Free and open to the public!

Director James Gray will discuss and show clips from his new film The Immigrant (NYFF51), which will open here on May 16. Attendees will receive a voucher for discount tickets to the film's theatrical run.

Young Polish immigrant Ewa (Marion Cotillard, in a thrilling performance), after being separated from her sister at Ellis Island, finds herself caught in a dangerous battle of wills with a shady burlesque manager (Joaquin Phoenix) in James Gray’s richly detailed period tragedy. And when a charismatic magician (Jeremy Renner) starts to compete for Ewa’s affections, The Immigrant begins building steadily to its devastating climax. Working with the great cinematographer Darius Khondji (Se7en, Amour), Gray imagines 1920s Manhattan as a dusty, sepia-toned dreamworld, sometimes faintly luminous but often dejectedly burnt-out—and the same could be said of the film’s heroes. A lovingly wrought portrait of Prohibition-era New York, it is also a morally ambiguous, open-ended reflection on family loyalty, urban disillusionment, and the unpredictable twists and turns of human motivation. Based on the stories and experiences told to the director by his grandparents, The Immigrant is perhaps one of the last of its kind—a personal epic.

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