This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re sharing a talk from the 60th New York Film Festival with Alice Diop & Frederick Wiseman, whose films Saint Omer (opening Friday with Q&As!) and A Couple, respectively, were both NYFF60 Main Slate selections. The conversation was moderated by Dessane Lopez Cassell, editor-in-chief of SEEN journal with translation by Nicholas Elliott.
French filmmaker Alice Diop has said that it was the work of Frederick Wiseman that inspired her to become a documentarian. It is fitting, then, that NYFF60’s Main Slate featured new films by Wiseman and Diop that speak to each other in extraordinary ways—including in their deviation from documentary into the more delicate terrain between fiction and nonfiction. Both A Couple (Wiseman) and Saint Omer (Diop) take true stories of extraordinary and fraught women as their bases, probing the formal possibilities and limits of cinema in revealing the inner lives of real people. The two directors convened for a conversation about the turn to narrative cinema, the cultural and generational distinctions of filmmaking in France and the United States, their respective approaches to cinema as a mode of systemic critique, and more. NYFF Talks were presented by HBO.
Watch/listen to the discussions below and don’t forget to subscribe here for more filmmaker conversations.
