The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced its lineup of new releases for the 2018 winter/spring season, featuring Philippe Garrel’s Lover for a Day, Susan Froemke’s The Opera House, and Valeska Grisebach’s Western, all NYFF55 selections; plus Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman and exclusive runs of Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames, Hong Sang-soo’s Claire’s Camera, and a new restoration of Raúl Ruiz’s Time Regained, coinciding with part 2 of our retrospective on the Chilean director.

Opening January 12

Lover for a Day / L’Amant d’un jour Exclusive run!
Philippe Garrel, France, 2017, 76m
French with English subtitles
After a painful breakup, heartbroken Jeanne (Esther Garrel) moves back in with her university professor father, Gilles (Eric Caravaca), to discover that he is living with optimistic, life-loving student Ariane (newcomer Louise Chevillotte), who is the same age as Jeanne. An unusual triangular relationship emerges as both girls seek the favor of Gilles, as daughter or lover, while developing their own friendship, finding common ground despite their differences. Gorgeously shot in grainy black and white by Renato Berta (Au revoir les enfants), Lover for a Day is an exquisite meditation on love and fidelity that perfectly illustrates Garrel’s poetic exploration of relationships and desire. An NYFF55 selection. A MUBI release.

Opening January 26

The Opera House Exclusive run!
Susan Froemke, USA, 2017, 108m
Renowned documentarian Susan Froemke takes viewers through the history of the Metropolitan Opera via priceless archival stills, footage, and interviews (with, among many others, the great soprano Leontyne Price). The film follows the development of the glorious institution from its beginnings at the old opera house on 39th Street to the storied reign of Rudolph Bing to the long-gestating move to Lincoln Center, the construction of which traces a fascinating byway through the era of urban renewal and Robert Moses’s transformation of New York. Most of all, though, this is a film about the love for and devotion to the preservation of an art form, and the upkeep of a home where it can live and thrive. An NYFF55 selection. A release of The Metropolitan Opera.

Opening February 2

A Fantastic Woman / Una Mujer Fantástica
Sebastián Lelio, Chile/Germany/Spain/USA, 2017, 104m
Spanish with English subtitles
Sebastián Lelio’s follow-up to 2013’s acclaimed Gloria is a compassionate, multifaceted study of grief and solitude. Newcomer Daniela Vega delivers a poised and intense turn as Marina, a transgender waitress and aspiring singer coping with the untimely death of her boyfriend as she faces scrutiny from authorities and family members. Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival, A Fantastic Woman is a stylish, intelligent, and genre-bending drama from the Chilean auteur and a watershed film for lead actress Vega. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

24 Frames Exclusive run!
Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France, 2017, 114m
The final film from Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami is a wordless series of sketches elaborating on his lifelong fascination with photography. Consisting of 24 four-and-a-half minute sketches—each a digitally manipulated, fixed-frame view of a scene from nature—24 Frames allows the late Kiarostami to evoke the moments before and after a still image has been captured, and to explore the thin line between natural and artificial beauty. Largely absent of humans, and alternating between color and black-and-white, these poetic miniatures gradually come to life with subtlety, giving rise to the poignant and mysterious possibilities of the moving image. A Janus Films release.

Opening February 9

Time Regained / Le temps retrouvé, d’après l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust Exclusive run!
Raúl Ruiz, France/Italy/Portugal, 1999, 170m
French with English subtitles
Ruiz’s most ambitious literary adaptation—an attempt to condense all of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time into a single feature, using the seven-part novel’s last installment as a kind of frame—is also one of his lushest, most transporting reflections on the movies’ power to seize and preserve moments of time. Proust’s narrator, Marcel (Marcello Mazzarella), is a consistent presence in the movie, but Time Regained is dominated by entrancing, sometimes tragic figures that seem to drift in and out of the film’s field of view: Catherine Deneuve as the stately former courtesan Odette de Crecy; Emmanuelle Béart as Marcel’s young love Gilberte; John Malkovich as the closeted, mysterious Baron de Charlus. Ruiz gives special attention to Proust’s fascination with photography and early forms of radio and cinema—technologies that promised a more perfect form of “time regained” than words or memories could provide. New restoration courtesy of Le Petit Bureau with support from the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image anime (CNC, France). An NYFF37 selection. A KimStim release.

Opening February 16

Western
Valeska Grisebach, Germany and Bulgaria, 2017, 119m
German and Bulgarian with English subtitles
German director Valeska Grisebach uses the Western as a template with which to draw out eternal human conflicts in this supremely intelligent genre update, her first feature in a decade. In remote rural Bulgaria, a group of German workers are building a water facility. Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), the reserved newbie in this all-male company, immediately draws the ire of the boorish team leader, not least for his willingness to mingle with the wary locals. Cast with utterly convincing nonprofessional actors, Western is a gripping culture-clash drama, attuned both to old codes of masculinity and new forms of colonialism. An NYFF55 selection. A Cinema Guild release.

Opening March 9

Claire’s Camera / La caméra de Claire Exclusive run!
Hong Sang-soo, France/South Korea, 2017, 69m
Korean, English, and French with English subtitles
The increasingly prolific Hong Sang-soo’s 20th feature—one of his three films to premiere in 2017—is a light, sunny divertissement shot on the fly during the Cannes Film Festival. Set far from the festival’s red-carpet pomp, Claire’s Camera is a cautionary tale about mixing business with pleasure, and in its way no less philosophical than other recent Hong works. A sales agent (Kim Min-hee) is fired mid-festival for her “dishonesty”—which turns out to be code for sleeping with a director who’s also involved with her boss. The revelations emerge with the help of a French tourist named Claire (Isabelle Huppert), a detective of sorts who helps others see their situations more clearly. Kim and Huppert make for a delightful pair amid the kind of cross-cultural comedy that also defined Hong’s Huppert-starring In Another Country. A Cinema Guild release.

New releases and revivals programmed by Florence Almozini and Dennis Lim.