Tomas Leach's In No Great Hurry; 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter.

A warm comfortable theater with great films await you this Winter at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. At present, there are 11 new first-run films will have their theatrical release in the First Quarter of 2014 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center and Walter Reade Theaters, starting off with British filmmaker Tomas Leach's documentary In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter, opening January 3.

Other offerings opening at Film Society January through March include some favorites from last year's New York Film Festival including Alain Guiraudie Stranger By the Lake (separately, Guiraudie will also be the subject of a Film Society retrospective), Nancy Buriski's Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil le Clercq, Arnaud Desplechin's Jimmy P. and Joanna Hogg's Exhibition.

AFI Fest 2013 award-winner In Bloom by Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß bows January 10. Set in Georgia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, two girls cast off the cares of the world just as life's pressures are at their doorstep and Venice Film Festival's The Tightrope takes a look at theater director Peter Brook's work via five hidden cameras. And welcome Spring with Freida Mock Human Rights Watch Film Festival exposé Anita, an intimate look at Anita Hill from the scandal that brought sexual harassment to the forefront of public awareness to the dynamic personality behind the famous name that made daily headlines in the early '90s.

And as a sneak to Q2's first-runs, Jim Jarmusch's NYFF drama Only Lovers Left Alive as well as Toronto's Palo Alto by Gia Coppola are also on tap. More details on later in the year later…

First-run films screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center January – March 2014:

In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (Opens January 3)
Directed by Tomas Leach, U.K.

“I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty.” Saul Leiter could have been lauded as the great pioneer of color photography, but was never driven by the lure of success. Instead he preferred to drink coffee and photograph in his own way, amassing an archive of beautiful work that is now piled high in his New York apartment. In a funny, intimate and moving film, In No Great Hurry follows Saul as he deals with the triple burden of cleaning an apartment full of memories, becoming world famous in his 80s and fending off a pesky filmmaker. (DOCNYC 2013)

The Rocket (Opens January 10)
Directed by Kim Mordaunt, Australia/Laos, Thailand (Lao with English subtitles)

A boy (Ahlo, 10), who is believed to bring bad luck, is blamed for a string of disasters. When his family loses their home and are forced to move, Ahlo meets the spirited orphan Kia (9) and her eccentric uncle Purple: an ex-soldier with a purple suit, a rice-wine habit and a fetish for James Brown. Struggling to hang on to his father's trust, Ahlo leads his family, Purple and Kia through a land scarred by war in search of a new home. In a last plea to prove he's not cursed, Ahlo builds a giant explosive rocket to enter the most lucrative but dangerous competition of the year: the Rocket Festival. As the most bombed country in the world shoots back at the sky, a boy will reach to the heavens for forgiveness. Gripping yet heart-warming, The Rocket is a deeply personal story about the determination of a boy who has the odds stacked against him, set against the epic backdrop of a war-ravaged country on the brink of huge change. With remarkable access to real rituals and festivities in the mountains of Laos, the film is a unique view into a world never seen on film before. Featuring an extraordinary leading performance from gutsy former street kid Sitthiphon Disamoe as Ahlo, the film also stars veteran actor and comedian Thep Phongam as a damaged but humorous ex-soldier who becomes a mentor to our young protagonist.
Berlin International Film Festival 2013 – Winner: Best First Feature

Tribeca Film Festival 2013 – Winner: Best Narrative Feature, Best Actor, Audience Award

AFI Fest – Winner: Audience Award for World Cinema


Kim Mordaunt's The Rocket.

In Bloom (Opens January 10)
Directed by Nana Ekvtimishvili, Simon Groß, Germany, France, Georgia (Georgian with English subtitles)

Early nineties, in Tbilisi, the capital of the newly independent Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The country is facing violence, war on the Black Sea coast (Abkhazia) and vigilante justice that plague society. But for Eka and Natia, fourteen-year-old inseparable friends, life just unfolds: in the street, at school, with friends or elder sisters who are already dealing with men’s dominance, early marriage and disillusioned love. For these two girls in bloom, life just goes on…
Berlin International Film Festival 2013

Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2013

AFI Fest 2013 (Winner: New Auteur Special Award for Personal Storytelling)

Stranger by the Lake (Opens January 24)
Directed by Alain Guiraudie, France (French with English subtitles)

Winner of a directing prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Alain Guiraudie’s exploration of death and desire unfolds entirely in the vicinity of a gay cruising ground that becomes a crime scene. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is a regular at a lakeside pickup spot, where he finds companionship both platonic and carnal. But his new paramour Michel (Christophe Paou) turns out to be a love-’em-and-leave-’em type, in the deadliest sense… Guiraudie has long been a singular voice in French cinema: anti-bourgeois, at ease in nature, a true regionalist and outsider. Here he captures naked bodies and hardcore sex with the same matter-of-fact sensuousness that he brings to ripples on the water and the fading light of dusk.
Cannes Film Festival 2013

Toronto International Film Festival 2013

New York Film Festival 2013

Sundance Film Festival 2014


Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake.

Papirosen (Opens January 24)
Directed by Gaston Solnicki, Argentina (Spanish with English subtitles)

Argentine filmmaker Gaston Solnicki has fashioned nearly 200 hours of footage shot over a decade into a family portrait at once epic and intimate—achieving the rare feat of turning the home movie into art. He captures four generations of his Buenos Aires clan on vacations and at family gatherings, digging into the family archives (vintage 8mm footage, a video recording of a Bar Mitzvah) to supplement it and incorporating the musings of his grandmother, Pola, a Holocaust survivor, to craft a deeply affecting meditation on the meaning of family and the weight of history.
New York Jewish Film Festival 2013

Locarno Film Festival 2013

The Tightrope (Opens January 31)
Directed by Simon Brook, Italy (French and English with subtitles)

Filmed with five hidden cameras, The Tightrope is a total immersion into the creative process behind legendary theater director Peter Brook's work—powerful, intimate, and emotionally thrilling. In this unique and deeply personal film, we get a dizzying glimpse from the Tightrope and an inkling of what it takes to make theater real…
Venice Film Festival 2012

Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil le Clercq (Opens February 5)
Directed by Nancy Buirski, USA

Tanaquil Le Clercq, known to all as “Tanny,” was the inspiration and then the wife of one of the greatest geniuses in the history of dance, George Balanchine, and she also sparked the creative imagination of Jerome Robbins. In 1954, at the height of her fame, she was struck down by polio. Nancy Buirski’s radiant film finds a tone to match Tanny’s exquisite dancing and long, lovely physique, well represented in photos, home movies and kinescopes. In addition to being a rich and compelling story of a dancer who can no longer dance and a muse who can no longer inspire, Buirski’s movie is also a vivid portrayal of a world and a time gone by. In addition to the breathtaking photos and archival footage, Afternoon of a Faun also features interviews with those who knew Tanny, including Jacques D’Amboise and Arthur Mitchell.
New York Film Festival 2013


Nancy Buirski's Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil le Clercq.

Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian  (Opens February 14)
Directed by Arnaud Desplechin

In the late 1940s, at the progressive Menninger Clinic, two mavericks bonded, not simply as therapist and patient, but as friends united by their personal experiences as outsiders. Arnaud Desplechin’s extraordinarily intelligent and moving adaptation of Georges Devereux’s landmark work of ethnographic-psychoanalysis stars Benicio Del Toro as the titular Jimmy P, a Blackfoot Indian and World War II veteran suffering from what initially seems like severe posttraumatic stress, and Mathieu Amalric as Devereux, a Hungarian Jew who reinvented himself many times over before coming to the US to study Mohave Indian culture. Both actors are at the top of their game and their interaction makes the best case for the “Talking Cure” ever depicted in a fiction film. 

New York Film Festival 2013

Cannes Film Festival 2013

In Secret  (Opens February 21)
Directed by Charlie Stratton, USA

Set in the lower echelons of 1860s Paris, Thérèse Raquin, a sexually repressed beautiful young woman, is trapped into a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille, by her domineering aunt, Madame Raquin. Thérèse spends her days confined behind the counter of a small shop and her evenings watching Madame play dominoes with an eclectic group. After she meets her husband's alluring friend, Laurent, she embarks on an illicit affair that leads to tragic consequences.
Toronto International Film Festival 2013


Freida Mock's Anita.

Anita (Opens March 21)
Directed by Freida Mock, USA

On October 11, 1991, a poised young law professor sent shock waves through the nation as she sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee intrepidly testifying to the lewd behavior of a Supreme Court nominee. Twenty years later, Academy Award winner Freida Mock brings us Anita, which crystallizes the sexist power dynamics in the room that day and unravels the impact of that lightning-rod moment on Anita Hill’s life and the broader discussion of gender inequality in America. Contemporary interviews with Hill and her allies, and unsettling archival footage,reveal the way her attempt to report confidentially on Clarence Thomas’s conduct quickly became a perverse and vicious public attack on her character and credibility. Hill’s hearing became a charade of justice. Yet her audacity to speak out detonated a national debate about sexual harassment that revolutionized gender politics.  
Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2013
Sundance Film Festival 2013

Exhibition (Opens March 28)
Directed by Joanna Hogg, U.K.

A married middle-aged couple (Viv Albertine and Liam Gillick), both artists, live in a beautiful modernist house in Chelsea, designed and built by an artist—a labyrinth, a refuge, a prison house, a battleground. As they confront their conflicts and competitions, they slowly arrive at the painful decision to sell, thus inviting interlopers into their private world. Joanna Hogg’s new film is structured as a cinematic mosaic of interlocking sights, sounds, exchanges, happenings great and small, everyday advances and retreats. It is, finally, a portrait of two people in a state of change in a house that effectively becomes a third character, and an agent in that change. Hogg’s film is a rarity, at once exactingly minimal and intimately character-driven. It is also a wonderful “London movie.”
New York Film Festival 2013
Locarno Film Festival 2013