Collaboratively designed by cinematographer Ed Lachman and visual artist JR, the poster for the 56th New York Film Festival features 41 pairs of eyes that belong to famous film directors. “The idea came together using JR’s emblematic eyes,” Lachman said. “What is cinema without the mind, the heart, and the eyes of the filmmakers? Using the directors’ eyes can symbolize the creative force behind the images and the stories that the Festival has championed and represented to New York over the years, supported by the audience holding the placards of their eyes, and what can be more New York than our alleyways?”

We held a poster contest, asking people how many eyes they could guess. Congrats to Rubing Liang, who correctly guessed an eye-popping 28 out of 41 director eyes! She won a pair of tickets to NYFF56, a signed poster, and met Ed Lachman. With the festival concluded and the poster now available to purchase, we’re revealing the names of all the directors featured on the poster.

See the poster with answers below, as well as Lachman’s NYFF Live discussion on the creation of the poster. A special thank you to photographers David Godlis and Julie Cunnah for their photo contributions to the poster. Chantal Akerman photo courtesy of Kenneth Saunders/The Guardian.

  1. Jean-Luc Godard
  2. Claire Denis
  3. Abbas Kiarostami
  4. Spike Lee
  5. Chantal Akerman
  6. Steve McQueen
  7. Bernardo Bertolucci
  8. Michelangelo Antonioni
  9. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
  10. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
  11. Barry Jenkins
  12. Agnès Varda
  13. Shirley Clarke
  14. Nagisa Oshima
  15. Federico Fellini
  16. Robert Frank
  17. Todd Haynes
  18. Krzysztof Kieślowski
  19. Lee Chang-dong
  20. Jerzy Skolimowski
  21. Mike Leigh
  22. Robert Altman
  23. Agnieszka Holland
  24. Hou Hsiao-hsien
  25. Andrea Arnold
  26. Darren Aronofsky
  27. Dušan Makavejev
  28. Ava DuVernay
  29. Kelly Reichardt
  30. Andrei Tarkovsky
  31. Orson Welles
  32. Luis Buñuel
  33. Steven Soderbergh
  34. Jane Campion
  35. Lucrecia Martel
  36. Werner Herzog
  37. Hong Sangsoo
  38. Jia Zhangke
  39. Cristian Mungiu
  40. Pedro Almodóvar
  41. Martin Scorsese

The 56th New York Film Festival poster is available to order here.