Art of the Real 2018

John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection

Q&A with Julien Faraut · North American Premiere · Opening Night Reception

Faraut’s sophisticated and witty found-footage ode to tennis legend John McEnroe is an essayistic investigation into the poetics of athletics, taking as its point of departure Jean-Luc Godard’s maxim, “Cinema lies, sports doesn’t.”

Empty Metal

Closing Night · World Premiere · Q&A with co-directors Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer, cast & crew

This first feature by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer is a forceful and hallucinogenic film about personal politics in extraordinary times.

All That Passes by Through a Window that Doesn’t Open

New York Premiere · Q&A with Martin DiCicco

A glimpse at the lives of the laborers who built the Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway, Martin DiCicco’s serene documentary doubles as a stunning document of Central Asia’s unique geography.

Baronesa

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Juliana Antunes

With its almost exclusively female crew and nonprofessional cast, Baronesa is structurally simple yet multilayered in its resonance, recalling the films of Pedro Costa as it establishes Antunes as a formidable new voice in Brazilian cinema.

Braguino

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Clément Cogitore · Pre-Screening Reception

The director of Neither Heaven Nor Earth (ND/NF 2016) looks at the conflict between two families of “Old Believers” living in an extremely remote region of the Siberian taiga. Uninterested in anyone’s rules but their own, the families are not only threatened by each other and wild animals but also by environmental change. Screening with Alex Tyson’s Divieto 2.

Casanova Gene

North American Premiere · Q&A with Luise Donschen

Donschen’s feature debut is a funny, eclectic, and seductive film about seduction, veering radically from fiction to observational documentary to single-subject interview (including John Malkovich) to landscape and back again.

Central Airport THF

U.S. Premiere

Berlin-based Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz returns with this impeccably photographed documentary chronicling a year in the lives of asylum seekers in Berlin's historic Tempelhof, a former airport built by the Nazi government as a symbol for Hitler's Germania.

Fail to Appear

New York Premiere · Q&A with Antoine Bourges and actress Deragh Campbell

Bourges’s droll, touching debut, about a support caseworker in training assigned to the case of a withdrawn shoplifter, studiously renders the mechanics and kinks of the Canadian legal system and social services.

I Remember the Crows

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Gustavo Vinagre

Filmed in a single all-night session, Brazilian director Gustavo Vinagre’s latest is an extended interview with his friend and collaborator Julia Katharine, a Japanese-Brazilian trans actress-filmmaker whose insomnia keeps her awake long enough for her to candidly spill stories from her life.

The Image You Missed

North American Premiere · Q&A with Donal Foreman

Donal Foreman tries to understand the father he hardly knew, the Irish-American political filmmaker Arthur MacCaig, who passed away in 2008, in his singular essay film.

Infinite Football

North American Premiere

The latest from Romanian New Wave master Porumboiu is a hilarious and politically incisive portrait of a bureaucrat who dreams of radically revising the rules of the world’s most popular sport.

Inland Sea

North American Premiere · Q&A with Kazuhiro Soda

Mrs. Koso, an elderly fishmonger, and Mr. Murata, an 86-year-old fisherman who still takes his boat out daily, are captured in this vérité-inflected black and white documentary.

Meteors

U.S. Premiere

Gürcan Keltek’s poetic, engrossing debut feature captures a critical moment from 2015 in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict via otherworldly black-and-white images, gradually arriving at a political truth that verges on the cosmic.

Milford Graves Full Mantis

New York Premiere · Q&As with Milford Graves, Jake Meginsky, and Neil Young

An experimental jazz icon who has played with Albert Ayler, Giuseppi Logan, and Sonny Sharrock, Milford Graves is now the subject of a documentary as radical as his music.

Once There Was Brasília

North American Premiere · Q&A with cinematographer Joana Pimenta

This witty and visually dazzling Afrofuturist docufiction takes on Brazil’s structural racism and the 2016 presidential coup.

One or Two Questions

North American Premiere

Swiss documentarian Kristina Konrad’s epic document of Uruguay’s 1989 amnesty referendum is an engrossing, powerful and frequently funny look at democracy in action.

Such a Morning

New York Premiere · Introduced by Amar Kanwar

A well-off math professor gives everything up to live in a train car in this minimalist meditation on modern existence.

Victory Day

U.S. Premiere

Loznitsa’s incisive film documents the annual gathering at the Soviet Memorial at Berlin’s Treptower Park to commemorate the Red Army’s defeat of the Nazis, capturing the event in all its patriotic spectacle and ecstatic strangeness.

Wild Relatives

North American Premiere · Q&A with Jumana Manna

Jumana Manna (A Magical Substance Flows Into Me, Art of the Real 2016) documents the complex pathway of seed distribution between Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and the global seed vault deep inside Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.

Yours in Sisterhood

U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Irene Lusztig

In the 1970s, Ms. received several thousand letters to the editor detailing all manner of injustices as well as criticisms of the magazine’s feminism. This film returns to the sites where some of the letters originated and records women of all ages reciting them to camera.

Shorts Program

Q&A with Francisco Rodriguez, Laura Huertas Millán, and Deborah Stratman

An impressionistic exploration into the final moments of four Chinese workers who died at sea, an astute observation of indigenous weavers who use a pre-Spanish loom to create their work, and a multilayered portrait of the residents of Dawson City, Yukon Territory.

Tribute to Eugenio Polgovsky (1977-2017): Tropic of Cancer and Mitote

Introduction by Mara Polgovsky

One of the best documentary filmmakers of his generation, Eugenio Polgovsky died suddenly last year. These two medium-length works—Tropic of Cancer and Mitote—reveal vastly different aspects of 21st-century Mexico.

Special Event: Nicolás Pereda’s The Private Property Trilogy

Q&A with Nicolás Pereda

In this interactive performance, Nicolas Pereda will explain his relationship to C.B., an amateur archaeologist, activist, artist, and the creator of the Mining Museum in La Union, as interview footage plays behind him.

Artist Spotlight: Steffani Jemison

Discussion with Steffani Jemison

This program spotlights the urgent and sublime work of multimedia artist Steffani Jemison, whose videos, performances, scores, and installations seamlessly merge politics, poetics, and aesthetics.

Artist Spotlight: Amar Kanwar

Artist and filmmaker Amar Kanwar chronicles India’s political shifts and the dramatic changes to its landscape, focusing on those most vulnerable to the effects. Here he presents two films from his multimedia installation work The Sovereign Forest (2012), followed by a discussion.

Artist Spotlight: Hiwa K

Discussion with Hiwa K

Iraqi-born, Germany-based artist Hiwa K shares three works from the past decade, followed by a discussion.

Artist Spotlight: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Discussion with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

A program-length survey of duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s recent video works, followed by a discussion.