Get your calendars out! We’ve announced dates for our winter season of repertory programming and festivals…

Illuminating Moonlight
January 4–9
With the ravishing, unforgettable Moonlight, Barry Jenkins has established himself as one of today’s major voices in independent American filmmaking. This series brings together Jenkins’s two features (including his ripe-for-rediscovery debut, Medicine for Melancholy) with a selection of films that informed the making of his latest, handpicked by the director himself. These major works of queer, black, and international art cinema are, like Moonlight, rich, stylistically sensual, and compassionate portraits of outsiders. Taken together, the films in this series serve to contextualize Jenkins’s work and offer insight into the making of a modern masterpiece. Barry Jenkins in person!

New York Jewish Film Festival
January 11–24
The year 2017 marks the 26th edition of the New York Jewish Film Festival, a partnership between the Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. JFF brings you the finest narrative and documentary films from around the world that explore the diversity of Jewish experience. This year’s festival features a wide-ranging and exciting lineup of films and shorts from the iconic to the iconoclastic. Including global, U.S., and New York premieres, a tribute to actress and cabaret artist Valeska Gert, a 50th anniversary screening of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, and a related poster exhibition honoring the life and work of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, this year’s NYJFF will entertain film lovers from all backgrounds.

Neighboring Scenes
January 26–31
Now in its second year, Neighboring Scenes is the Film Society’s showcase of contemporary Latin American cinema. Highlighting impressive recent productions from across the region, this selective slate of premieres exhibits the breadth of styles, techniques, and approaches employed by Latin American filmmakers today. Neighboring Scenes spans a wide geographic range, featuring established auteurs as well as fresh talent from the international festival scene. Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Cinema Tropical.

Ashes and Diamonds

Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds

 

Dance on Camera
February 3–7
Dance on Camera Festival remains the longest-running dance film festival in the world, providing a platform for choreographic storytelling and creative expression, and intimate access to innovative media artists and their cinematic works. Each February, the Festival presents feature-length documentary and narrative films, inventive short films, filmmaker panels and special events, cutting edge media and art installations, as well as engaging community and student programs. Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Dance Films Association.

Tribute to Andrzej Wajda
February 9–16
Andrzej Wajda passed away on October 9, 2016 in Warsaw at the age of 90, nearly a month after the world premiere of his last film, Afterimage. For more than half a century, Wajda crafted a filmography that encapsulated the essence of postwar Poland and constitutes, quite simply, one of the great legacies of world cinema. No single visual style or strategy characterizes his films. His work often employed intricately illuminated deep spaces as well as looser, more vérité methods; many served as counter-narratives to the officially sanctioned records kept by Stalinized Poland; others were more oblique and meditative as they reckoned with concepts including individualism, one’s duty toward others, and the meaning of freedom. This February, the Film Society is honored to present a selection of the Polish master’s previous films in celebration of his monumental lifework, as well as the New York premiere of Afterimage, an impassioned memorial to the great avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński. Presented in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute.

Film Comment Selects
February 1723
Of all the annual film festivals in New York, there is no other quite like this one. Film Comment’s festival of movies returns in its 17th edition with a selection of titles curated by the magazine’s editors. It’s an offering of strikingly bold visions, mixing New York premieres of new films and long-unseen older titles that deserve the big-screen treatment. As evidenced by such past selections as Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day, Olivier Assayas’s demonlover, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, and Terence Davies’s Sunset Song, these are films that play by their own rules, works of considered artistry that reflect the philosophy of a magazine that has been essential for film lovers for more than 50 years.

William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939). Image courtesy of United Artists / The Kobal Collection.

William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939). Image courtesy of United Artists / The Kobal Collection.

 

Wuthering Heights
February 24–28
In the 170 years since its publication, Emily Brontë’s only novel, Wuthering Heights, has been one of the most frequently adapted works of literature, fascinating, inspiring, and provoking some of cinema’s greatest directors to try to render its dark, romantic, politically charged majesty. Its timeless story—the impossible love of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and the far-reaching scars it leaves on their families—has been transposed to various historical periods and countries, has had the races and genders of its characters changed to striking effect, and has been incarnated through a diverse assortment of visual aesthetics and performance styles. Which is the definitive adaptation? Wyler’s classical Hollywood rendition? Buñuel’s surrealist reimagining? Rivette’s materialist ghost story? Yoshida’s stark expressionist take? Arnold’s kitchen-sink realist interpretation? Decide for yourself by joining the Film Society in revisiting five of the greatest attempts to put Wuthering Heights on the screen.

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema
March 1–12
Rendez-Vous with French Cinema returns in March with another edition that exemplifies the variety and vitality of contemporary French filmmaking. The films on display, by emerging talents and established masters, raise ideas both topical and eternal, and many take audiences to entirely unexpected places. Highlights from recent Rendez-Vous with French Cinema editions include Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, François Ozon’s In the House, Robin Campillo’s Eastern Boys, Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo, and Benoît Jacquot’s 3 Hearts. Co-presented with UniFrance Films, the 22nd edition of Rendez-Vous will demonstrate that the landscape of French cinema is as fertile, inspiring, and distinct as ever.

New Directors/New Films
March 15–26
Celebrating its 46th edition in 2017, the New Directors/New Films festival introduces New York audiences to the work of emerging filmmakers from around the world. Throughout its rich, nearly half-century history, New Directors has brought previously little-known talents like Pedro Almodóvar, Chantal Akerman, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Christopher Nolan, Laura Poitras, Spike Lee, and Kelly Reichardt to wider audiences. We hope you’ll join us in celebrating a group of filmmakers who represent the present and anticipate the future of cinema: daring artists whose work pushes the envelope and is never what you’d expect. Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.

Jean-Pierre Léaud
March 29–April 6
Jean-Pierre Léaud is to the French New Wave what Anna Magnani was to Italian Neorealism and what John Wayne was to American westerns: its spirit, its emblem, its avatar. The actor, who last year received the Cannes Film Festival’s Honorary Palme d’Or in recognition of a career spanning nearly 60 years, first broke through as François Truffaut’s on-screen surrogate Antoine Doinel in 1959’s The 400 Blows, and he won Best Actor at the 1966 Berlin Film Festival for Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin. Since then he has worked with French masters Jacques Rivette, Jean Eustache, Philippe Garrel, Bertrand Bonello, and Olivier Assayas, and such key international filmmakers as Tsai Ming-liang, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Aki Kaurismäki, and Raúl Ruiz. On the occasion of the release of Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV (NYFF54)—in which he delivers a magisterial, career-capping performance as the longest-reigning French monarch during his final days—the Film Society is proud to pay tribute to the prolific actor’s irresistible presence and undeniable legacy.