New York, Sept. 30 (US): The film’s past and future mingle like a pair of moviegoers arguing in a debate outside a movie theater at the New York Film Festival, which kicks off its 60th edition Friday with the premiere of Don Noah Baumbach. DeLillo quote titled White Noise.
In those six decades, the Lincoln Center Festival has been America’s premiere link to cinema, combining a vibrant picture of a cinematic year with films from around the world, anticipated fall titles and restored classics. The Associated Press (AP) reports that it’s a festival filled with more questions than answers.
“One of the questions we ask ourselves is: What is the main movie of the New York Film Festival? It shouldn’t be something expected,” says Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director. “It shouldn’t be something that automatically looks like it should belong in the pantheon.”
Canon—and expands its definition—has always taken a keen interest at the New York Film Festival, playing the films of Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Anis Farda, Pedro Almodovar and Jane Campion over the years. The first edition of the festival, in 1963, was attended by Luis Buñuel, Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, Roman Polanski and Jean-Luc Godard. NYFF, which awards no awards and does not offer an industry market, is strictly defined as a showcase for what programmers consider the best.
“We honor those 60 years of the festival by staying true to its mission, why it was created, what it was intended to serve and the relationship, first and foremost, that it had with New York City,” Eugene Hernandez, CEO. “It’s a bridge between artists and audiences, and it’s been 60 years.”
In the past two years, Lim and Hernandez have sought to reconnect the festival with New York, expanding its presence across the city. But the pandemic has made that difficult. The 2020 festival was held virtually and in drive-throughs around the city. Last year’s festival brought crowds back together, even though there were great COVID-19 precautions in place. “It was a three-year journey to get to this moment,” says Hernandez, who left after that festival to lead the Sundance Film Festival.
The 60th New York Film Festival, which will hold screenings in all five boroughs during its run through October 16, this year underscores New York’s connections with a series of festivals for filmmakers in their hometowns. Those include opening night with Baumbach; centerpiece for the documentary Nan Goldin by Laura Poitras “All Beauty and Bloodshed”; Closing night with Elegance Bratton’s semi-autobiographical “Inspection”; and James Gray’s birthday celebration “Armageddon Time”, based on his childhood in Queens. Another high-profile New York story, “She’s Happy,” a drama about New York Times investigative journalists who helped expose Harvey Weinstein, is also one of the festival’s most important global performances.
In many ways, little has changed in 60 years. (Godard will be back again this year, with the late iconic painter’s “Picture Book” offered free in an episode.) Except that it’s probably gotten bigger, with more sidebars and a busier main board.
“For most of its life, the festival had only 20, 25 films on its main list. I think if you try to do that now, you don’t really get a complete picture of contemporary cinema,” says Lim. “The landscape is absolutely enormous.”
Each NYFF brings in a mix of major directors and younger filmmakers, but the split between the two is particularly rich this year. Aside from veterans like Claire Dennis (“Stars at Noon”) and Park Chan-wook (“Decision to Leave”), the festival will welcome longtime regulars Frederick Wiseman (“A Couple”) and Martin Scorsese (“Character Crisis: One Night Only,” A documentary about singer-songwriter David Johansson and Paul Schrader (“Master Gardner”) will conclude with Jerzy Skolimowski (“EO”), 84-year-old Polish director, and 94-year-old James Ivory (“A Cooler Climate”) Their inclusion at the third New York Film Festival, more than half a century ago.
A movie like “EO,” which traces a donkey between feral interactions with humans, is directly connected to the history of cinema, in homage to Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar. But it also excels on a rough track of its own, which Schraeder, writer and maker of “Taxi Driver” recent “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter”, has been doing pretty hard for decades. These are filmmakers for whom cinema is an endless crusade, full of pain and transcendence.
Other filmmakers on their earlier travels. Several prominent figures of the festival made their debut. Bratton’s first narrative film, “Inspection,” is very personal for the 43-year-old director and photographer. Led by a stunning performance by Jeremy Pope, it dramatizes Bratton’s own experience as a gay man in training camp. The treatment he receives there is harsh, with echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s “full metal jacket”. But in some ways, it’s an improvement from his harsh reality back home.
Scottish director Charlotte Wells also relays her personal experience in her brilliantly composed and deeply devastating debut film, “Aftersun,” starring Paul Mescal and Frankie Curio as a father-daughter pair on vacation in Turkey. To a notable degree, the film aligns with every fleeting gesture between the two, and the currents that might differentiate them.
Intimacy may seem less relevant to “Till,” Emmett Till’s drama giving its world premiere. Films about such indelible moments in American history often take a wide lens to portray the full societal scale. But Chinonye Chukwu, in her follow-up to her 2019 blockbuster “Clemency,” has kept her film centered, often deeply, on Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who is stunningly played by Danielle Didweiler. Even, like so many films at the festival, is a reminder of how powerful one person’s testimony can be.
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