This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring two conversations from the 60th New York Film Festival. The first is with Carla Simón, director of Alcarràs, an NYFF60 Main Slate selection about a family in present-day Catalonia, moderated by former NYFF Executive Director Eugene Hernandez. The second conversation is a deep dive on liberating lost movies with various Missing Movies board members and advisors.
Watch/listen to the discussions below and don’t forget to subscribe here for more filmmaker conversations.
Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale Festival, 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.
Movies go “missing” all the time, whether due to lapses in preservation and archiving, complexities of copyright and distribution, or technological obsolescence. To address these issues—which can powerfully shape what we know and regard as the cinematic canon— a group of filmmakers, distributors, archivists, and lawyers founded the organization Missing Movies.
We were pleased to welcome Missing Movies board members and advisors Amy Heller, Dennis Doros, Nancy Savoca, Rich Guay, Ira Deutchman, and Maya Cade to NYFF60 for a special conversation aimed at empowering the filmmaking community with the tools to liberate lost films and to ensure that the cinema of the present avoids the same fate. All NYFF60 Talks were presented by HBO.
