NYFF51 Live: Claire Denis (Bastards)

Free and open to the public on a first come, first served basis!

Claire Denis will discuss her daring new film, Bastards, which screened as a part of the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. Moderated by the New York Film Festival’s Director of Programming, Kent Jones.

Claire Denis’s jagged, daringly fragmented and very darkest film—visually, psychologically, and politically—is that rarest of cinematic narratives, a genuinely contemporary film noir. Inspired by recent French sex ring scandals involving men of wealth and power, Denis positions the superb Vincent Lindon (the lover in her 2002 Friday Night) as the movie’s moral and erotic center. Lindon is a sea captain gone AWOL to come to the rescue of his estranged sister (Julie Bataille) and his teenaged niece (Lola Créton, star of Mia Hansen-Løve’s Goodbye First Love); Chiara Mastroianni is Lindon’s married lover, who has sold her soul in exchange for the security of her young son; and the remarkable Michel Subor, an erstwhile Denis collaborator since Beau Travail, is the very embodiment of an evil beyond comprehension. Shooting digitally for the first time, Denis and her long-time camerawoman Agnès Godard impart their trademark tactility to every image. A Sundance Selects release.