Film at Lincoln Center has announced its lineup of festival, repertory, and new release programming for the 2024 spring season, from March through June.
This spring, FLC is pleased to present a number of first run titles that debuted in the 61st New York Film Festival, including Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, Hong Sangsoo’s In Our Day, Marco Bellocchio’s Kidnapped, Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, and Angela Schanelec’s Music. Peter Kass’s Time of the Heathen, long thought lost and newly restored in 4K, will also be presented in its first-ever New York theatrical run. Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi will return after sold-out screenings during FLC’s “Desire/Expectations: The Films of Edward Yang,” a retrospective of the pioneering filmmaker’s work this past holiday season.
FLC will also present several series and retrospectives dedicated to important facets and faces of cinema: Seeing the City: Avant-Garde Visions of New York from The Film-Makers’ Cooperative Collection, a selection of films giving an alternative vision of one of the most filmed and photographed metropolises on earth; Sophia Loren: La signora di Napoli, a celebration of the iconic Italian star’s unmatched career, featuring many new restorations of her most enduring films; and Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Baker, an eclectic selection of films handpicked by Baker herself, occasioned by the release of her debut feature film, Janet Planet.
In anticipation of the release of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, multi-instrumentalist composer Eiko Ishibashi, who scored Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (NYFF59), will perform live with the North American premiere of Hamaguchi’s silent film GIFT. This performance and the release of Hamaguchi’s latest film will be preceded by Hamaguchi I & II, an opportunity for New York audiences to catch up with some of the acclaimed director’s most remarkable films, from his short films and debut feature Passion, to the beguiling and mysterious love story Asako I & II, and the 2021 double-hitter of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Oscar winner Drive My Car.
New editions of annual film series and festivals will also be returning to FLC, including New Directors/New Films, New York African Film Festival, and Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.
In addition to this abundant lineup of new releases, revivals, series, and festivals, on April 22 Film Comment will present a double-feature program of two features shot by Indian cinematographer Navroze Contractor—Duvidha, and Sanjiv Shah’s unique musical satire Love in the Time of Malaria (1992), which will screen theatrically in the U.S. for the first time—along with an extended conversation with Contractor’s partner, director Deepa Dhanraj.
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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.).
Opens March 29
La Chimera
Alice Rohrwacher, 2023, Italy, 133m
Italian with English subtitles
La Chimera. Courtesy of NEON.
With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and magical realism, Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro, NYFF56) conjures a marvelous entertainment set in a rural Italy eternally caught between the ancient and the modern. Josh O’Connor (The Crown) stars as Arthur, a ne’er-do well Englishman, handsomely rumpled and recently out of prison, who returns to a rural town in central Italy where he hesitantly reconnects with a ragtag group of tombaroli (tomb raiders), for whom he uses his uncanny powers of divination to locate graves that date back to the Etruscan period and teem with antiquities of immense value to collectors and museums. Yet the melancholy Arthur has other ghosts on his mind, including his long-lost love Beniamina, who haunts his memory like her own ghostly civilization. Featuring gorgeous rough-hewn textures from the great cinematographer Hélène Louvart and outstanding supporting work from Isabella Rossellini, Carol Duarte, and Alba Rohrwacher, La Chimera is a dreamlike descent into a majestically tattered world right beneath our own. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. A NEON release. Tickets on sale Thursday!
April 3–14
New Directors/New Films
Good One. Courtesy of Metrograph Pictures.
Celebrating its 53rd edition in 2024, New Directors/New Films introduces New York audiences to the work of emerging filmmakers from around the world. Co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art for more than half a century, the festival has celebrated filmmakers who speak to the present and anticipate the future of cinema, and whose bold work pushes the envelope in unexpected, striking ways. This year’s selection showcases films from more than 30 countries, and prize winners from the Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Sarajevo, and Sundance film festivals. Opening the festival on April 3 is the New York premiere of Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, a piercing drama starring Sebastian Stan in an ingeniously embodied performance as Edward, an aspiring actor with severe facial disfigurement. ND/NF will close with Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions, a propulsive, brilliantly discombobulating queer comedy set in Brooklyn in the summer of 2020. Tickets on sale now!
Opens April 5 with Bertrand Bonello in Person
The Beast
Bertrand Bonello, 2023, France, 146m
English and French with English subtitles
The Beast. Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films.
A filmmaker consistently unafraid to wade through the weird miasma of contemporary life, Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama; Coma, NYFF60) works from the outside in, dramatizing the psychological toll of the political and cultural world around us. Here he has created a dynamic and disturbing parable that jumps between three different time periods (1910, 2014, and 2044) to diagnose our acute—and perhaps eternal—feelings of estrangement and alienation. Using Henry James’s haunting 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle” as his film’s provocative inspiration, Bonello tells the story of a young woman (Léa Seydoux) who undergoes a surgical process to have her DNA—and therefore memories of all her past lives—removed. In so doing, she realizes her fate has long been intertwined, for better and worse, with a young man (George MacKay). Touching on modern anxieties of AI and incel culture, which may recur throughout history as commonly as love and hate, The Beast, like all good science-fiction, asks essential questions about the ever-shifting status of humanity itself. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. A Sideshow and Janus Films release. Tickets on sale now!
April 17–25
A Brighter Summer Day + Yi Yi
Yi Yi. Courtesy of Janus Films.
After sold-out screenings during Desire/Expectations: The Films of Edward Yang, A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi return to Film at Lincoln Center in the Walter Reade Theater, April 17–25.
A Brighter Summer Day
Edward Yang, 1991, Taiwan, 237m
Mandarin and Taiwanese with English subtitles
A deeply personal epic comparable in scope and impact to the Godfather movies and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, Yang’s extraordinary memory film stretches tautly over four hours of screen time and more than 100 speaking parts. Set in the early 1960s (Yang’s own teenage years) and inspired by the true story of Taiwan’s first juvenile homicide case, the film follows rebellious teenager Xiao Si’r (the debut role of Chen Chang, years before appearing in Happy Together and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) as he comes of age amid rival street gangs and the “White Terror” witch hunts of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government. Few movies more readily call to mind the great, sprawling novels of the 19th century and their portraits of ordinary individuals caught in the maelstrom of a changing society—A Brighter Summer Day is widely considered, alongside Yi Yi, as one of Yang’s crowning cinematic achievements. A Janus Films release.
A Brighter Summer Day was restored in 2009 by the Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Central Motion Picture Corporation, and the Edward Yang Estate. Scan performed at Digimax laboratories in Taipei. Restoration funded by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways, and Qatar Museum Authority.
Yi Yi
Edward Yang, 2000, Taiwan, 173m
Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
A work of extraordinary synchronicity, empathy, and narrative control, Yi Yi is like a particularly fine timepiece, as fascinating for the way it functions as the way it is formed. Once again and for his last completed feature, Yang probed the conflicts and anxieties of life in Taiwan, but this time through the prism of family. Middle-aged businessman NJ (wonderfully played by Wu Nien-Jen, one of the key screenwriters of the New Taiwan Cinema) is having personal and professional crises—his computer firm is in flux and he’s just reconnected with an old girlfriend. Meanwhile, Grandma has had a stroke, for which NJ’s daughter blames herself; his wife runs off to a religious retreat; and his son is having trouble adjusting to it all—perhaps because he’s a genius. Winner of the Best Director Award at Cannes, Yi Yi would be remarkable if only for the nuanced performances, or for the delicacy of the narrative, or for the gentleness and affection with which Yang considers his characters: Together, these ingredients make it both irresistible and overwhelming. An NYFF38 Main Slate selection. A Janus Films release.
April 22
Film Comment Live: Tribute to Navroze Contractor
From the early ’70s onwards, the Indian cinematographer Navroze Contractor—who passed away last year at age 80—blazed a trail of radical image-making. Trained in fine arts, photography, and cinematography, Contractor wielded the camera as both a weapon and a paintbrush, capturing both the thrills and the throes of popular uprisings against the state through films that defined political documentary in India, and giving stunning form to the bold adventures in fiction undertaken by India’s Parallel Cinema filmmakers.
His longtime collaboration with his partner, director Deepa Dhanraj, and the feminist group they co-founded, the Yugantar Film Collective, resulted in a series of short and feature-length films—including What Has Happened to This City? (1984) and Something Like a War (1991)—that endure as extraordinary, pulsating visual documents of collective power and anti-capitalist resistance. As cinematographer for Indian independent stalwarts like Mani Kaul, Chetan Shah, Ketan Mehta, Pattabhi Rama Reddy, and Sanjiv Shah, Contractor combined technical innovation and an eye for everyday beauty to render landscapes and faces with expressionistic minimalism. Kaul’s rapturous Duvidha (1973), which won a prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1975, and screened in the 1976 edition of the New Directors/New Films festival, is an exemplar.
To celebrate Contractor’s legacy and contribution to cinema, Film Comment presents a double-feature program of two features shot by the cinematographer—Duvidha, and Sanjiv Shah’s unique musical satire Love in the Time of Malaria (1992), which will screen theatrically in the U.S. for the first time—along with an extended conversation with Dhanraj. Tickets on sale now with 2-for-1 pricing!
Duvidha
Mani Kaul, 1973, India, 82m
A hypnotic and enigmatic ghost story derived from a Rajasthani folktale, Duvidha endures as a seminal contribution to the Indian cinema of the 1970s. A mischievous (and lonely) ghost seeking company fixates upon a beautiful young woman whose merchant husband is away on a five-year business trip (which began the day after their wedding!), so he transmutes himself into the man’s doppelganger. But the ghost’s plan goes awry when the husband finally returns home. One of Navroze Contractor’s earliest and most acclaimed films as a cinematographer, Duvidha is a strikingly stylized synthesis of folklore and cinematic modernism, as attuned to spectral vibrations as it is the rhythms, rituals, and textures of quotidian life.
Monday, April 22 at 6:00pm (followed by extended conversation with Deepa Dhanraj)
Love in the Time of Malaria
Sanjiv Shah, 1992, India, 128m
U.S. Premiere
One of the strangest and most inspired films to come out of India in the ’90s, Love in the Time of Malaria unfolds in the fictional kingdom of Khojpuri, ruled by a king with intestinal issues and plagued by mosquitoes that are infecting the population with dissent and unrest. Cherub-faced chemist Hunshilal is enlisted by the crown’s Moral Science Institute to concoct a cure for the mosquito scourge from the local crop—red onions—but soon finds himself embroiled in a seditious conspiracy against the authorities. Sanjiv Shah’s no-holds-barred debut feature is an exuberant and unclassifiable political satire, incorporating expertly written songs, intricate webs of references and gags, and stirring calls to revolution into a thinly veiled (and bitingly topical) portrait of a nation in crisis. A bravura example of Navroze Contractor’s versatility as a cameraman, the film melds elaborate, fantasy-tinged setpieces with naturalistic scenes of city life, including documentary footage of street protests against the government.
Rarely screened except on public television in India, Love in the Time of Malaria was restored in 2022 by the Film Heritage Foundation.
Monday, April 22 at 8:30pm (introduction by Deepa Dhanraj)
Opens April 26
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
Joanna Arnow, 2023, U.S., 88m
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
In her unsparing, acerbically funny feature debut, Joanna Arnow stars as an emotionally detached young Brooklynite drifting through unremarkable days and nights. Neither her on-again-off-again BDSM relationship with a mildly disinterested older dom, nor her nondescript corporate job, appear to bring her any satisfaction, and her relationship with her unpleasable New Yorker parents only compounds the tiresome cycle of her routine. Arnow, who also wrote, directed, and edited this sharp and observant take on modern-day malaise, is known for her autobiographically tinged works of brutal honesty and deadpan self-deprecation. Here, she finds a core of poignant truth about the ways people search for those elusive, ever-shifting things like emotional happiness and sexual gratification, refusing to judge them while at the same time unafraid of presenting their flaws. An NYFF61 Currents selection. A Magnolia Pictures release.
April 26–30
Hamaguchi I & II
Since emerging onto the world stage with his 2015 international breakthrough, the five-plus-hour Happy Hour, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi has hardly slowed down. Rather, the six additional films he has made since then have all but solidified his status as one of contemporary cinema’s most tirelessly inventive filmmakers, whose body of work so far is among the most profoundly human, richly cinematic, and pleasantly unpredictable in modern movies. Over the years he has developed a style evoking the fiction-gamesmanship of Rivette, the unassuming intimacy of Rohmer, and the expressive formalism of Sōmai with the distinctive traits of Hollywood and literature that—in a rarely successful balancing act—have won over arthouse and mainstream crowds alike. Occasioned by the U.S. release of Evil Does Not Exist (opening May 3) and the North American premiere of GIFT with composer Eiko Ishibashi (May 1–2), Film at Lincoln Center is thrilled to offer New York audiences the chance to catch up with some of Hamaguchi’s most remarkable films in the Walter Reade Theater—from his short films and debut feature Passion, made while still a student, to the beguiling and mysterious love story Asako I & II, and the 2021 double-hitter of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Oscar winner Drive My Car.
Organized by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson.
May 1 & 2
GIFT: A Film by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi X Live Score by Eiko Ishibashi
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2023, Japan, 74m
No dialogue
North American Premiere
Photo by Seiji Shibuya; NEOPA Inc. x Fictive LLC
Film at Lincoln Center welcomes multi-instrumentalist composer Eiko Ishibashi (Drive My Car) for the North American Premiere of her live performance of GIFT. This brand-new feature from director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, developed in collaboration with Ishibashi, is something like the concentrated, wordless flipside of Evil Does Not Exist (NYFF61, opening at FLC on May 3), a sui generis ecopolitical thriller set within a serene rural village that’s about to be disrupted by the construction of a glamping site for Tokyo tourists. How this scenario unfolds in GIFT is an altogether different experience: a silent feature that will only be presented with the live accompaniment of Ishibashi’s score, performed by the composer herself. Join us this May for what promises to be an unmissable event, presented for three screenings only in the Walter Reade Theater. Tickets on sale now!
Organized by Florence Almozini and Manuel Santini.
Wednesday, May 1 at 7:00pm
Thursday, May 2 at 7:00pm & 9:15pm
Opens May 3 with Ryûsuke Hamaguchi in Person
Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2023, Japan, 105m
Japanese with English subtitles
Evil Does Not Exist. Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films.
Deep in the forest of the small rural village Harasawa, single parent Takumi lives with his young daughter, Hana, and takes care of odd jobs for locals, chopping wood and hauling pristine well water. The overpowering serenity of this untouched land of mountains and lakes, where deer peacefully roam free, is about to be disrupted by the imminent arrival of the Tokyo company Playmode, which is ready to start construction on a glamping site for city tourists—a plan, which Takumi and his neighbors discover, that will have dire consequences for the ecological health and cleanliness of their community. The potent and foreboding new film from Oscar-winning director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, both NYFF59) is a haunting, entirely unexpected cinematic experience that reconstitutes the boundaries of the ecopolitical thriller. Intensified by a rapturous, ominous score by Eiko Ishibashi, this mesmeric journey diverges from country-vs-city themes to straddle the line between the earthy and the metaphysical. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. A Sideshow and Janus Films release.
May 3–7
Seeing the City: Avant-Garde Visions of New York from The Film-Makers’ Cooperative Collection
Taxi, Taxi.
An iconic, oftentimes clichéd, cinematic setting for hundreds of films, New York has regularly played a starring role in the history of cinema. Narrative films set in New York City are almost a subgenre unto themselves and have received copious attention. Less explored are visions of the city anchored in exploration, experimentation, and subversive political commitment. This set of programs—many of which will be presented on 16mm—offers a diverse and engaging introduction to some of the scores of films in The Film-Maker’s Cooperative’s collection that explore the city. From the lyrical evocations of the anonymity of the crowd and mass transit, and a clutch of visionary works examining the built environment, to a set of films exploring housing, the lurking shadow of ever-encroaching gentrification, and specific areas of the city, this selection gives an alternative vision of one of the most filmed and photographed metropolises on earth.
Organized by Dan Sullivan and Tom Day. Co-presented with The Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
May 8–14
New York African Film Festival
Film at Lincoln Center and African Film Festival, Inc. are excited to announce the 31st edition of the New York African Film Festival, taking place from May 8 to 14. Since its inception in 1993, the festival has been at the forefront of showcasing African and diaspora filmmakers’ unique storytelling through the moving image. This year’s theme, Convergence of Time, explores the intersection of historical and contemporary roles played by individuals representing Africa and its diaspora in all cultural and artistic disciplines. With more than 50 films from more than 25 countries, the festival invites audiences to delve into the convergence of archival and modern experimentalism, transcending both space and time.
Co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and African Film Festival, Inc. Organized by Mahen Bonetti, Tisa Chigaga, Zamzam Dirieh Ali, and Devin Powell, African Film Festival, Inc.
Opens May 10 – Exclusive New York Run
Time of the Heathen
Peter Kass, 1961, U.S., 76m
Time of the Heathen.
For his first and only feature, theater actor-director (and protégée of Clifford Odets) Peter Kass put a politically charged twist on the wrong-man thriller, resulting in a work of enveloping atmosphere that visionarily explores the post-traumatic delirium of war. Set in New York four years after the bombing of Hiroshima, the film follows a bible-carrying drifter named Gaunt (John Heffernan), who, after witnessing the rape and murder of a Black woman, is framed and pursued by locals while left as the sole protector of the woman’s young son. Time of the Heathen is at once a slow-dawning reckoning of collective guilt and complicity, a tense chase film, and a radical formal experiment featuring collaborations with key figures of the American avant-garde—among them Ed Emshwiller, who shot and co-edited the film, and composer Lejaren Hiller. Long thought lost and newly restored in 4K, Film at Lincoln Center is pleased to present the film’s first-ever New York theatrical run this May. An Arbelos release.
Restored in 4K in 2023 by UCLA Film & Television Archive and Lightbox Film Center, University of the Arts at Illuminate Hollywood laboratory, in collaboration with Corpus Fluxus and Audio Mechanics from the 35mm picture, the soundtrack negative and the original 1/4” stereo master recording of Lejaren Hiller’s score. Funding provided by Ron and Suzanne Naples.
Opens May 17 – Exclusive New York Run
In Our Day
Hong Sangsoo, 2023, South Korea, 83m
Korean with English subtitles
In Our Day. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.
For his 30th feature film, Hong Sangsoo has crafted a slippery yet captivating inquiry into the search for meaning, connection, and artistic satisfaction. In Our Day alternates two seemingly unrelated stories: in the first, a disillusioned former actress named Sangwon (Hong regular Kim Minhee) who has left her profession behind and is recharging at the apartment of her longtime friend Jung-soo (Song Sunmi); in the second, a middle-aged poet, Hong Uiji (Ki Joo-bong), who has become a cult figure for a new generation of young readers, is being visited by a student (Park Miso) making a documentary about him and a young man (Ha Seong-guk) drilling him with questions about the meaning of it all—which makes it difficult for the artist to refrain from drinking, even though his doctors have sworn him off alcohol. From these two disparate strands, Hong delightfully evokes a world rich with enigma and possibility, in which the most seemingly minute detail (the whereabouts of a cat, the spiciness of a noodle dish) has outsized repercussions, and asking life’s big questions often brings us back to square one. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. A Cinema Guild release.
Opens May 24
Kidnapped
Marco Bellocchio, 2023, Italy, 134m
Italian and Hebrew with English subtitles
Kidnapped. Courtesy of Cohen Media.
In 1858 Bologna, a 6-year-old named Edgardo Mortara was seized by authorities of the papal state, taken away from his Jewish parents, and placed in the care of the Church. Believed to have been baptized in the cradle under odd circumstances, the child would be claimed as a Catholic. His mind erased of his family’s religious heritage and beliefs, Edgardo was, unbeknownst to him, at the center of an international firestorm that led directly to the Italian people’s rejection of the Pope’s rule amidst the tumultuous Risorgimento. In this sumptuously mounted film from treasured octogenarian director Marco Bellocchio, the Mortara case becomes an extraordinary, nearly operatic historical drama. Kidnapped is at once a personal, human-scale narrative of a family in crisis, following parents who will do anything to retrieve their child from the clutches of a ruthless theocratic government, and a wide-scope portrait of a country on the cusp of revolution. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. A Cohen Media Group release.
May 30–June 6
Open Roads: New Italian Cinema
Open Roads: New Italian Cinema is the only screening series to offer North American audiences a diverse and extensive lineup of contemporary Italian films. This year’s edition again strikes a balance between emerging talents and esteemed veterans; commercial and independent fare; and outrageous comedies, gripping dramas, and captivating documentaries.
Co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà. Organized by Dan Sullivan of Film at Lincoln Center and by Carla Cattani, Griselda Guerrasio, and Monique Catalino of Cinecittà, Rome.
June 7–13
Sophia Loren: La signora di Napoli
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Sophia Loren’s eternal beauty, undeniable charisma, and naturalism of ever-surprising depth and sophistication have made her one of the greatest treasures of world cinema. Launched to global fame with her vividly embodied turn in Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1960)—for which she won a Cannes Best Actress prize, the British Academy Award, and the Oscar for Best Actress (making history as the first actress to win for a foreign-language film)—Loren represented something startlingly fresh and alluring to audiences from all over: here was perhaps the first international movie star. Moving freely between major Hollywood films and Italian-based productions, equally skilled at drama or comedy, she harnessed her versatile charm and earthy intensity for a range of directors—from Altman, Cukor, and Chaplin, to Blasetti, Fellini, and, on multiple occasions, De Sica, who likened her to Mona Lisa—and in indelible roles opposite the likes of Gregory Peck, Marlon Brando, and Marcello Mastroianni, with whom she fostered, across 14 features, one of cinema’s greatest on-screen duos. This June, Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà are proud to celebrate the unmatched career of Sophia Loren, featuring many new restorations of her most enduring films.
Organized by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson of Film at Lincoln Center, and by Paola Ruggiero, Camilla Cormanni, and Marco Cicala of Cinecittà. Co-produced by Cinecittà, Rome.
June 14–20
Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Baker
Annie Baker. Photograph by Sean DiSerio.
Since her Off-Broadway debut in 2008, playwright Annie Baker—perhaps best known to New York audiences as the author of 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner The Flick, a chamber piece set entirely in the auditorium of a fading movie palace in suburban Massachusetts—has been celebrated for pioneering a dramaturgical sensibility situated at the intersection of theater and cinema. Noting her careful attention to the mechanics and affective consequences of duration, critics have heralded the pointedly “anti-theatrical” slant of Baker’s work in theater, where she exhibits a granular fascination with idiosyncratic regional textures, the rhythms and linguistic patterns of small talk, and the minute, unstudied gestures of everyday self-expression—all deployed with wry, understated humor and an unwavering compassion for characters who inhabit the margins of a social or cultural ecosystem. With the release of her first feature film—NYFF61 Main Slate selection Janet Planet, lauded as one of last year’s most aesthetically sophisticated and strikingly original filmmaking debuts—Baker has come full circle, virtuosically adapting her immense talents for world-building and characterization to the visual vocabularies and narrative syntax of the seventh art. In anticipation of the film’s release, Film at Lincoln Center is excited to present an eclectic selection of films, all handpicked by Baker herself, that exemplify the myriad ways in which filmmakers have grappled with and paid tribute to cinema’s sibling art form, eloquently interrogating the lineage that links the proscenium and the film frame.
Organized by Florence Almozini, Madeline Whittle, and Annie Baker.
Opens June 21
Janet Planet
Annie Baker, 2023, U.S., 113m
It’s the summer before Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) starts sixth grade, and she is spending the lazy months with her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), in their home in the woods. As the months drift by, the bespectacled, taciturn girl, fiercely observant, watches Janet and three enigmatic adults who drift in and out of their lives. Set in 1991 rural Western Massachusetts, the superb debut film from Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Annie Baker is a work of surreal tranquility that moves at a different, lost pace of life, and which perceives heartbreak just as Lacy is beginning to grasp the world and her place in it. Baker has created a film about a mother and daughter quite unlike any other, heightening the viewer’s senses and expressing oceans of feeling with the smallest gestures. Nicholson and Ziegler perform their roles with an inspiring lack of sentimentality, and the wondrous supporting cast includes Elias Koteas, Sophie Okonedo, and Will Patton. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. An A24 release.
Opens June 28
Last Summer
Catherine Breillat, 2023, France, 104m
French with English subtitles
Last Summer. Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films.
One of the world’s most consistently provocative filmmakers for nearly 50 years, Catherine Breillat proves with her incendiary, compelling new drama that she is not through toying with viewers’ comfort levels. A highlight at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the multi-César Award–nominated Last Summer stars Léa Drucker as Anne, a lawyer who specializes in cases of sexual consent and parental custody. Seemingly happily married to kind-hearted businessman Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin) with adopted twin daughters, Anne inexplicably finds herself drawn to Pierre’s estranged 17-year-old son Théo (Samuel Kircher) after the boy returns home to live with them. Embarking on a passionate affair with the teenager, Anne all too willingly thrusts herself into a maelstrom of attraction, intimidation, and manipulation. Breillat’s incisive latest—written in collaboration with Pascal Bonitzer and featuring original music by Kim Gordon—elegantly surveys the situation’s extreme power dynamics while giving the brilliant Drucker the chance to create a character who exists entirely within her own moral boundaries. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.
Opens June 28 – Exclusive Two-Week New York Run
Music
Angela Schanelec, 2023, Germany/France/Greece/Serbia, 105m
Greek and English with English subtitles
Music. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.
A young man and woman are unknowingly united by the same violent death. Brought together by fate and horrible irony, Jon (Aliocha Schneider) and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer) first meet in prison, where she works and he’s an inmate; they kindle a romance fomented by passion for classical music and opera, followed by marriage and children. Yet as in all tragedies, the past returns to haunt them. Inspired by the Oedipus myth, founding Berlin School member Angela Schanelec (I Was at Home, But…, NYFF57) pushes her skill for finding catharsis via oblique means to new levels of emotionality. Using abstract gestures and broad narrative ellipses, yet still managing to plumb the depths of her characters’ complicated traumas, Schanelec has created with Music an alternately austere and vivid portrait of grief and redemption through art told with her distinctive compositional rigor. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. A Cinema Guild release.
