Film at Lincoln Center has announced its lineup of festival, repertory, and new release programming for the 2023 spring season, from March through June. 

Following this year’s edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, FLC kicks off the spring season with a selection of Cauleen Smith’s short works to be presented alongside a 4K restoration of her 1998 feature debut Drylongso (an NYFF60 Revivals selection), with Smith in-person to discuss her work; Unspeakable: The Films of Tod Browning, a retrospective of the pioneering filmmaker’s career; as well as a number of NYFF60 Main Slate selections, including Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s Stonewalling, with the filmmakers in-person for Q&As; Hong Sangsoo’s Walk Up; Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, presented in 35mm, along with his 2019 debut feature Bait; Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen; Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest; and Pietro Marcello’s Scarlet. NYFF60 Main Slate selection Master Gardener, writer-director Paul Schrader’s latest film, will also be shown following a double feature of Schrader’s previous films First Reformed and The Card Counter with the filmmaker in-person for a Q&A. Selections from the 2023 edition of FLC’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema include Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris and acclaimed writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children. FLC will also host An Evening with Terence Blanchard featuring a screening of Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blues, with director Sacha Jenkins and composer Terence Blanchard in-person. Retrospectives of two legendary filmmakers are expected at FLC this season as well: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, one of the 21st century’s most essential artists and a towering figure in both world cinema and the art world, and Marco Ferreri, the most punk Italian filmmaker of his generation and one of world cinema’s most indelible enfants terribles. This quarter will also see the return of four beloved festivals: New Directors/New Films, the New York African Film Festival, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.

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; Tyler Wilson, Programmer; Cecilia Barrionuevo, Programmer-at-Large; and Claire Diao, Programmer-at-Large.

FLC Members save $5 on all tickets! Sign up for the weekly FLC newsletter for on-sale updates and more.

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.

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

March 2-12
Rendez-Vous with French Cinema

The Gravity

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema begins March 2 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. 

Tickets on sale now!

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. Tickets on sale now!

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. See all three films and save! Discount package of $20 for GP and $15 for FLC Members will automatically be applied in cart when all three are added.

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. Tickets on sale now!

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. Tickets on sale now!

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. Tickets on sale now!
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: Shorts Programs I & II

Entitled

Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses film, video, installation, public performance, and sculpture. Drawing from the rich lineages of structuralist filmmaking and Third Cinema, 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. Occasioned by our release of Drylongso (NYFF60), newly restored in 4K, we are pleased to present two programs of Smith’s short films, including major works such as Chronicles of a Lying Spirit by Kelly Gabron (1992) and The Changing Same (2001), both screening from archival film prints, as well as her post-Katrina sci-fi, The Fullness of Time (2008). Featuring Smith in person on Friday, March 17. Tickets on sale now! See Drylongso and shorts programs and save! Discount package of $20 for GP and $15 for FLC Members will automatically be applied in cart when all three are added.

Organized by Tyler Wilson. Special thanks to Cauleen Smith and Mar Sudac; Janus Films; the Academy Film Archive.

March 17-26
Unspeakable: The Films of Tod Browning

Tod Browning (1880–1962) ranks among the most original and enigmatic filmmakers of his time. He has been described as one of cinema’s thorniest humanists as well as “the first diabolist of the cinema,” whose influence can be seen in the work of David Lynch, John Waters, Guillermo del Toro, and David Cronenberg. His groundbreaking achievements in horror and underworld melodramas were typified by incisive manifestations of beauty, alongside lifelong personal obsessions with the sideshow milieu, criminality and retribution, and psychosexual innuendo. Tickets on sale now!

Organized by Tyler Wilson and Madeline Whittle.

March 20 at 7pm
An Evening with Terence Blanchard: Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blues
Sacha Jenkins, USA, 2022, 106m

A magisterial tribute to a founding father of jazz, Sacha Jenkins’s comprehensive documentary chronicles the life and times of legendary trumpeter Louis Armstrong, from his role in the birth of the musical genre he’d come to epitomize on to his later adventures in Hollywood as an indelible onscreen presence. Working from a wealth of archival footage, Jenkins constructs a stirring ode to Armstrong that historically situates his achievements and public image, deftly tracing how the cultural figure cut by Armstrong was formulated against a backdrop of unapologetic, systemic racism. And, appropriately, the film is scored by none other than Terence Blanchard, himself a latter-day titan of the trumpet, and the result is an utterly absorbing and moving homage to a true icon of American music. An Apple release. Q&A with director Sacha Jenkins and composer Terence Blanchard, moderated by writer Larry Blumenfeld. Tickets on sale now!

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. Tickets on sale now!

Opening March 29 – April 9
New Directors/New Films

Mutt. Courtesy of Quiltro LLC

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, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Alice Diop, Laura Poitras, Mark Jenkin, Wong Kar Wai, and Kelly Reichardt to the attention of wider audiences. Highlights of the 2023 program include Opening Night film Earth Mama, Savanah Leaf’s debut feature and a devastating and evocative portrait of motherhood refracted through the prisms of race and class; and Closing Night film Mutt from director Vuk Lungulov-Klotz, which follows Feña, a twentysomething trans man who must contend with an onslaught of aggravations, surprise encounters, and emotional choices over a 24-hour period. Tickets on sale now!

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 Madeline Whittle (Film at Lincoln Center).

Opening March 31
Enys Men
Mark Jenkin, 2022, U.K., 35mm, 91m

Enys Men. Courtesy of NEON.

In 1973, on an uninhabited, windswept, rocky island off the coast of Cornwall in southwest England, an isolated middle-aged woman (Mary Woodvine) spends her days in enigmatic environmental study. When she’s not tending to the moss-covered stone cottage in which she lodges, her central preoccupation is a cluster of wildflowers at a cliff’s edge, the blossoms’ subtle changes noted in a daily ledger. She’s also increasingly haunted by her own nightmarish visitations, which seem both summoned from her own past and brought up from the very soil and ceremonial history of this mysterious place. Shot on enveloping, period-evocative 16mm, this eerie, texturally rich experience from Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin conjures works of classic British folk horror but remains its own strange being, a genuine transmission from a weird other world. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A NEON release. Tickets on sale now!

Bait
Mark Jenkin, 2019, U.K., 99m

Bait

A celebration of cinema as a physical medium, this delirious whatsit from Cornish director Mark Jenkin follows Martin (Edward Rowe), a cove fisherman whose brother has started using their father’s boat to shuttle tourists. This soon causes latent familial tensions—not to mention antagonism between tourists and locals—to explode in surprising fashion. Shot on tactile hand-processed black-and-white 16mm and unfolding with the staccato rhythms of avant-garde cinema, Jenkin’s debut feature from 2019 is an idiosyncratic work of social realism fascinatingly pitched somewhere between documentary and political melodrama. A 2019 New Directors/New Films selection. A NEON release. Tickets on sale now!

Opening April 14
Passion
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2008, Japan, 115m
In his second feature, never before released in the United States, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) examines a series of intersecting love triangles as only he can, plunging headlong into the exposed-nerve confessions and unrequited attachments among a group of thirtysomethings. The film begins when a couple, Kaho (Aoba Kawai) and Tomoya (Ryuta Okamoto), announce their engagement to their friends over dinner, where it’s also revealed the groom had an affair years earlier. While the two spend the evening apart, Tomoya follows his friends to the apartment of a former classmate (Fusako Urabe, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy) with whom he’s in love and is led into ever more vulnerable and shocking exchanges of emotional honesty. Passion was made as Hamaguchi’s student thesis project at Tokyo University of the Arts, and it already displayed, with clear-headed precision, the director’s peerless gift for elucidating the complexity of modern relationships and their intricate, frequently inexpressible wounds. A Film Movement release.

Opening April 21
Other People’s Children
Rebecca Zlotowski, 2022, France, 104m
French with English subtitles

Other People’s Children

Acclaimed writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski (An Easy Girl, 2020 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema) draws from her own life to depict the emotional trajectory of Rachel (Virginie Efira), a schoolteacher whose desire for a biological child seems increasingly unlikely to be fulfilled (as she’s informed by her gynecologist in a delightful cameo from Frederick Wiseman). When Rachel enters into a relationship with car designer Ali (Roschdy Zem), he’s slow to let her know that he’s a single father, but once she finds out she quickly grows to love his precocious daughter, Leila (Callie Ferreira-Goncalves). The stresses and strains of close relationships between adults and children are thoughtfully examined in this drama that’s as romantic in its evocation of new love blossoming in Paris as it is clear-headed about the myriad pressures that societal expectations impose on the lives of middle-aged women. A 2023 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema selection. A Music Box Films release.

Trenque Lauquen
Laura Citarella, 2022, Argentina, 262m (presented in two parts)
Spanish with English subtitles

Trenque Lauquen. Courtesy of Laura
Citarella.

In her dazzling and enormously pleasurable new opus, Laura Citarella takes viewers on a limitless, mercurial journey through stories nested within stories set in and around the Argentinean city of Trenque Lauquen (“Round Lake”) and centered on the strange disappearance of a local academic named Laura (Laura Paredes). Through initial inquiries by two colleagues—older boyfriend Rafael and a driver named Ezequiel with whom Laura had grown secretly close—we learn about her recent discoveries, including a new, unclassified species of flower and a series of old love letters hidden at the local library, which may help track her down. Yet as flashbacks and anecdotes pile up, we—and the film’s intrepid investigators—begin to realize that this intricately structured tale is larger and stranger than we could have imagined. Citarella, a producer of the equally remarkable shape-shifting epic La Flor, has confidently crafted a series of interlocked romantic, biological, and ecological mysteries that create parallels between past lives and present dangers, invoke the rapture of obsessive pursuit, and salute the human need to find personal freedom and happiness. Trenque Lauquen is told in 12 chapters spread across two feature films. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A Cinema Guild release.

Twilight / Szürkület
György Fehér, 1990, Hungary, 101m
Hungarian with English subtitles
This long unseen masterpiece from György Fehér, loosely based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 crime novella The Pledge, follows a seasoned homicide detective whose careening obsession with catching a child serial killer compels him to use a young girl as bait. Captured with spellbinding, protracted tracking shots and ashen black-and-white tones by DP Miklós Gurbán (Werckmeister Harmonies), this nightmarish noir conjures a spectral world swayed by madness and senseless destruction. The first of only two theatrical features directed by Fehér, a regular collaborator with Béla Tarr (a consultant on this film), Twilight premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 1990, where it won the Bronze Leopard for Gurbán’s camerawork. An Arbelos release.
New 4K restoration by the National Film Institute – Hungary Film Archive & FilmLab. Digital grading supervised by Miklós Gurbán (Director of Photography). 

Opening April 28
The Eight Mountains
Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, 2022, Italy/Belgium/France, 147m
Italian with English subtitles
Adapting Paolo Cognetti’s prize-winning 2016 novel, directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch craft an exquisite, rapturous epic of camaraderie, despair, and loneliness, and the physical spaces that define a relationship. The Eight Mountains patiently chronicles a decades-long, life-changing friendship between two men of vastly different families and classes. Pietro, a Turin native, and Bruno, raised in the Alps, meet as 11-year-olds one summer in Grana—a small mountain village in northwestern Italy. This unique place, and the differences between the two, define the bond and the deviations that surface in adulthood as Pietro (Luca Marinelli, Martin Eden) is consumed by wanderlust that gradually separates him from Bruno (Alessandro Borghi). Van Groeningen’s longtime cinematographer, Ruben Impens (Titane, The Broken Circle Breakdown), imparts breathtaking, meticulously composed visuals to this deeply affecting epic of harmony and friction with the natural world. Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. A Sideshow and Janus Films release.

May 4-14
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Among the 21st century’s most essential artists, Apichatpong Weerasethakul has amassed a richly original and transcendently mesmerizing body of work that few filmmakers can match. From his feature debut, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), to the Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), to his metaphysical latest, Memoria (2021), Weerasethakul’s formally daring oeuvre is marked by a meticulously controlled sense of cinematic sensuality and a powerful, understated gift for locating the political within the everyday. A towering figure in both world cinema and the art world, Weerasethakul continues to work in short- and feature-length filmmaking, always manifesting an experimental desire to rethink the possibilities of the medium. A singular cinephile in his own right, Weerasethakul has engaged with film history in profound ways. Join Film at Lincoln Center as we host Weerasethakul for a complete retrospective of his career to date, including his rarely screened shorts, as well as a carte-blanche selection of films that made a mark on his incomparable imagination, including films by Frederick Wiseman, John Cassavetes, Shōhei Imamura, and Abbas Kiarostami.

Organized by Florence Almozini, Dan Sullivan, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Special thanks to Jean Ma (Stanford University).

Opening May 5
Chile ’76
Manuela Martelli, 2022, Chile/Argentina/Qatar, 95m
Spanish with English subtitles

Chile ’76. Courtesy of Kino Lorber

In a gripping debut feature constructed with sinister elegance and mounting tension, Manuela Martelli places the viewer in a historical moment fraught with anxiety: the early years of Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile. Her narrative presents Pinochet’s oppressive reign from the unusual and surprising perspective of Carmen (a superb Aline Küppenheim), an upper-middle-class woman whose life begins to unravel after local priest Father Sánchez (Hugo Medina) implores her to use her summer beach house, under renovation, to hide an injured young man (Nicolás Sepúlveda) whom she comes to suspect is a victim of political prosecution. As Carmen descends into danger, she experiences a gradual moral awakening. Martelli’s film is a taut, evocative, and impressively assured depiction of the inescapable, ever-tightening noose of patriarchal, governmental dictatorship and how its effects gradually bleed into our everyday experiences. A 2023 New Directors/New Films selection. A Kino Lorber release.

Unrest
Cyril Schäublin, 2022, Switzerland, 93m
Swiss German, Russian, and French with English subtitles

Unrest. Courtesy of KimStim.

A film of immense delicacy and precision, Cyril Schäublin’s complexly woven timepiece is set in the hushed environs of the Swiss watchmaking town of Saint-Imier in the 1870s. In this unlikely place, a youthful Pyotr Kropotkin, who would become a noted anarchist and socialist philosopher, experiences a quiet revolution, finding himself inspired by the buzzing activity of the town’s denizens, from the photographers and cartographers surveying its people and land to the growing anarchist collective at the local watermill raising funds for strikes abroad, to the organizing workers at the watch factory, whose craft is depicted with exacting detail and devotion. Schäublin’s abstracted, geometric visual approach reinforces the singularly contemplative nature of his project: this is a film about time—its tyranny as well as its comforts—and how it relates to work, leisure, and the larger processes that shape history. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A KimStim release with support from Swiss Films.

Opening May 10-16
New York African Film Festival
Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) and African Film Festival, Inc. (AFF) celebrate the 30th anniversary of the New York African Film Festival from May 10 to 16. Launched in 1993 and one of the first of its kind in the United States, the festival reflects on the myriad ways African and diaspora filmmakers have used the moving image as a mold to tell their stories in their own nuanced and idiosyncratic ways. Under the banner Freeforms, the festival presents over 50 films from more than 25 countries that invite audiences to explore the infinite realms of African and diaspora storytelling and embrace its visionary, probing, and fearless spirit.

Co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and African Film Festival, Inc. Organized by Mahen Bonetti, Theresa Chigaga, Dara Ojugbele, and Farima Kone Kito, African Film Festival, Inc.

May 17
Paul Schrader Double Feature: First Reformed + The Card Counter
For nearly half a century, Paul Schrader has crafted a personal and provocative body of work typified by an obsessive focus on moral decay, isolation, and self-redemption across various dispirited pockets of the United States. Rounding out an era-delineating thematic trilogy that began with First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), Master Gardener (NYFF60) continues what the writer-director has referred to as his “man in a room” movies with a startling tale of dormant violence and the possibility of regeneration. In anticipation of Master Gardener’s theatrical release at FLC on May 19, which will feature a Q&A on opening day with Schrader and stars Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver, we are pleased to present a double feature of First Reformed and The Card Counter on May 17, followed by a Q&A with Schrader. Tickets on sale March 20 at noon for Members and March 21 at noon for GP!

First Reformed
Paul Schrader, 2017, USA, 108m
Paul Schrader’s 2017 film about a middle-aged pastor named Toller (Ethan Hawke, in a truly extraordinary performance), who is shocked out of his self-inflicted torment when he is called to minister to a troubled young environmental activist and his wife (Philip Ettinger and Amanda Seyfried), is as deeply personal as it is politically and spiritually urgent. The film also stars Cedric the Entertainer as the leader of the megachurch that oversees Toller’s 250-year-old landmarked structure and his ever-dwindling congregation. Schrader has created a potent cinematic experience, a carefully constructed, beautifully crafted communion with one lonely soul that allows us to gaze right into the eye of modern media- and money-fueled horror. An A24 release. Tickets on sale March 20 at noon for Members and March 21 at noon for GP!

The Card Counter
Paul Schrader, 2021, USA, 112m
“I had never imagined myself as someone suited to a life of incarceration.” So begins Schrader’s follow-up to First Reformed, which casts Oscar Isaac as William Tell, an ex-con whose eight-year prison sentence for the torturing of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib gave him time to form new gambling skills to employ in the outside world. A solitary routine of casino-crawling and eking out meager winnings is punctuated by moments in spartan motel rooms where Tell obsessively revisits past misdeeds in his diary. But that lasts only so long before an interested financier (Tiffany Haddish) and the son of a late military vet (Tye Sheridan) offer him a risky path to redemption. The Card Counter is part crime thriller, part horror-war film—a tightly wound, ominous plunge into the moral terror between indifference and suffering, revenge and self-sacrifice. A Focus Features release. Tickets on sale March 20 at noon for Members and March 21 at noon for GP!

Opening May 19
Master Gardener
Paul Schrader, 2022, USA, 111m

Master Gardener. Courtesy of HanWay Films.

Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) takes great care and pride in his work as the longtime head horticulturist at Gracewood Gardens, the historic estate of the demanding, imperious Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). An enclosed, scrupulously run world of its own, Gracewood has been in the Haverhill family for generations, and Norma trusts no one other than Narvel to continue its traditions. However, a threat of change is harkened by the arrival of Norma’s troubled grand-niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), whose presence sets off a chain reaction of events that catalyze Narvel into coming to terms with his own shocking past. Following First Reformed and The Card Counter, Paul Schrader continues his dramatic renaissance with an equally effective, startling tale about dormant violence and the possibility of regeneration. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A Magnolia Pictures release. Q&A with Paul Schrader, Joel Edgerton, and Sigourney Weaver on May 19 screening. Tickets on sale March 20 at noon for Members and March 21 at noon for GP!

May 31-June 6
Human Rights Watch Film Festival
Human Rights Watch is one of the world’s leading independent organizations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights, and its annual film festival is a vital forum for movies that tackle important global issues. Showcasing an international selection of acclaimed works that bring human rights struggles to life through storytelling, the festival presents challenging, provocative art that calls for justice and social change.

Selections in recent years have included some of the most urgent documentary and fiction films of our time (including The Janes, The Territory, Crip Camp, Midnight Traveler, Welcome to Chechnya, Minding the Gap, One Child Nation, City of Ghosts, I Am Not Your Negro, Whose Streets?, and On Her Shoulders), and this year again the festival features essential and entertaining films destined to spark debate.

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival invites you to celebrate the power we all possess to make a difference in the world, as you meet courageous individuals on both sides of the lens.

Discover more information at ff.hrw.org.

Organized by Human Rights Watch.

June 1-8
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 9-22
Marco Ferreri
Marco Ferreri was simply the most punk Italian filmmaker of his generation. A cine-provocateur of the highest order, Ferreri developed an oeuvre that is one of the most eclectic and surprising in all of Italian cinema, composed largely of black-as-night social satires and uncannily affecting dramas. From his earliest features—produced in Spain—to the vital skewerings of the European bourgeoisie he made upon returning for a long, prolific run in the Italian film industry (such as the 1969 Dillinger Is Dead and the 1973 La Grande Bouffe), Ferreri’s films take a delirious and critical view of the times in which he lived and worked and remain some of the funniest, darkest, and most thought-provoking works of their era. Join Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà for a rare opportunity to spend time with Ferreri’s tales of ordinary madness in this extensive career retrospective of one of world cinema’s most indelible enfants terribles. Co-presented with Cinecittà.

Organized by Florence Almozini and Dan Sullivan of Film at Lincoln Center and by Camilla Cormanni and Paola Ruggiero of Cinecittà. Co-produced by Cinecittà, Rome.

Opening June 9
Blue Jean
Georgia Oakley, 2022, U.K., 97m
Writer-director Georgia Oakley’s radiant feature debut is set in late 1980s Thatcher-era Britain, on the heels of the Conservative-controlled government’s passing of Section 28 (which essentially inscribed homophobia into law), yet it finds painful parallels with the reactionary politics of the present. Rosy McEwen delivers a star-making performance as Jean, a closeted gym teacher who finds sanctuary in the sisterhood of the Newcastle queer club scene and with her girlfriend, Viv (Kerrie Hayes), until a new student discovers her secret and threatens the already tenuous stability of her double life. With its gorgeously atmospheric 16mm cinematography and retro-cool needle drops, Blue Jean is as much a triumph of period detail as it is a moving character study that subtly deviates from the kitchen-sink dramas evoked by its setting. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Scarlet
Pietro Marcello, 2022, France/Italy/Germany, 103m
French with English subtitles

Scarlet. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Pietro Marcello, one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile talents, follows his dramatic breakthrough, Martin Eden, with an enchanting period fable based on a beloved 1923 novel by Russian writer Alexander Grin. The film begins as the tale of a sensitive brute (Raphaël Thiéry) who returns home from World War I to his rural French village to discover that his wife has died and he must take care of their baby daughter, Juliette, then blossoms into a pastoral portrait of Juliette (Juliette Jouan) as a free-spirited young woman reckoning with a local witch’s prophecy for her future and falling for the modern man (Louis Garrel) who literally drops from the sky. In his first film made in France, Marcello proves again that he is as comfortable in the realm of folklore as he is in creative nonfiction, delicately interweaving realist drama, ethereal romance, and musical flights of fancy. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A Kino Lorber release.

Opening June 23
The Mother and the Whore
Jean Eustache, 1973, France, 210m
French with English subtitles

The Mother and the Whore.

At long last released in a striking new restoration worthy of the film’s reputation, 50 years after its scandalous premiere at Cannes, Jean Eustache’s hard-to-see masterpiece uses an obsessive, talkative ménage à trois—Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont, and Françoise Lebrun—as the jumping-off point for an intense exploration of sexual politics among liberated yet alienated moderns. The Mother and the Whore abounds with references and allusions to 15 years of New Wave images and language while also documenting the mix of strategies and fictions that lovers and other strangers use to make contact and to armor themselves. Léaud, Lafont, and Lebrun, the foundation of the film, portray its unforgettable characters with an absolute intensity and a mesmerizing, endlessly rich sense of humanity. An NYFF60 Revivals selection. A Janus Films release. 

The Mother and the Whore has been restored and remastered in 4K in 2022 by Les Films du Losange with the support of CNC and the participation of Cinémathèque Suisse and of Chanel. Image restoration by L’Immagine Ritrovata/Éclair Classics, supervised by Jacques Besse and Boris Eustache. Sound restoration by Léon Rousseau-L.E. Diapason.

Film at Lincoln Center will present a retrospective of Jean Eustache’s films, all of which have been newly restored, beginning July 7.

Revoir Paris
Alice Winocour, 2022, France/Belgium, 105m
French with English subtitles

Revoir Paris

After surviving a mass shooting in a Paris restaurant, married translator Mia (Virginie Efira) is haunted, unable to resume life as usual and left with a total blackout where her memories of the traumatic incident should be. Determined to reconstruct the sequence of events and reestablish a sense of normalcy, Mia finds herself repeatedly returning to the bistro where the shooting happened. In the process she forms bonds with fellow survivors, including banker Thomas (Benoît Magimel) and teenager Félicia (Nastya Golubeva). Initially shocking and ultimately deeply moving, Revoir Paris, the latest from Rendez-Vous favorite Alice Winocour (Disorder, Proxima), is a meditation on grief and healing anchored by a career-best performance from Efira (Benedetta, an NYFF59 selection). A 2023 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Opening Night Selection. A Music Box Films release.