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.
- Jean-Luc Godard
- Claire Denis
- Abbas Kiarostami
- Spike Lee
- Chantal Akerman
- Steve McQueen
- Bernardo Bertolucci
- Michelangelo Antonioni
- Rainer Werner Fassbinder
- Apichatpong Weerasethakul
- Barry Jenkins
- Agnès Varda
- Shirley Clarke
- Nagisa Oshima
- Federico Fellini
- Robert Frank
- Todd Haynes
- Krzysztof Kieślowski
- Lee Chang-dong
- Jerzy Skolimowski
- Mike Leigh
- Robert Altman
- Agnieszka Holland
- Hou Hsiao-hsien
- Andrea Arnold
- Darren Aronofsky
- Dušan Makavejev
- Ava DuVernay
- Kelly Reichardt
- Andrei Tarkovsky
- Orson Welles
- Luis Buñuel
- Steven Soderbergh
- Jane Campion
- Lucrecia Martel
- Werner Herzog
- Hong Sangsoo
- Jia Zhangke
- Cristian Mungiu
- Pedro Almodóvar
- Martin Scorsese
The 56th New York Film Festival poster is available to order here.