We Are One Program 2: A Passion for Films

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Atlantiques
Mati Diop (LC Emerging Artists Award 2017 recipient), France, 2009, 16m
Atlantiques, winner of the Best Short Film Award at the 2009 Rotterdam International Film Festival, tells the story of a young boy’s tragic migratory voyage in Senegal.

Parsi
Eduardo Williams (LC Emerging Artists Award 2019 recipient) & Mariano Blatt, Argentina/Guinea Bisseau/Switzerland, 2019, 23m
Commissioned for the 2018 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Williams’s latest is an immersive work exploring the rhythmic, discursive language of Mariano Blatt’s poem “No es” against the perpetually moving people of Guinea-Bissau.

Pelourinho, They Don’t Really Care About Us
Akosua Adoma Owusu (LC Emerging Artists Award 2020 recipient), USA, 2019, 9m
In 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote to the U.S. Embassy of Brazil concerning the country’s discriminatory attitude toward black immigrants. Akosua Adoma Owusu conveys this correspondence through montage, juxtaposing voiceover readings of the letters, sumptuous Super-8 footage shot on the streets of Pelourinho, and interpolated images from Spike Lee’s controversial music video for Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Really Care About Us,” resulting in a film that swiftly traces nearly a century of social unrest.

Dramatic Relationships
Dustin Guy Defa (LC Emerging Artists Award 2016 recipient), USA, 2016, 9m
Scenes from the working life of a male director: Defa sophisticatedly lampoons masculinity in filmmaking with this sly, surprising meta-movie.

Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight
Eliza Hittman (LC Emerging Artists Award 2018 recipient), USA, 2011, 16m
Set in Brighton Beach, this sensitive and atmospheric short follows a 17-year-old Russian teenager as she escapes the close-quarters tension between herself, her father and his many cats, into a Brooklyn night charged with freedom and desire.

Rosalinda
Matías Piñeiro (LC Emerging Artists Award 2015 recipient), Argentina, 2010, 43m
A group of actors travel to an island in Tigre to rehearse William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Luisa, who plays Rosalind in the play, terminates a current romantic relationship over her cell phone. During preparations she alternates between rehearsing and daydreaming, and starts to slowly embody Rosalind, transforming into the object of desire of other cast members on the island. During those sun-soaked hours, love strikes between the players and the roles between actress and character confuse themselves in a rare mixing of joyful artifice and anguishing uncertainty. But once rehearsals are over and everyone returns to reality, the romantic bliss between the cast members and their own partners awakens in her, foolish and irrepressible, a desire to long and hope for a phone call.

For our contribution to We Are One: A Global Film Festival, the New York Film Festival and Film at Lincoln Center has chosen to spotlight short and medium-length work by the envelope-pushing, innovative filmmakers whose work we’ve shown in various festivals and programs, and whose careers we have supported through our artist initiatives, including the Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, the NYFF Filmmaker Residency, and the Kazuko Trust Award. The ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the need for new forms of solidarity in the face of unprecedented uncertainty; our commitment to supporting the filmmakers who make it possible for us to put on film festivals in the first place must remain unwavering. Cinema is a social art, and while we lament our inability to enjoy films in a theater together for now, we also want to acknowledge the artists whose work drew us there and will again soon enough. These two programs—named for two of the seminal books written by NYFF’s founders, Amos Vogel and Richard Roud—offer a varied, kaleidoscopic view of cinema over the past decade-plus, ranging from award-winning narrative shorts to diaristic, experimental pieces and much more, and perhaps even a suggestion of what the medium’s future might hold, coronavirus be damned.