The Close-up

For today’s daily NYFF62 podcast, director RaMell Ross and cast members Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Fred Hechinger, and Hamish Linklater join NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Nickel Boys, the Opening Night selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival. Nickel Boys screens again on October 3, 5, and 9. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/nyff Rare is the film of a major book that maintains the power and precision of its source material while also generating its own singular aesthetic. Yet RaMell Ross’s extraordinary realization of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2019 novel, about two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida, achieves just this. In breakout performances that cut to the bone, Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson play Elwood and Turner, whose close friendship helps sustain their hope even as the horrors mount around them at the Nickel Academy, which becomes a microcosm of American racism in the mid-20th centur

On the first episode of our daily 62nd New York Film Festival edition of the FLC podcast, director Julia Loktev and subjects Anna Nemzer, Ksenia Mironova, and Olga Churakova join Rachel Rosen to discuss My Undesirable Friends Part I – Last Air in Moscow, world premiering in the Main Slate of this year's festival. American filmmaker Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet, NYFF49), born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent journalism in Putin’s Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. With her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist for TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, Loktev ends up immersing herself with a group of young women fighting to ensure the vocalization of dissent and outspoken criticism of the country—even as they are branded by the government as “foreign agents,” their careers and lives increasingly at risk as the country creeps toward war. Structured in fiv

This week we’re excited to present a special preview of the 62nd New York Film Festival, beginning this Friday, September 27 and running through October 14. Tickets to this year’s festival are still available but going fast! NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim is joined by Jordan Raup, Associate Director of Marketing at Film at Lincoln Center, to break down the films and events you can’t miss throughout this year’s 17-day festival, including Nickel Boys, The Room Next Door, Blitz, Queer, April, My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, Transamazonia, Afternoons of Solitude, exergue – on documenta 14, Jimmy, The Sealed Soil, and more. Opening with RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, this year’s festival will feature screenings across New York City’s five boroughs, free talks with your favorite filmmakers, stimulating panel discussions, trivia nights, and much more. Don’t forget to subscribe here for more daily filmmaker conversations throughout the festival. Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with His Three Daughters director Azazel Jacobs and cast members Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, and Carrie Coon during a special advance screening at FLC. His Three Daughters is now streaming on Netflix. From writer-director Azazel Jacobs comes this bittersweet and often funny story of an elderly patriarch and the three grown daughters who come to be with him in his final days. Katie (Carrie Coon) is a controlling Brooklyn mother dealing with a wayward teenage daughter; free-spirited Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) is a different kind of mom, separated from her offspring for the first time; and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) is a sports-betting stoner who has never left her father’s apartment—much to the chagrin of her half-sisters, who share a different mother and worldview. Continuing his astute exploration of family dynamics in close-knit spaces, Jacobs follows the siblings over the course of three volatile days, as death looms, grievances erupt, and love seeps thr

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2012 at the 50th New York Film Festival with No director Pablo Larraín and lead actress Antonia Zegers. Larraín returns to the New York Film Festival this fall with the NYFF62 Spotlight selection Maria. Don’t miss the NYFF premiere of Maria and many more great films at this year's festival. Single tickets will go on sale this Tuesday, September 17! Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff In 1988, Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, due to international pressure, is forced to call a plebiscite on his presidency. The country will vote YES or NO to Pinochet extending his rule for another eight years. Opposition leaders for the NO persuade a brash young advertising executive, Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), to spearhead their campaign. Against all odds, with scant resources and under scrutiny by the despot's minions, Saavedra and his team devise an audacious plan to win the election and set Chile free. The conversation was moderated by Richar

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2011 at the 49th New York Film Festival with The Loneliest Planet director Julia Loktev and lead actress Hani Furstenberg. Acclaimed artist and filmmaker Loktev returns to the New York Film Festival this fall with the NYFF62 Main Slate selection My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow. Single tickets to the festival will go on sale on Tuesday, September 17! Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff. In The Loneliest Planet, Julia Loktev crafts an intimate relationship film starring Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg as young fiancés backpacking through the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia. The two characters are joined by a mountaineer, forming a trio that quietly treks across dramatic landscapes, where there is just as much said as left unsaid. Loktev dramatically expands her scope with The Loneliest Planet and in the gorgeously filmed mountains has found the perfect setting for isolated, at times suffocating drama. The conversation was m

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2011 at the 49th New York Film Festival with the makers of the Main Slate selection A Dangerous Method: director David Cronenberg, screenwriter Christopher Hampton, producer Jeremy Thomas, and lead actor Michael Fassbender. Cronenberg returns to the New York Film Festival this Fall with the NYFF62 Main Slate selection The Shrouds starring Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger. Don’t miss the U.S. Premiere of The Shrouds and many more great films by securing your Pass to NYFF62 today at filmlinc.org/passes. From acclaimed director David Cronenberg came A Dangerous Method, a dark tale of sexual and intellectual discovery featuring two of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Carl Jung (played by Michael Fassbender) has just begun his psychiatric career, having been inspired by the great Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). When a mysterious and beautiful woman (Keira Knightley) goes under Jung's care, Jung finds himself crossing the line of the doctor/pa

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Between the Temples director Nathan Silver and cast members Carol Kane, Robert Smigel, and Cindy Silver. Directed by New York filmmaker Nathan Silver, who co-wrote the screenplay with C. Mason Wells, Between the Temples follows Jason Schwartzman as a bereaved cantor at an upstate New York synagogue, who has lost his wife, can’t sing anymore, lives with his two mothers, and has a newfound taste for mudslide cocktails. While he keeps kosher and remains devout, his ennui-addled regression seems all but terminal until his 70-year-old grade school music teacher (played by Carol Kane) walks back into his life and becomes his new adult Bat Mitzvah student… and maybe something more.  Something like Harold and Maude by way of Mike Leigh, Silver’s ninth feature is perhaps his most accomplished film yet—a portrait of love in a time of loss that is equal parts touching, cringingly hilarious, and effortlessly strange, shot in stunning 16mm by Sean Price Williams and

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2020 with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker RaMell Ross, moderated by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Garrett Bradley (Time). The two discuss Ross’s documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which was a 2018 New Directors/New Film selection. Ross’s next feature, Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, will open the 62nd New York Film Festival on September 27.  “The American stranger knows Blackness as a fact—even though it is fiction,” says writer-director RaMell Ross. For his visionary and political debut feature, Ross spent five years intimately observing African-American families living in Hale County, Alabama. It’s a region made unforgettable by Walker Evans and James Agee’s landmark 1941 photographic essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which documented the impoverished lives of white sharecropper families in Alabama’s Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Ross’s poetic return to this pla

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Red Island director Robin Campillo from the 2024 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. Rendez-Vous and NYFF veteran Robin Campillo, whose 2017 period drama BPM: Beats Per Minute reconstructed and celebrated ACT UP’s legacy of AIDS activism in France during the 1990s, once again draws on personal history with his latest film, reaching back further to evoke a sumptuously visualized 1970s childhood spent with his military family on Madagascar. Growing up on one of the last remaining French colonial bases on the island, young Thomas (Charlie Vauselle) keeps a curious and observant eye on the adults around him, not least his parents (Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Quim Guterriez). Bonding with young Suzanne (Cathy Pham) over the Fantômette comic books, Thomas’s imagination and observational powers grow even as the world around him is about to die. Making striking use of a child’s perspective, Campillo’s carefully observed drama of a lost world is lyrical and cl

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Good One director India Donaldson and cast members Lily Collias and James Le Gros from the 2024 edition of New Directors/New Films. Good One opens at FLC on August 9 with Q&As opening weekend. A seemingly small incident has monumental implications in the extraordinary feature debut of India Donaldson, a film of expertly harnessed naturalism and restrained emotional intensity. Seventeen-year-old high school senior Sam (a revelatory Lily Collias) has agreed to join her father Chris (James Le Gros) and his longtime buddy Matt (Danny McCarthy) on a camping trip in the Catskills, though she’d rather be hanging with her friends for the weekend. Affable and wise, Sam at first seems to enjoy the intergenerational bonding experience with the two divorced dads, yet the men’s own festering, middle-aged resentments begin to change the emotional tenor of the trip—until something happens that alters Sam’s perception of the men and her place in their orbit. Amidst the

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Customs Frontline lead actor Nicholas Tse, recently on hand for the film's North American Premiere at the 2024 New York Asian Film Festival. In this explosive Hong Kong thriller, superstars Nicholas Tse (2024 Screen International Star Asia Awardee) and Jacky Cheung ignite the screen as customs officers caught in a deadly web of arms smuggling. Tse, in a powerhouse performance that also marks his debut as an action director, plays the uncompromising Chow Ching-lai, whose unwavering dedication puts him on a collision course with the elusive mastermind behind the weapons trafficking, while Cheung, as Chow’s mentor and superior, brings a world-weary gravitas to the role. As the stakes rise and the body count mounts, Chow and his Thai counterparts race against time to thwart the shipment of stolen weapons. With pulse-pounding action, shocking twists, and a villain who seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once, this is a white-knuckle ride that will take you

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Dìdi director Sean Wang, who recently joined us for the 2024 New York Asian Film Festival. In his feature debut, Sean Wang, hot on the heels of his Oscar-nominated documentary short Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, crafts a poignant and humorous narrative that captures the essence of adolescence in 2008 California. Thirteen-year-old Chris, aka Wang Wang (Izaac Wang), navigates the treacherous waters of teenage life, from awkward dating to ruining friendships, while discovering his passion for skateboard filming. Wang deftly employs timeless coming-of-age tropes, exposing the embarrassing and hilarious moments that define this pivotal stage. However, it is Chris’s struggle with his identity as an Asian American that elevates the film. Joan Chen and Shirley Chen deliver nuanced performances as Chris’s mother and sister, respectively, adding depth to the family dynamics. Wang’s nonfiction background lends authenticity and an insightful touch to this resonant dramedy, remi

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with The Life Ahead director Edoardo Ponti who recently joined us for the retrospective Sophia Loren: La Signora di Napoli. Sophia Loren delivers a towering performance in her son Edoardo Ponti’s 2020 adaptation of the novel Madame Rosa, which embodies the range, intelligence, and innate charisma of the legendary actress. Previously adapted in 1977 by Moshé Mizrahi, with Simone Signoret in the lead role, Ponti moves Romain Gary’s novel to Bari, Italy, where a Holocaust survivor turned children’s caretaker (Loren) forms an unlikely friendship with a bitter street kid (a spectacular Ibrahim Gueye) after he robs her. By turns tender and haunted, the storied role of Rosa is imbued here with the unmistakable wisdom of a seasoned performer, who subtly nods to her own illustrious on-screen persona with subtlety and grace. This conversation was moderated by FLC Programmer Tyler Wilson.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation between My Dinner with André lead actor Wallace Shawn and Janet Planet filmmaker Annie Baker. When Dan Talbot, the pioneering distributor and exhibitor of international art films, read playwrights Wallace Shawn and André Gregory’s script for My Dinner with André, he was so excited about the project that he helped director Louis Malle procure production funding from Gaumont. The concept was to depict an encounter between the two writers, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, as they discuss mortality, money, despair, and love over a meal at an Upper West Side restaurant—according to Gregory, Malle’s one direction was to “talk faster.” By turns entertaining, confessional, funny, and moving, suffused with melancholy and joy alike, the film became a sensation at the art house upon its release, playing to packed theaters for a solid year, and went on to endure as a perennial favorite on the home video circuit. Now please enjoy the conversation between Ann

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Last Summer director Catherine Breillat and lead actress Léa Drucker from the 61st New York Film Festival. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection, Last Summer opens Friday at FLC, featuring Q&As with Breillat on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/summer One of the world’s most consistently provocative filmmakers for nearly 50 years, Catherine Breillat proves with her incendiary, compelling new drama that she is not through toying with viewers’ comfort levels. In Last Summer, Léa Drucker stars as Anne, a lawyer who specializes in cases of sexual consent and parental custody. Seemingly happily married to kind-hearted businessman Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) with adopted twin daughters, Anne inexplicably finds herself drawn to Pierre’s estranged 17-year-old son Théo (Samuel Kircher) after the boy returns home to live with them. Embarking on a passionate affair with the teenager, Anne all too willingly thrusts herself into a maelstrom of attract

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Music director Angela Schanelec following her film’s U.S. premiere in the Main Slate at the 61st New York Film Festival. Music opens at Film at Lincoln Center next Friday, June 28 with introductions by Doug Tielli, the singer-songwriter featured in the film, at the 6:15pm screenings on June 28 and 29. Get tickets to Music! Leading contemporary German filmmaker Angela Schanelec is singularly adept at creating dramas of unexpected catharsis via the most oblique narrative strategies. Her latest film, Music, pushes this approach to new levels of emotionality. Using abstract gestures and broad narrative ellipses, yet still managing to plumb the depths of its characters’ complicated traumas, Music tells the story of a young man and woman unknowingly united by the same violent death. Brought together by fate and horrible irony, Ion (Aliocha Schneider) and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer) first meet in prison, where he’s an inmate and she’s a guard; they kindle a romance

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Film at Lincoln Center Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle, as she discusses the films featured in FLC’s new series Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Baker. A series of 17 films handpicked by acclaimed playwright Annie Baker that engage with theater as a cinematic theme, Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Bakera runs from June 14-20 in anticipation of the release of Baker’s directorial debut, Janet Planet, on June 21. Get tickets to Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Baker! Get tickets to Janet Planet! Many films in the series will be shown on 35mm and Baker will join us in-person for select introductions and Q&As, including a sneak preview of Janet Planet on June 20. Opening Night of the series will feature Louis Malle’s iconic collaboration with André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, My Dinner with André (1981) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), both presented on 35mm. Baker will also engage in a discussion

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Another End director Piero Messina from Opening Night of this year’s edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema. A melancholic, philosophical take on science fiction, Piero Messina’s ensemble drama contemplates a futuristic twist on the afterlife and its implications for those whom the deceased have left behind. Gael García Bernal stars as Sal, who has recently lost his partner Zoe in a car accident. When Sal’s sister Ebe (Bérénice Bejo) suggests he use a new technology to transplant Zoe’s memories into the mind and body of a stranger (Renate Reinsve), he finds himself confronted with a new opportunity to say goodbye to his love—but at what price? A rare blend of high-concept and deep feeling, Another End is a moving work on human connection in an increasingly virtual world. This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Tyler Wilson.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 61st New York Film Festival with Green Border director Agnieszka Holland, cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk, and cast members Behi Djanati Atai & Joely Mbundu. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. Green Border was a Main Slate selection of NYFF61 and will open in select theaters on June 19th. A Syrian family leaves the violence of their country behind, hoping to cross from Belarus into Poland and then onto the safe haven of Sweden. But, like so many lost souls, they end up caught in a political maelstrom, demonized by the Polish government and press and used as pawns in an inhumane, deadly border game. This harrowing, urgent drama from the veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland constructs an intricate account of the contemporary global humanitarian crisis, expanding out to encompass the interconnected lives of security patrol officers, activist lawyers, and civilians who put themselves on the line for strange