Film at Lincoln Center has announced its lineup of festival, repertory, and new release programming for the 2023 winter/spring season.

FLC kicks off the year with new releases including NYFF60 selections: Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, Austria’s Oscar entry starring Vicky Krieps in a perceptive, nuanced performance who quietly dominates the screen as Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who begins to see her life of royal privilege as a prison as she reaches her 40th birthday; Alcarràs, Spain’s Oscar entry and Carla Simón’s follow-up to her acclaimed childhood drama Summer 1993, a ruminative, lived-in portrait of a rural family in present-day Catalonia whose way of life is rapidly changing; Saint Omer, France’s Oscar entry and Alice Diop’s arresting fiction feature debut, starring Kayije Kagame as Rama, who attends the trial of a young Senegalese woman (Guslagie Malanga), who has allegedly murdered her own baby daughter; Mia Hansen-Løve’s  intensely poignant and deeply personal drama One Fine Morning, starring Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a professional translator and single mother at a crossroads; Albert Serra’s Pacificition, a mesmerizing, slow-building fever dream about a French bureaucrat (a monumental Benoît Magimel) drifting through a fateful trip to a French Polynesian island with increasing anxiety; a selection of Cauleen Smith’s short works, some newly restored and presented on 16mm, to be presented alongside her 1998 feature debut and landmark in American independent cinema Drylongso, which follows a woman in a photography class in Oakland as she begins photographing the young Black men of her neighborhood, having witnessed so many of them fall victim to senseless murder; and Hong Sangsoo’s Walk Up, a delicately radical structure in his latest exploration of the complexities of relationships, growing older, and artistic pursuit. In addition to this lineup, a 4K restoration of the great Claire Denis’s Chocolat, her riveting semi-autobiographical feature based on her childhood in colonial French Africa as the daughter of a civil servant, will be presented for a limited run.

Beijing-based wife-and-husband team Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s joins FLC with the release of their latest work Stonewalling (an NYFF60 Main Slate selection, opening March 10) by revisiting their previous collaborations with limited screenings of Egg and Stone and The Foolish Bird, with the filmmakers in person over opening weekend.

FLC series include ‘Verse Jumping with Daniels, featuring a selection of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s (better known by their joint film credit, Daniels) features, plus a selection of shorts, music videos, movie trailers, and a curated list of favorite films handpicked by the directors themselves, who will appear in person; The Unknowable Tod Browning, a retrospective highlighting one of the most original and enigmatic filmmakers of his time; and the return of four beloved festivals: the New York Jewish Film Festival, Dance on Camera Festival, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, and New Directors/New Films.

FLC programming is led by Florence Almozini, Senior Director, Programming, and the team includes Manuel Santini, Senior Manager, Programming; Dan Sullivan, Programmer; Regina Riccitelli, Senior Programming Coordinator; Madeline Whittle, Assistant Programmer; and Tyler Wilson, Programmer. In addition, FLC is joined by two at-large programmers: Cecilia Barrionuevo and Claire Diao, to complement the team.

Cecilia Barrionuevo was the artistic director of Mar del Plata International Film Festival until 2021, and a member of the festival’s programming team since 2010. She has curated shows for Documenta Madrid, UnionDocs, Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires, Museo Reina Sofía, and La Casa Encendida, and is a program advisor for Antofacine, among others. 

Claire Diao is a French-Burkinabè film programmer, critic, and distributor. She is the founder of the touring short film program Quartiers Lointains, co-founder of the Pan-African film critic magazine AWOTELE, and the CEO of the Pan-African film distribution company Sudu Connexion. She is a member of the African Film Critic Federation and the Burkinabè Film Critic organization and a mentor for the Durban Talents (South Africa). 

FLC Members save $5 on all tickets! Get 30% off membership this month only with the code HOLIDAY30 through Dec. 21st and sign up for the FLC Newsletter for on-sale updates.

Film descriptions and additional details are listed below and on filmlinc.org. New releases and revival runs are organized by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson.

FILMS & SERIES DESCRIPTIONS
All films screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th St.) or Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
(144 W. 65th St.).

Opening December 23
Corsage
Marie Kreutzer, 2022, Austria, France, Germany 113m
German, French, English, Hungarian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Corsage. Courtesy of IFC Films.

In a perceptive, nuanced performance, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) quietly dominates the screen as Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who begins to see her life of royal privilege as a prison as she reaches her 40th birthday. Marie Kreutzer boldly imagines Elizabeth’s cloistered, late-19th-century world within the Austro-Hungarian Empire with both austere realism and fanciful anachronism, while staying true and intensely close to the woman’s private melancholy and political struggle amidst a crumbling, combative marriage and escalating scrutiny. Star and director have together created a remarkable vision of a strong-willed political figure whose emergence from a veiled, corseted existence stands for a Europe on the cusp of major, irrevocable transformation. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. An IFC Films release. Tickets on sale now.

Opening January 6
Alcarràs
Carla Simón, 2022, Spain/Italy, 120m
Catalan and Spanish with English subtitles

Alcarràs. Courtesy of MUBI.

Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlinale, Carla Simón’s follow-up to her acclaimed childhood drama Summer 1993 is a ruminative, lived-in portrait of a rural family in present-day Catalonia whose way of life is rapidly changing. The Solé clan live in a small village, annually harvesting peaches for local business and export. However, their livelihood is put in jeopardy by the looming threat of the construction of solar panels, which would necessitate the destruction of their orchard. From this simple narrative, pitting agricultural tradition against the onrushing train of modern progress, Simón weaves a marvelously textured film that moves to the unpredictable rhythms and caprices of nature and family life. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A MUBI release.

January 12-23, 2023
New York Jewish Film Festival

The Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center are delighted to continue their partnership to bring you the 32nd annual New York Jewish Film Festival, presenting films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience. This year’s festival presents an engaging lineup of narratives, documentaries, and shorts with many screenings in person at the Walter Reade Theater, and two films presented virtually.

Highlights include America, Ofir Raul Graizer’s visually sumptuous film that takes place in striking settings, such as a flower shop, an ancient cave, and a waterfall; Sylvie Ohayon’s Haute Couture, a warm, witty, and wildly stylish testament to women working together, featuring a standout performance by Nathalie Baye; and Jake Paltrow’s June Zero, a gripping drama that revisits the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann from three disparate perspectives. Tickets on sale now.

Organized by Rachel Chanoff, Lisa Collins, Ana Maroto, Indigo Sparks, and Aviva Weintraub, with Dan Sullivan as advisor.

Opening January 13
Saint Omer
Alice Diop, 2022, France, 118m
French with English subtitles

Saint Omer. Courtesy of NEON.

Rama (Kayije Kagame), a successful journalist and author living in Paris, has come to Saint Omer, a town in the north of France, to attend the trial of a young Senegalese woman, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), who allegedly murdered her baby daughter. Although she admits to killing the child, she cannot or will not provide motivation, claiming it was a kind of sorcery out of her control. Rama’s plan to write about Laurence in a book inspired by the Medea myth increasingly unravels as she becomes overwhelmed by the case, and reckons with memories of her immigrant mother as well as her own impending motherhood. In her consummate fiction feature debut, Alice Diop (We) constructs an arresting yet highly sensitive, superbly acted film of constantly revealing layers. Saint Omer is at once a tense courtroom drama, a work of abstracted psychological portraiture, an inquiry into human agency, and a provocative examination of the limits of myth and cross-cultural knowledge. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A SUPER release.

Opening January 27
One Fine Morning
Mia Hansen-Løve, 2022, France, 112m
French with English subtitles

One Fine Morning. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Few filmmakers are as adept at exploring the contours of modern love and grief as Mia Hansen-Løve (Bergman Island), whose intensely poignant and deeply personal latest drama stars Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a professional translator and single mother at a crossroads. Her father (Pascal Greggory), rapidly deteriorating from a neurological illness, will soon require facility care, and her new lover (Melvil Poupaud) is a married dad whose unavailability only seems to draw her nearer to him, despite—or because of—the fact that she’s going through an overwhelming time in her life. Hansen-Løve, so finely observant of the small nuances of human interaction, works in harmonious concert with a magnificent Seydoux to create a complicated portrait of a woman torn between romantic desire and familial tragedy that is a marvel of emotional and formal economy. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

February 3-9
‘Verse Jumping with Daniels

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

In little over a decade, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (better known by their joint film credit, Daniels) have established a formidable, consistently surprising body of work that has catapulted them to the foreground of popular American cinema. Their willfully odd, wildly entertaining films—works of deranged maximalism with an unabashed sincerity—offer propulsive thrills alongside absurdist humor and deftly combine the aesthetics of music videos, video games, interactive storytelling, and animation into a style that has become unmistakably their own. Daniels’ knack for resonating with present-day anxieties emerged in full force with their 2016 debut feature, the uncategorizable Swiss Army Man, and most recently with their widely celebrated Everything Everywhere All at Once, which jumps through its own intricate multiverse of film references—from kung fu and Hollywood actioners to experimental animation to nonfiction cinema. This February, Film at Lincoln Center is pleased to present Daniels’ features, plus a selection of shorts, music videos, movie trailers, and a curated list of favorite films handpicked by the directors themselves, who will appear in person.
Organized by Florence Almozini, Tyler Wilson, and Daniels.

February 10-13
Dance on Camera Festival
Featuring 10 programs over four days, including 30 new films, as well as other gems from the traditional canon, the Dance on Camera Festival celebrates this new year with a selection of titles exploring dance films from around the globe, including films from 14 countries. Six New Yorkers will have their work featured, alongside works by 15 female-identifying artists—four of whom are new filmmakers, and one of whom is still a student. This festival will highlight the work of visionary artists Siobhan Davies, Bella Levitsky, Albert Tiong, and Hans Van Maarten, as well as films that push the boundary of time and memory. These films capture the poetry of movement, the visceral power of beauty, the chaos of addiction, and the healing power of dance. 

Opening February 17
Pacifiction
Albert Serra, 2022, France/Spain/Germany/Portugal, 162m
French with English subtitles

Pacifiction. Courtesy of Grasshopper Film and Gratitude Films.

Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra reconfirms his centrality in the contemporary cinematic landscape with this mesmerizing portrait of a French bureaucrat (a monumental Benoît Magimel) drifting through a fateful trip to a French Polynesian island with increasing anxiety. Pacifiction charts the various uneasy relationships that develop between Magimel’s autocratic yet avuncular high commissioner, De Roller, and the Indigenous locals (including nonprofessional actor Pahoa Mahagafanau in a hypnotic breakthrough as De Roller’s trusted right hand and maybe lover) who operate essentially under his faux-benevolent thumb, many of whom we meet at a resort that caters to the prurient exoticism of foreign tourists. Serra’s gripping, atmospheric thriller is a slow-building fever dream that lulls us before catching us by surprise with the depths of its darkness, a film that allows its incisive social commentary about the remnants of colonialism to surface through quiet observation and aesthetic audacity. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A Grasshopper Film and Gratitude Films release.

Opening February 24
Chocolat
Claire Denis, 1988, France/West Germany/Cameroon, 105m
English and French with English subtitles
The great Claire Denis made her debut with this semi-autobiographical feature, based on her childhood in colonial French Africa as the daughter of a civil servant. France (Mireille Perrier) reminisces about her childhood in Cameroon as her father (François Cluzet) comes and goes on call, which leads to the strengthening of her friendship with their devoted house servant, Protée (Isaach de Bankolé), and to the escalating sexual tension between him and her mother, Aimée (Giulia Boschi). As Protée increasingly becomes an object of desire and of scorn, France’s memories become more and more ambivalent. Prefiguring the concerns of Denis’s later films (Beau Travail, White Material) and establishing the tactile sensuality and elliptical style for which she is known, Chocolat today stands as a modern classic. A Janus Films release.
New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director Claire Denis, with a mono soundtrack. Restoration made by the laboratory Eclair Classics from the original feature negative with the colorist Bruno PATIN and Diego MERCURIALI and with the DoP Robert ALAZRAKI.

March 2–12
Rendez-Vous with French Cinema
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 Both Sides of the Blade; Mathieu Amalric’s Hold Me Tight; Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District; Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s Anaïs in Love; and Arnaud Desplechin’s Deception. Co-presented with UniFrance, the 27th edition of Rendez-Vous will demonstrate that the landscape of French cinema is as fertile, inspiring, and distinct as ever.
Organized by Florence Almozini and Madeline Whittle in collaboration with UniFrance.

Opening March 10
Stonewalling
Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka, 2022, Japan, 148m
Hunanese with English subtitles

Stonewalling.

The gripping, humane yet uncompromising latest film from Beijing-based wife-and-husband team Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka, shot with precise formal economy by Otsuka (who also serves as cinematographer), focuses on a year in the life of Lynn, a flight-attendant-in-training whose plans to finish college are thrown into doubt when she discovers she’s pregnant. Not wanting an abortion (a decision she hides from her callow, absent boyfriend, away on modeling and party-hosting gigs), she hopes to give the child away after carrying it to term, while staying afloat amidst a series of dead-end jobs. As incarnated by the filmmakers’ quietly potent recurring star Yao Honggui, Lynn—whose story continues after being the center of the filmmakers’ acclaimed The Foolish Bird (2017)—is both a fully rounded character and the vessel for an urgent critique of a modern-day social structure that has few options for women in need of care. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A KimStim release.

Egg and Stone and The Foolish Bird
For more than a decade, Beijing-based wife-and-husband team Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka, together with their recurring lead, Yao Honggui, have been making films about the lives of young people in China—in many cases “left-behind children,” or those whose parents are forced to move away from their families to find jobs in cities. On the occasion of the release of their latest, Stonewalling (opening at Film at Lincoln Center on March 10), we are pleased to revisit their previous collaborations with limited screenings of Egg and Stone (2012) and The Foolish Bird (2017), with the filmmakers in person over opening weekend.

Egg and Stone
Huang Ji, 2012, China, 101m
Hunanese with English subtitles

Egg and Stone

Huang Ji’s auspicious feature debut from 2012 is an autobiographical portrait of irrevocable social and familial collapse in contemporary China. Set in the director’s home village in Hunan Province and made exclusively with local non-professional actors (one of them a family member of the director), Egg and Stone follows a 14-year-old girl named Honggui (Yao Honggui, in her debut), left to navigate the traumatic consequences of a sexual assault under the supervision of her aunt and uncle, with whom she has been living for seven years while her parents work in the city. This remarkably poised, unsparing depiction of poverty and abuse, meticulously shot by Ryuji Otsuka (who also served as the film’s editor and producer), reveals the profound complications of urban migration and the ongoing degradation of women in the wake of China’s “loosened” one-child policy. Although the film’s national premiere at the 2012 Beijing Independent Film Festival was cut short mid-screening, that same year it won the Tiger Award, the top prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival. An Icarus Films release.

The Foolish Bird
Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka, 2017, China, 117m
Hunanese with English subtitles

The Foolish Bird

Building on the themes established in Egg and Stone—in particular, the alienating circumstances of “left-behind children” and the disenfranchisement of women in contemporary China—The Foolish Bird focuses on a highschooler named Lynn (Yao Honggui) who lives with her grandparents in Meicheng, a small Hunanese city unsettled by an ongoing rape-murder investigation. With little structure to regulate her life outside of school, where she is bullied, Lynn begins smuggling and reselling confiscated mobile phones with her friend, which leads to encounters with the city’s seedier inhabitants. A portrait of exploitation wrought by a technocratic state and its male-dominated conduits, The Foolish Bird accumulates a series of interactions of violence, corruption, and intimacy to conjure a tense mood, and subtly bends the contours of the mystery genre to haunting effect.

Opening March 17
Drylongso
Cauleen Smith, 1998, USA, 86m

Drylongso.

Cauleen Smith’s 1998 feature debut, a landmark in American independent cinema, follows Pica (Toby Smith), a woman in a photography class in Oakland, as she begins photographing the young Black men of her neighborhood, having witnessed so many of them fall victim to senseless murder and fearing the possibility of their becoming extinct altogether. This project serves as a point of departure for Smith to explore Pica’s relationship with her family, as well as her relationship with a friend (April Barnett) who becomes the victim of an enigmatic and elusive serial killer lurking in the background. An enduringly rich work of DIY filmmaking, Drylongso remains a resonant and visionary examination of violence (and its reverberations), friendship, and gender. An NYFF60 Revivals selection. A Janus Films release.

4K restoration undertaken by the Criterion Collection, Janus Films, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Supervised by director Cauleen Smith.
Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses film, video, installation, public performance, and sculpture. Drawing from the rich lineages of structuralist filmmaking, Third Cinema, and Afrofuturism, since the late 1980s Smith’s short films have touched on the many concerns of our times—systemic racism, class, gender violence, and colonization among them—with a rigor and intrepid formal experimentation that has become all too rare. This March, we are honored to screen a selection of Smith’s short works, some newly restored and presented on 16mm, alongside the release of the new 4K restoration of her 1998 debut feature, Drylongso, and with Smith in person.

March 17-26
The Unknowable Tod Browning 

Dracula

Tod Browning (1880–1962) ranks among the most original and enigmatic filmmakers of his time. Born Charles Albert Browning, Jr., son of a middle-class family, he ran away from his Kentucky home at age 16 to join the circus, where he took jobs as a barker, a contortionist, a clown, and a somnambulist buried alive in a box with its own ventilation system. Following a stint in vaudeville and adopting the moniker Tod (German for death), Browning eventually found a more permanent home in cinema as an actor until a life-altering car accident placed him behind the camera. He went on to direct a series of melodramas, including nine films starring Priscilla Dean (White Tiger, Drifting) before making some of the most bizarre and eerily atmospheric films of the silent era with Lon Chaney (in a 10-film collaboration including The Unknown, widely considered Browning’s masterpiece). Chaney’s death in 1930 coincided with the director’s transition to sound, notably with his genre-defining version of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi and his controversial, career-tarnishing Freaks, later reappraised by Andrew Sarris as “one of the most compassionate films ever made.” Browning has been described as one of cinema’s greatest humanists, as well as a sadistic ironist, and though his films retain complex moral ambiguities, a glance at this rich body of work reveals a visionary with an eye for stylization, typified by incisive treatment of Hollywood manifestations of beauty alongside lifelong personal obsessions with the sideshow milieu, criminality and retribution, and the psychology of horror.
Organized by Tyler Wilson and Maddie Whittle.

Opening March 24
Walk Up
Hong Sangsoo, 2022, South Korea, 97m
Korean with English subtitles

Walk Up. Courtesy of The Cinema Guild.

Hong Sangsoo uses a delicately radical structure in his latest exploration of the complexities of relationships, growing older, and artistic pursuit. Successful middle-aged filmmaker Byungsoo (Kwon Haehyo) drops by to visit and introduce his daughter to an old friend, Mrs. Kim (Lee Hyeyoung), the owner of a charming apartment building that houses a restaurant on the ground floor. After Mrs. Kim tries to persuade Byungsoo to move into one of the walk-up units, the film and Byungsoo’s future take a series of unexpected turns, as the various floors of the apartment come to contain different stages of his romantic and professional lives—or perhaps they’re different realities? Hong’s playfully existential drama consistently surprises, asking provocative, unresolvable questions about desire, illusion, satisfaction, and what we need—and take—from one another as we seek our own answers. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A Cinema Guild release.

Opening March 29 – April 9
New Directors/New Films
Celebrating its 52nd edition in 2023, the New Directors/New Films festival introduces New York audiences to the work of emerging filmmakers from around the world. Throughout its rich, half-century-plus history, New Directors/New Films has brought previously little-known talents like Spike Lee, Chantal Akerman, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Alice Diop, Laura Poitras, Mark Jenkin, Wong Kar Wai, and Kelly Reichardt to the attention of 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 expect.

Organized by La Frances Hui (Co-Chair, MoMA), Florence Almozini (Co-Chair, Film at Lincoln Center), Josh Siegel (MoMA), Rajendra Roy (MoMA), Olivia Priedite (MoMA), Dan Sullivan (Film at Lincoln Center), Tyler Wilson (Film at Lincoln Center), and Maddie Whittle (Film at Lincoln Center).