fearsome Bengal tiger. A Twentieth Century Fox release.
LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE (2012) 109min
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Country: Japan/Iran/France
Fresh from the triumph of his Tuscany-set CERTIFIED COPY (NYFF 2010), master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami travels even further afield from his native Iran for this mysteriously beautiful romantic drama filmed entirely in Japan. LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE revolves around the brief encounter between an elderly professor (the wonderful 81-year-old stage actor Tadashi Okuno, here playing his first leading role in a film) and a sociology student (Rin Takanashi) who moonlights as a high-end escort. Dispatched to the old man by her boss—one of the professor’s former students—the young woman finds her latest client less interested in sex than in cooking her soup, talking, and playing old Ella Fitzgerald records (like the one that gives the film its allusive title). Eventually, night gives way to day and a tense standoff with the student’s insanely jealous boyfriend (Ryō Kase); but as usual in Kiarostami, nothing is quite as it appears on the surface. Are these characters—who conjure in one another the specters of regret and roads not taken—meeting by chance, or is it fate? Is this love, or merely something like it? A Sundance Selects release.
LINES OF WELLINGTON (Linhas de Wellington) (2012) 151min
Director: Valeria Sarmiento
Country: France/Portugal
After conquering Spain, Napoleon Bonaparte sent a powerful army to invade Portugal in 1810. The French plowed through the resistance mounted against them until, as they approached Lisbon, they were met by a combined British and Portuguese army under the command of the Viscount Wellington. That’s the general historical outline for Valeria Sarmiento’s extraordinarily intimate epic of the Peninsular War. Along the way, we witness love affairs and treachery, noble action and selfish cruelty, from the highest social echelons to the most humble quarters. Prepared by the late Raul Ruiz from a screenplay by Carlos Saboga (Mysteries of Lisbon), LINES OF WELLINGTON was completed by Sarmiento—Ruiz’s longtime editor as well as his widow—who has created a revealing portrait of life during what has been called one of the first examples of “total war.” The all-star cast includes Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Elsa Zylberstein, Marisa Paredes, and John Malkovich as Wellington.
MEMORIES LOOK AT ME (Ji Yi Wang Zhe Wo) (2012) 91min
Director: Song Fang
Country: China
Song Fang’s remarkable directorial debut, in which she travels from Beijing to Nanjing for a visit with her family (many of whom play themselves), gracefully expounds on several poignant topics: how an adult child’s relationship with her parents changes as they grow older, and how to negotiate one’s place as a single woman in a world of married couples. Song, who many will remember for her wonderful performance as the nanny and aspiring filmmaker in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon (NYFF 2007), perfectly captures the rhythms of brief sojourns home, trips filled with reunions (both joyful and heart-wrenching), reminiscences, and moments of feeling painfully out of place. Winner of the Best First Feature prize at this year’s Locarno Film Festival.
NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET (La Noche de enfrente) (2012) 107min
Director: Raul Ruiz
Country: France/Chile
In August 2011, the cinema sadly lost one of its most magical artists, director Raul Ruiz—but, happily, not before he left us with one final masterpiece. Returning to his native Chile, Ruiz introduces us here to Don Celso, a bespectacled office worker heading into retirement. After an evening’s poetry class, Celso starts to narrate several tales from his childhood to his teacher, guiding the audience both within and outside the film through various levels of reality that mix the private and the public, the historical and the mythic, the here and the beyond. The journey is, of course, full of Ruizian flights of visual and verbal wit, where resonances between words and images form connections that at times defy traditional storytelling. NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET is both a moving meditation on one man’s mortality as well as an insightful summation of an artist’s brilliant career. A Cinema Guild release. Ruiz will also have his work presented during NYFF’s soon-to-be-announced Views From the Avant-Garde schedule.
NO (2012) 110min
Director: Pablo Larrain
Country: Chile/USA/Mexico
In 1988, in an effort to extend and legitimize its rule, the Pinochet military junta announced it would hold a plebiscite to get the people’s permission to stay in power. Despite being given 15 minutes a day to plead its case on television, the anti-Pinochet opposition was divided and without a clear message. Enter Rene Saavedra (an excellent Gael Garcia Bernal), an ad man who, after a career pushing soft drinks and soap, sets out to sell Chileans on democracy and freedom. Winner of the top prize in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, NO is little short of a miracle: shooting on U-matic video tape to give the film the look of the Eighties, filmmaker Pablo Larrain (TONY MANERO, POST MORTEM) has created a smart, funny and totally engrossing political thriller with a powerful resonance for our times. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
WORLD PREMIERE
NOT FADE AWAY (2012) 112min
Director: David Chase
Country: USA
The time is the 1960s, on the cusp of the summer of love. The place, suburban New Jersey. The music, 100 percent pure rock and roll. For his feature filmmaking debut, The Sopranos creator David Chase has crafted a wise, tender and richly atmospheric portrait of a group of friends trying to do what so many awkward suburban kids of the time dreamed of doing: form their own rock band. And these guys are good, fronted by a preternaturally gifted singer-songwriter (terrific newcomer John Magaro) who’s a dead ringer for the young Bob Dylan, even if dad (James Gandolfini) doesn’t take kindly to seeing junior strut around in long hair and Cuban heels. Masterfully capturing the era’s conflicting attitudes and ideologies, all set to a killer soundtrack produced by the legendary Steven Van Zandt, NOT FADE AWAY just might be the best coming-of-age movie since Barry Levinson’s Diner—and one of the best rock movies ever. A Paramount Vantage release.
OUR CHILDREN (À perdre la raison) (2012) 111min
Director: Joachim Lafosse
Country: Belgium
How does it happen that a vibrant, capable young woman loses her sense of self-worth and ends up destroying what she most loves? Belgian director Joachim Lafosse structures an all too familiar contemporary story that was headline news in Europe as a classical tragedy. Émilie Dequenne more than fulfills the promise of her award-winning performance in the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta with this portrait of a young school teacher who marries a Moroccan immigrant (Tahar Rahim) and has four children with him, while gradually becoming aware of how much he is in thrall to his mentor, a domineering doctor (Niels Arestrup). Rahim and Arestrup reprise their father/son relationship from Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet but with an even more corrupt twist. Lafosse’s direction of this perverse narrative of patriarchal power and female oppression is like steel wrapped in silk.
PASSION (2012) 94min
Director: Brian De palma
Country: USA
Brian De Palma exhibits great panache and a diabolical mastery of frequent, small surprises in his first fiction feature since his magical comedy-of-coincidences, FEMME FATALE. With tongue planted in cheek, or maybe not—it’s up to you to decide—De Palma turns French director Alain Corneau’s 2010 LOVE CRIME into a far more droll, erotic tale of female competition. Noomi Rapace more than matches her performance in the original GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO as the assistant to an unscrupulous advertising honcho (Rachel McAdams), who steals her ideas and acts as if it’s all good sport. It’s great fun until De Palma zeros in on the fury in Rapace’s eyes. The De Palma trademarks are all present and deployed with coolly calculated abandon: a brilliant use of split screen; a confusion of identical twins; dreams within dreams; and shoes to die for.
SOMETHING IN THE AIR (Après Mai) (2012) 122min
Director: Olivier Assayas
Country: France
In the months after the heady weeks of May ’68, a group of young people search for a way to continue the revolution believed to be just beginning. For Gilles (newcomer Clément Mettayer), this means having to balance his political commitments with his desire to explore painting and filmmaking; for his girlfriend Christine (GOODBYE, FIRST LOVE star Lola Créton), this means throwing herself wholeheartedly into the task of organizing. Olivier Assayas (CARLOS, SUMMER HOURS) here describes the sentimental education of a generation that was too young to have been on the barricades; he brilliantly captures its explorations of new lifestyles, the arguments about strategies and tactics, and above all its music, a constant presence that becomes something like the artistic unconscious of an era. The period details are perfect, but what makes this film so special is the sense it conveys of history as lived experience. A Sundance Selects release.
TABU (2012) 118min
Director: Miguel Gomes
Country: Portugal
The ghosts of F.W. Murnau, Luis Buñuel, Joseph Cornell and Jack Smith hover above Miguel Gomes’s third feature—an exquisite, absurdist entry in the canon of surrealist cinema. Shot in ephemeral black-and-white celluloid, TABU is movie-as-dream—an evocation of irrational desires, extravagant coincidences, and cheesy nostalgia that nevertheless is grounded in serious feeling and beliefs, even anti-colonialist politics. There is a story, which is delightful to follow and in which the cart comes before the horse: the first half is set in contemporary Lisbon, the second, involving two of the same characters, in a Portuguese colony in the early 1960s. “Be My Baby” belted in Portuguese, a wandering crocodile, and a passionate, ill-advised coupling seen through gently moving mosquito netting make for addled movie magic. The winner of the Alfred Bauer Prize (for a work of particular innovation) and FIPRESCI (International Film Critics) award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. An Adopt Films release.
YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET (Vous n'avez encore rien vu) (2012) 115min
Director: Alain Resnais
Country: France
From its impish title to its vibrant formal experimentation, YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET proves that, at age 90, master French filmmaker Alain Resnais (HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, WILD GRASS) is indeed still full of surprises. Based on two works by the playwright Jean Anouilh, the film opens with a who’s-who of French acting royalty (including Mathieu Amalric, Michel Piccoli and frequent Resnais muse Sabine Azéma) being summoned to the reading of a late playwright’s last will and testament. Upon their arrival, the playwright (Denis Podalydès) appears on a TV screen from beyond the grave and asks his erstwhile collaborators to evaluate a recording of an experimental theater company performing his Eurydice—a play they themselves all appeared in over the years. But as the video unspools, something curious happens: instead of watching passively, these seasoned thespians begin acting out the text alongside their youthful avatars, looking back into the past rather like mythic Orpheus himself. Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Eric Gautier on stylized sets that recall the French poetic realism of the 1930s, YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET is an alternately wry and wistful valentine to actors and the art of performance from a director long fascinated by the intersection of life, theater and cinema.
Labels: Abbas Kiarostami, Alain Renais, Ang Lee, Brian De Palma, Denzel Washington, film society of lincoln center, FilmLinc, Michael Haneke, New York Film Festival, NYFF, NYFF50
Friday, August 28, 2009
NYFF 2009
THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2009
SEPTEMBER 25 - OCTOBER 11
The New York Film Festival (NYFF) is always one of the highlights of the year in film. It usually previews a few of the most important films that will be competing for awards at the end of the year (unimportant films also compete for awards, but they'll not be found at NYFF) , and many films that are among the very best of the year from all over the world, and hardly seen at all except at NYFF.
(For example, last year's slate screened Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner The Class and the Academy Award-nominated films The Wrestler, Changeling, and Waltz with Bashir.)
Filmmakers and actors often visit the festival and participate in discussions on stage after the film, (and even, sometimes, casually, outside).
Outside Walter Reade Theater last year
Photo by Eric Roffman
Here, above, is Arnaud Desplechin, a quintessential French Director, who made last year's A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noel) (with Catherine Denueve and Mathieu Amalric) outside the Walter Reade Theater last year.
In the many connections among the films from year to year, Amalric was in the 2007 film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon), and will appear again at the festival, this year in Wild Grass (Les herbes folles) by Alain Renais.
(Note -- disclaimer!): I don't know which filmmakers or actors will actually be present this year... when I say they'll be back I only mean that they have a film in the festival).
at NYFF 1974
Photo by Eric Roffman
And Jacques Rivette (now 81... Alain Renais, by the way, is 87) will be back with 36 Views of Saint-Loup Peak (36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup). Above is a picture of Juliet Berto in the Green Room at Alice Tully Hall, when she came to the festival for Rivette's Celine et Julie vont en bateau more than 30 years ago. (Berto was a co-writer of that film, and was also in Godard's masterpiece La Chinoise, which was shown recently in the 1968 retrospective by the Film Society. )
Unfortunately, getting tickets to the films is not so easy. Each film is only shown at most twice. And the festival tends to be oversubscribed. Unlike the policy at the The Public Theater, which tries to give away many of their seats free to the public, democratically (but in return for waiting on line really, really early in the morning), access to Film Society tickets are prioritized by the length of time you've been a member of the Film Society, and only after initial orders are taken do other tickets go on sale to the public.
While Alice Tully Hall was undergoing renovations, films were shown at Rose Hall. It's time to take the most oversubscribed films and show them more than twice, perhaps adding screenings at Rose or even Avery Fisher Hall (where opening and closing night films are shown). It's nice that the Film Festival is like a party for those who go every year, but it should also allow more people to participate. I would think that a full house at any of these theaters would more than pay for itself and whatever trouble it would require to schedule extra screenings. Some of the films, of course, go on to commercial screeneings after the festival. Still, I think it's more fun to see them at the festival.
If you do not have a ticket, by the way, there are frequently people who do have extra tickets that they will sell (at face price) or even give away free at the door. There usually are quite a few, so it's worth trying if there's a film you want to see. (And if you do have a ticket you're not using, by all means go to the theater and let someone else use it!)
Note: 9/16 -- It has just been announced that there will be a "Rush Line" this year with at least 50 tickets available for each screening at the Alice Tully Hall box office!
Note 10/1 -- The Festival is providing extra screenings for the most popular sold-out films!
Excellent!
Here is a summary (by the NYFF) of the festival's main event offerings. (In addition to the main event there are several sidebar events, including selections of films from China and from India.) (Note: Check the description of the last film, the Wizard of Oz retrospective, for my favorite line from these previews!)
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2009
Opening Night: Alain Resnais' Wild Grass
Centerpiece: Lee Daniels' Precious
Closing Night: Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces
The 47th edition of the New York Film Festival will open with the U.S. premiere of Alain Resnais's Wild Grass (Les herbes folles) and close with Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos). This year's Centerpiece will be Lee Daniels' Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire.
In addition this year's festival will include two Masterworks series from China and India, Views From the Avant Garde, and special events.
The Festival returns this year to its renowned home, Alice Tully Hall, beautifully restored and renovated with superb, state-of-the-art sound and projection.
The 17-day NYFF highlights 29 films from 17 countries by celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new independent directors.
This Year's Selections:
A Film Society veteran, legendary French auteur Alain Resnais returns with Wild Grass, his 10th film selected for the New York Film Festival. His film Muriel appeared in the first New York Film Festival in 1963. And recently, Private Fears in Public Places showed at the 44th edition of the Festival in 2006.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave and fifty years after his groundbreaking debut with Hiroshima Mon Amour, Resnais delivers a career-crowning masterpiece with Wild Grass, a delightful roundelay based on Christian Gailly's novel The Incident, about the fate-altering ripples triggered by a seemingly ordinary purse snatching. The purse belongs to Marguerite (Resnais' regular, Sabine Azema), a dentist who moonlights as an aviatrix. Its contents are retrieved by Georges (André Dussollier), a married man who soon finds himself infatuated with the purse's owner, even though he hasn't actually met her yet. Add in a couple of keystone cops (hilariously played by Mathieu Amalric and Michel Vuillermoz), some dizzying aerial acrobatics, and the glorious widescreen camerawork of cinematographer Eric Gautier and Wild Grass becomes a uniquely playful meditation on coincidence and desire that suggests Resnais, at age 87, is truly in his prime.
Winner of both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Lee Daniels' Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, marks the first time the American director has been at the Festival. In his astonishing adaptation of Sapphire's 1996 novel, Daniels unsparingly recounts the horrific life of Clareece "Precious" Jones, an obese, barely literate 16-year-old living in late '80s Harlem who's sexually abused by both her father and mother. But Precious is not just a tale of endless abjection-it's also an exhilarating celebration of a young woman's determination to free herself from the pathologies surrounding her, guided by a teacher who senses her innate talents. Without a trace of easy, unearned sentimentality, Precious might be the most spirit-affirming movie of the year. Bringing this raw, uncompromising material to the screen, Daniels has assembled a remarkable cast: Paula Patton as Precious's devoted teacher, Mariah Carey as a tough yet compassionate welfare officer, fearless newcomer Gabourey Sidibe as Precious, and-most memorably-Mo'Nique as her monstrous mother, which won the actress a Special Jury Prize at Sundance.
Also no stranger to New York audiences, and a true NYFF favorite, Pedro Almodóvar's newest, Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos), marks his eighth film in the New York Film Festival. (Seven of these have either been Opening Night, Centerpiece or Closing Night selections.) Broken Embraces tells the story of a blind screenwriter, living and working under a pseudonym, who learns of the death of a powerful industrialist, triggering a flood of memories that encompass a tale of naked ambition, forbidden love and devastating loss. Moving from Madrid sound stages to the volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands, Almodóvar takes us on a candy-colored emotional roller coaster that barrels from comedy to romance to melodrama to the darker haunts of film noir-with even a salute to the "Making Of..." film along the way. Penelope Cruz has never been better, nor more ravishing, and she's ably aided by Lluis Homar (Bad Education), Blanca Portillo (Volver), and a wonderful newcomer to the Almodóvar stable, Rubén Ochandiano. The luscious cinematography is by Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros, Brokeback Mountain).
Rounding out the 2009 slate, The Film Society welcomes a group of well-established alumni back to the New York Film Festival with new features, including Marco Bellocchio (Vincere), Catherine Breillat (Bluebeard), Claire Denis (White Material), Manoel de Oliveira, (Eccentricities of a Blonde), Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon), Jacques Rivette (36 Views of Saint-Loup Peak), Todd Solondz (Life During Wartime), Lars von Trier (Antichrist) and Andrzej Wajda (Sweet Rush).
New directors to the Festival include Maren Ade (Everyone Else), Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgrass), Zhao Dayong (Ghost Town), Samuel Maoz (Lebanon), Raya Martin (Independencia), João Pedro Rodrigues (To Die Like A Man) and Sabu (Kanikosen).
New York Film Festival 2009
September 25 - October 11
Main Slate
Wild Grass
Alain Resnais, France, 2009; 113m
Photo Credit: The Film Society of Lincoln Center/Sony Pictures Classics
Wild Grass / Les herbes folles
Alain Resnais, France, 2009; 113m
The venerable Alan Resnais creates an exquisite human comedy of manners, mystery and romance with some of France's - and our - favorite actors: Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier, Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Almaric. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
Lee Daniels, USA, 2009; 109m
Photo Credit: The Film Society of Lincoln Center/Lionsgate
Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
Lee Daniels, USA, 2009; 109m
Precious is sixteen and living a miserable life. But she uses all the emotional energy she possesses to turn her life around. Director Lee Daniel's audacious tale features unforgettable performances by Mo'Nique, Mariah Carey and newcomer Gabourey Sidibe. A Lionsgate release.
CLOSING NIGHT
Broken Embraces
Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 2009; 128m
Photo Credit: The Film Society of Lincoln Center/Sony Pictures Classics
Broken Embraces / Los abrazos rotos
Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 2009; 128m
Almodóvar's newest masterwork is a candy-colored emotional roller that barrels from comedy to romance to melodrama to the darker haunts of film noir and stars his muse, Penélope Cruz, in a multilayered story of a man who loses his sight and the love of his life. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
36 Views of Saint-Loup Peak / 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup
Jacques Rivette, France, 2009, 84m
The legendary Jacques Rivette returns with an elegiac look at the final days of a small-time traveling circus.
Antichrist
Lars von Trier, Denmark, 2009, 109m
Surely to be one of the year's most discussed films, Lars von Trier's latest chronicles a couple's efforts to find their love again after a tragic loss, only to unleash hidden monsters lurking in their souls. An IFC Films release.
The Art of the Steal
Don Argott, USA, 2009, 101m
Bound to be controversial, this intriguing account of the travails of the legendary Barnes collection of art masterworks and the foundation set up to protect it raises vital questions about public vs. private "ownership" of art.
Bluebeard
Catherine Breillat, France, 2009, 78m
Photo Credit: The Film Society of Lincoln Center/Pyramide Films
Bluebeard / La Barbe Bleue
Catherine Breillat, France, 2009, 78m
Two sisters reading Charles Perrault's 17th century tale of perhaps the first "serial killer" becomes a meditation on the enduring fascination with a character who has served as inspiration for countless novels, plays and films.
Crossroads of Youth / Cheongchun's Sipjaro
An Jong-hwa, Korea, 1934, 73m
The oldest surviving Korean film, this recently-rediscovered masterwork will be presented with live musical accompaniment as well as a benshi (offscreen narrator).
Eccentricities of a Blonde
Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France, 2009, 64m
One hundred years young, director Manoel de Oliveira returns with another gem: a wry, moving tale of a pure if frustrated love adapted from a novel by Eça de Queiroz.
Everyone Else / Alle Anderen
Maren Ade, Germany, 2009, 119m
The ups and downs, joys and jealousies, frustrations and fulfillments of a young couple on a summer holiday provide the premise for this brilliant meditation on modern coupling.
Ghost Town
Zhao Dayong, China, 2008, 180m
A revealing, one-of-a-kind look at China far away from the glittering urban skylines, this portrait of a contemporary rural community in China offers extraordinary insights into everything from the role of religion to gender relationships to the place of social deviants.
Hadewijch
Bruno Dumont, France, 2009, 105m
A young woman searches for an absolute experience of faith-and in the process grows increasingly distant from the world around her.
Independencia
Raya Martin, Philippines, 2009, 77m
Maverick director Raya Martin offers a kind of alternative history of the Philippines and its struggle for nationhood in this stylized tale of a mother and son hiding in the mountains after the US takeover of the islands.
Inferno / L'Enfer
Serge Bromberg, France, 2009, 100m
A film buff's delight, Serge Bromberg film resurrects the surviving footage of Clouzot's aborted, experimental film L'Enfer, revealing a slightly mad but beguiling project that will always remain one of cinema's great "what ifs."
Kanikosen
Sabu, Japan, 2009, 109m
Kanikosen is a highly stylized, stirring, manga-flavored update of a classic Japanese political novel, with labor unrest aboard a crab canning ship evolving into a cry of a younger generation aching to break the bonds of conformity.
Lebanon
Samuel Maoz, Israel, 2009, 92m
Debut director Samuel Maoz takes us inside an Israeli tank and the emotions of its crew during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
Life During Wartime
Todd Solondz, USA, 2009, 96m
Preparing for his bar-mitzvah, a young man must deal with his divorced mother's prospective fiancé as well as rumors that his own father is not really dead.
Min Yé
Souleymane Cissé, Mali/France, 2009, 135m
A work of startling originality, Souleymane Cissé's first film in over a decade insightfully and incisively chronicles the dissolution of an upper-middle class African marriage.
Mother/ Maedo
Bong Joon-ho, South Korea, 2009, 128m
Convinced that her son has been wrongly accused of murder, a widow throws herself body and soul into proving his innocence. Kim Hye-ja in the title role gives perhaps the performance of the year.
Ne Change Rien
Pedro Costa, France/Portugal, 2009, 103m
A shimmering valentine, Costa's latest is less a portrait than a kind of visual homage, to the artistry of actor and singer Jeanne Balibar.
Police Adjective / Politist, adj.
Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2009, 115m
Discovering a teenager with hashish, a young policeman hesitates about turning him in. But his supervisor has other ideas in this beautifully acted, provocative modern morality play. An IFC Films release.
Room and a Half / Poltory komnaty ili sentimentalnoe puteshtvie na rodinu
Andrey Khrzhanovsky, Russia, 2009, 131m
Former animator Andrey Khrzhanovsky combines scripted scenes, archival footage, several types of animation, and surrealist flights of fancy to create this stirring portrait of poet Josef Brodsky and the postwar Soviet cultural scene. A Seagull Films release.
Sweetgrass
Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, USA, 2009, 105m
This breathtaking chronicle follows an ever-surprising group of modern-day cowboys as they lead an enormous herd of sheep up and then down the slopes of the Beartooth Mountains in Montana on their way to market.
Sweet Rush / Tatarak
Andrzej Wajda, Poland/France, 2009, 85m
Celebrated master Andrzej Wajda returns with a bold, experimental work that juxtaposes a story about a terminally doctor's wife rediscovering romance thanks with a heart-rending monologue written and performed by actress Krystyna Janda about the death of her husband.
To Die Like a Man / Morrer como um homen
João Pedro Rodrigues, Portugal, 2009, 138m
This touching, finely-etched portrait follows Tonia, a veteran drag performer confronting younger competition and her boyfriend's demands that she undergo a sex change.
Vincere
Marco Bellocchio, Italy, 2009, 129m
Mussolini's "secret" marriage to Ida Dalser, afterwards completely denied by Il Duce, along with the son born from the relationship, becomes the springboard for this visually ravishing meditation on the fascist manipulation of history. An IFC Films release.
Claire Denis, France, 2009, 100m
Photo Credit: The Film Society of Lincoln Center/Wild Bunch
White Material
Claire Denis, France, 2009, 100m
A handful of Europeans try to make sense of-and survive-the chaos happening all around them in an African country torn apart by civil war.
The White Ribbon / Das weisse band
Michael Haneke, Austria/France, 2009, 144m
The Palme d'Or winner at this year's Cannes Film Festival, this is a starkly beautiful meditation on the consequences of violence-physical, emotional, spiritual-in a northern German town on the eve of World War I. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
The Wizard of Oz
Victor Fleming, 1939, USA, 103m
The 70th Anniversary of the timeless classic, presented in a spectacular newly-restored edition makes the film a new experience even for those who practically have it memorized. A Warner Bros. release.
This year the NYFF introduces Masterworks which will feature works from India and China.
- "Re-Inventing China: A New Cinema for a New Society, 1949-1966"
- "A Heart as Big as the World: The Films of Guru Dutt"
Both series will screen at the Walter Reade Theater.
There will also be: Special Events! and Views From the Avant Garde.
(Note: Always remember the Sponsors. Due to the strange way the world works, few artistic endeavors would ever exist without private sponsors.)
Sponsors:
The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from 42BELOW, GRAFF, Stella Artois, Illy Caffè, The New York State Council on the Arts, and The National Endowment for the Arts.
The 47th Annual New York Film Festival is sponsored by HBO® Films, The New York Times, and Kodak.
HBO® and related channels and service marks are the property of Home Box Office, Inc.
Labels: Alain Renais, New York Film Festival, NYFF, Pedro Almodovar, Penelope Cruz
