Guide | New York Film Festival

April 20

April 21

April 22

April 23

April 24

April 25

1:00 PM

8:30 PM

La Chimera

Alice Rohrwacher
2023
Italy
133 minutes
Italian with English subtitles
Opens March 29, 2024

With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and magical realism, Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro) conjures a marvelous entertainment starring Josh O’Connor as a ne’er-do well Englishman, handsomely rumpled and recently out of prison, who returns to a rural town in central Italy where he hesitantly reconnects with a ragtag group of tombaroli (tomb raiders).

Showtimes

April 19

April 20

April 21

April 22

April 23

April 24

April 25

Close Your Eyes

Víctor Erice
2023
Spain
169 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

Spanish director Víctor Erice’s fourth film in 50 years, Close Your Eyes is the culmination of one of the most legendary careers in modern cinema, an elegiac personal epic about time, memory, and the movies, in which an aging filmmaker (Manolo Solo) tries to unlock the mystery of an actor who disappeared and left an unfinished film in his wake.

The Delinquents

Rodrigo Moreno
2023
Argentina
190 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles

Timid bank clerk Morán (Daniel Elías), fed up with his dead-end middle-management job, decides one day to simply walk into the vault and pack a bag with enough cash to cover his salary until retirement age. A heist picture unlike any other, The Delinquents upends genre expectations with a gentle yet deftly constructed existentialist fable.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

Radu Jude
2023
Romania
163 minutes
Romanian with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

Among the most radical filmmakers working today and one of the few unafraid to diagnose our absurd evils and moral blind spots, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude follows a day in the life of a severely overworked film production assistant who drives around Bucharest on her latest gig: filming work accident victims auditioning to be in a safety equipment video by a German multinational corporation.

Eureka

Lisandro Alonso
2023
Argentina/France/Portugal
146 minutes
English, Portuguese, and Lakota with English subtitles

North American Premiere • Q&A with Lisandro Alonso, Alaina Clifford & Sadie Lapointe on Oct. 10 & 11

The protean Argentinean director Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad, Jauja) continues to shapeshift, delight, and challenge with his marvelous and immersive new film, which takes the viewer on an unexpected journey through three stories set in wildly different terrain, each of them reflecting lives haunted by the specter of colonialist violence, featuring Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni.

Evil Does Not Exist

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
2023
Japan
105 minutes
Japanese with English subtitles
Opens May 03, 2024

Q&A with Ryûsuke Hamaguchi & Eiko Ishibashi on May 3 at 6pm screening

In his potent and foreboding new film, Oscar-winning director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) reconstitutes the boundaries of the ecopolitical thriller with the tale of a serene rural village that’s about to be disrupted by the construction of a glamping site for Tokyo tourists.

Showtimes

May 3

1:00 PM

3:30 PM

9:00 PM

May 4

May 5

May 6

May 7

May 8

May 9

Fallen Leaves

Aki Kaurismäki
2023
Finland
81 minutes
Finnish with English subtitles

Finland's Oscar Entry

This enchanting, Cannes Jury Prize–winning love story from Finnish virtuoso Aki Kaurismäki circles around two financially strapped Helsinkians, grocery clerk Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and construction laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), who keep finding and losing one another in a world that seems to be falling apart.

Green Border

Agnieszka Holland
2023
Poland/Czech Republic/France/Belgium
152 minutes
Polish, Arabic, English, and French with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Agnieszka Holland on Oct. 4 & 5

In this harrowing, urgent drama from veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland, a Syrian family leaves the violence of their country behind, hoping to cross from Belarus into Poland and then onto the safe haven of Sweden, only to get caught in a political maelstrom, demonized by the Polish government and press and used as pawns in an inhumane, deadly border game.

Here

Bas Devos
2023
Belgium
82 minutes
Dutch, French, Romanian, and Mandarin with English subtitles

Ends Thursday!

In Belgian filmmaker Bas Devos’s lovely and tranquil fourth feature, a migrant construction worker living in Brussels is planning a trip home to his mother in Romania. In preparing for his voyage, he reconnects with local family members over gifted bowls of homemade soup, interacts with strangers, and discovers a revivifying commune with nature.

In Our Day

Hong Sangsoo
2023
South Korea
83 minutes
Korean with English subtitles

Opens May 17!

For his 30th feature film, Hong Sangsoo has crafted a slippery yet captivating inquiry into the search for meaning, connection, and artistic satisfaction that alternates two seemingly unrelated stories concerning a disillusioned young actress and a middle-aged poet.

Showtimes

May 17

May 18

May 19

May 20

May 21

May 22

May 23

In Water

Hong Sangsoo
2023
South Korea
61 minutes
Korean with English subtitles

North American Premiere

A youthful trio has convened off-season on the desolate yet beautiful Jeju Island to shoot a film, yet the subject matter remains unclear. As the young director’s movie gradually makes itself clear on screen, so does Hong’s vision of the often all-consuming pursuit for artistic meaning.

Janet Planet

Annie Baker
2023
U.S.
113 minutes
Opens June 21, 2024

Opens June 21!

Set in 1991 in rural Western Massachusetts, the superb debut film from Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Annie Baker is a work of surreal tranquility that follows young Lacy the summer before sixth grade, as she quietly observes her mother Janet and three enigmatic adults who drift in and out of their lives.

Kidnapped

Marco Bellocchio
2023
Italy
134 minutes
Italian and Hebrew with English subtitles
Opens May 24, 2024

Opens May 24!

In 1858 Bologna, a 6-year-old named Edgardo Mortara was seized by authorities of the papal state, taken away from his Jewish parents, and placed in the care of the Church. The Mortara case becomes an extraordinary, nearly operatic historical drama in this sumptuously mounted film from treasured octogenarian director Marco Bellocchio.

Showtimes

May 24

May 25

May 26

May 27

May 28

May 29

May 30

Last Summer

Catherine Breillat
2023
France
104 minutes
French with English subtitles

Opens June 28!

Catherine Breillat proves that she is not through toying with viewers’ comfort levels with her incendiary new drama starring Léa Drucker as Anne, a middle-aged lawyer who inexplicably finds herself sexually drawn to her husband’s estranged 17-year-old son Théo.

Music

Angela Schanelec
2023
Germany/France/Greece/Serbia
105 minutes
Greek and English with English subtitles

Opens June 28!

Leading contemporary German filmmaker Angela Schanelec’s latest film pushes her oblique narrative approach to new levels of emotionality. Using abstract gestures and broad narrative ellipses, yet still managing to plumb the depths of its characters’ complicated traumas, Music tells the story of a young man and woman unknowingly united by the same violent death.

Orlando, My Political Biography

Paul B. Preciado
2023
France
103 minutes
French with English subtitles

Q&A with Paul B. Preciado on Oct. 3 & 4

Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando is both historical anchor and hopeful North Star of writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s first film, a sweeping yet intimate documentary that takes a panoramic look at past and present trans lives.

Perfect Days

Wim Wenders
2023
Japan/Germany
124 minutes
Japanese with English subtitles

Q&A with Koji Yakusho and Takuma Takasaki on Oct. 11 & 12

As in his finest movies, Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas) here locates the magnificence in the everyday, casting the incomparable Koji Yakusho as the taciturn, good-natured Hirayama, who goes about his solitary hours working as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo.

Pictures of Ghosts

Kleber Mendonça Filho
2023
Brazil
93 minutes
Portuguese with English subtitles

Ends Thursday!

The moving and playful new documentary by Brazilian filmmaker and unrepentant cinema obsessive Kleber Mendonça Filho serves as a poignant testament to the liminal state of movie love, telling, in three chapters, the story of his cinematic world—the city of Recife, where his youthful film education took place.

Poor Things

Yorgos Lanthimos
2023
U.S./U.K./Ireland
141 minutes

Q&A with Yorgos Lanthimos, James Price, Shona Heath, Jerskin Fendrix, and Holly Waddington on Sept. 30 & Oct. 1

In his boldest vision yet, iconoclast auteur Yorgos Lanthimos creates a punkish update of the Frankenstein story set in an alternate 19th century on the cusp of technological breakthrough, in which a peculiar, childlike woman named Bella (Emma Stone) embarks on a journey of self-actualization.

La Práctica

Martín Rejtman
2023
Argentina/Chile/Germany/Portugal
95 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles

North American Premiere • Q&A with Martín Rejtman on Sept. 30 & Oct. 1

Leading light of the New Argentine Cinema, Martín Rejtman returns with his first film in nearly a decade, a sardonic yet loving immersion into a world of wellness retreats and physical and spiritual self-improvement about an Argentinean yoga instructor in Chile struggling to keep his business and body afloat after he separates from his wife.

The Settlers

Felipe Gálvez
2023
Chile
101 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles

A tale of brutal colonialist violence set against the sweeping, mountainous backdrop of Chile at the turn of the 20th century, Felipe Gálvez’s brilliantly constructed adventure plays off conventions of the American Western while becoming its own haunting work of cinematic historical exploration.

The Shadowless Tower

Zhang Lu
2023
China
144 minutes
Mandarin with English subtitles

North American Premiere • Q&A with Zhang Lu on Sept. 30

Set in contemporary Beijing, Zhang Lu’s elegiac film about middle age—its confusions and complications, as well as its beauty and grace—follows the compelling, distinctly human rhythms of Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing), an aging divorcé who has abandoned his love of poetry writing to become a food critic and whose connection with a young photographer opens the possibility of reconciliation to his past.

Youth (Spring)

Wang Bing
2023
France/Luxembourg/Netherlands
215 minutes
Chinese regional dialects with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Wang Bing on Oct. 1 & 2

The latest epic work of observational nonfiction from Wang Bing furthers the filmmaker’s ongoing chronicle of the economic, social, and personal upheavals happening across a transforming China, a remarkable account of young rural migrant workers employed in textile factories, shot over the course of five years.

The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer
2023
U.K./U.S./Poland
105 minutes
German and Polish with English subtitles

Q&A with Jonathan Glazer, Christian Friedel, and Sandra Hüller on Oct. 8 & 9

In his chilling, oblique study of evil, British director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) situates the viewer at the center of frighteningly familiar banality: the domestic routine of a Nazi Commandant, his wife, and their kids, while death and violence occur against those imprisoned in Auschwitz over the wall from their idyllic house. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

Pier Paolo Pasolini – Agnès Varda – New York – 1967

Agnès Varda
2022
France
4 minutes
French with English subtitles

North American Premiere

In 1966, two legendary filmmakers, in town for the 4th NYFF, took a walk through Times Square. Armed with 16mm color film, Agnès Varda captured Pier Paolo Pasolini. A year later, she edited the footage and recorded his brief commentary track, discussing the uses of documentary filmmaking, Christianity, and the nature of reality. Precedes La Chimera and Pictures of Ghosts.

Spotlight expands the vision of the Main Slate, showcasing a selection of the season’s most anticipated and significant films.

Maestro

Bradley Cooper
2023
U.S.
129 minutes

Spotlight Gala · North American Premiere

A tour de force for director and star Bradley Cooper, Maestro dramatizes the public and private lives of legendary musician Leonard Bernstein with sensitivity, visual ingenuity, and symphonic splendor, depicting the complicated yet devoted decades-spanning relationship between Leonard and his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan).

AGGRO DR1FT

Harmony Korine
2023
U.S.
80 minutes

U.S. Premiere • Intro by Harmony Korine on Oct. 7 & 8

Harmony Korine’s hallucinatory trance film, shot entirely in retina-scorching infrared and set to an intoxicating Araabmuzik score, casts Jordi Molla and rapper Travis Scott in a feverish, transporting action-movie miasma of skulls and swords, masks and machine guns, strippers and mobsters, horned demons and hot cars. Preceded by David Cronenberg’s Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection.

Bleat

Yorgos Lanthimos
2022
Greece
35mm
30 minutes

North American Premiere • Q&A with Yorgos Lanthimos · Presented on 35mm

In Yorgos Lanthimos’s entrancing black-and-white silent film, Emma Stone gives a mesmerizing performance as a young widow who, along with her late husband (Damien Bonnard), embarks on a singularly unclassifiable journey through sex, death, and resurrection. This 35mm screening will feature live accompaniment by an ensemble of musicians and a choir and be followed by a conversation with Lanthimos.

The Boy and the Heron

Hayao Miyazaki
2023
Japan
124 minutes
Japanese with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere

While the Second World War rages, the teenage Mahito, haunted by his mother’s tragic death, is relocated from Tokyo to the serene rural home of his new stepmother; as he tries to adjust, this strange new world grows even stranger. The first film in a decade from Hayao Miyazaki is a ravishing, endlessly inventive fantasy that is destined to be ranked with the legendary animator’s finest, boldest works.

The Curse

Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie
2023
U.S.
159 minutes

World Premiere

In this brilliantly discomfiting collaboration between Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, Fielder and Emma Stone play married entrepreneurs (don’t call them gentrifiers!) who flip houses and convert them into eco-friendly homes for the struggling residents of Española, New Mexico—all for an HGTV-style reality show. The New York Film Festival is pleased to premiere the first three episodes of this genre-defying series.

Foe

Garth Davis
2023
Australia
110 minutes

World Premiere • Q&A with Garth Davis on Sept. 30

In this superbly rendered, sensationally acted science-fiction drama set in 2065, a married midwestern couple (Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal) are given the chance to transcend their climate-change-destroyed world. Building to a devastating climax, director Garth Davis (Lion) expertly interrogates essential questions of our time about environmental apocalypse and the rise of artificial intelligence.

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project

Joe Brewster, Michèle Stephenson
2023
U.S.
103 minutes

Q&A with Nikki Giovanni, Joe Brewster, and Michèle Stephenson on Sept. 30

This beguiling, Sundance-awarded documentary portrait follows poet and activist Nikki Giovanni as she approaches 80, exploring her Afrofuturist-feminist philosophical outlook and her poignant relationship with her family with audacity and eloquence.

Hit Man

Richard Linklater
2023
U.S.
113 minutes

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Richard Linklater on Oct. 3 & 4

Richard Linklater’s peppy sunlit neo-noir is a continually surprising delight. Glen Powell, in a wily and charismatic star turn, plays strait-laced philosophy professor Gary Johnson, who moonlights as an undercover hit man for the New Orleans Police Department, inhabiting different guises and personalities to catch hapless criminals hoping to bump off their enemies. Based on an improbable true story, with a few wild embellishments.

The Killer

David Fincher
2023
U.S.
118 minutes

Adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker from a graphic novel by Alexis “Matz” Nolent and Luc Jacamon, and starring a perfectly chilled Michael Fassbender, The Killer is an exemplary process movie in which revenge proves unpredictable, character is action (and inaction), and murder isn’t personal — until, suddenly, it is.

Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros

Frederick Wiseman
2023
France/U.S.
240 minutes
French with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Frederick Wiseman on Oct. 7 & 9

Frederick Wiseman brings his camera into a three-star Michelin restaurant in rural central France—La Maison Troisgros, located in the Roanne commune in Loire—and the results are as expansive, delectable, and provocative as one would hope: a patient, kaleidoscopic documentary portrait of the demand for perfection.

Occupied City

Steve McQueen
2023
U.K./Netherlands
262 minutes

Q&A with Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter on Oct. 1

Steve McQueen’s four-and-a-half-hour documentary is a mammoth confrontation with a shameful historical legacy that draws parallels to our contemporary world, recounting in prismatic fashion and with startling sobriety the realities of life in Amsterdam during World War II under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, using newly shot images of the city’s forever haunted spaces.

The Pigeon Tunnel

Errol Morris
2023
U.K.
92 minutes

Q&A with Errol Morris on Sept. 30

Pioneering documentarian Errol Morris applies his signature aesthetic to a riveting, thriller-like portrait of John le Carré, whose novels such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy forever changed the way we perceive espionage in popular culture and the world.

Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus

Neo Sora
2023
Japan
102 minutes
Japanese with English subtitles

Ends Thursday!

As a final gift to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s legions of fans, filmmaker Neo Sora (Sakamoto’s son) has constructed a gorgeous elegy starring Sakamoto himself in one of his final performances, an intimate, melancholy, and achingly beautiful one-man show recorded in late 2022 at NHK Studio in Tokyo.

Strange Way of Life

Pedro Almodóvar
2023
Spain
31 minutes

Extended Conversation with Pedro Almodóvar

Almodóvar’s dazzling new short is an unexpected, hyper-male Western melodrama of vivid colors and explosive homoeroticism starring Ethan Hawke as a small-town sheriff who, after 25 years, rekindles a sexual relationship with a former lover, played by Pedro Pascal.

The Sweet East

Sean Price Williams
2023
U.S.
104 minutes

North American Premiere

Smack in the middle of a high school trip to our nation’s capital, self-possessed teen Lillian (the remarkably poised Talia Ryder) breaks off from her classmates, kicking off a journey straight down the rabbit hole of the New Weird America. The directorial debut for cinematographer Sean Price Williams and screenwriter Nick Pinkerton is a deranged and hilarious autopsy of contemporary U.S. life.

The Taste of Things

Trân Anh Hùng
2023
France
135 minutes
French with English subtitles

Ends Thursday!

Destined to be remembered as one of the great films about the meaning, texture, and experience of food, this sumptuous, exceptionally well-crafted work of epicurean cinema, set in late 19th-century France, stars Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel as Eugénie, a cook, and Dodin, the gourmet chef she has been working with for 20 years.

Currents complements the Main Slate, tracing a more complete picture of contemporary cinema with an emphasis on new and innovative forms and voices.

NYFF61 Currents features are sponsored by:

The Human Surge 3

Eduardo Williams
2023
Argentina/Portugal/Netherlands/Taiwan/Brazil/Hong Kong/Sri Lanka/Peru
121 minutes
Spanish, Tamil, Mandarin, and English with English subtitles

Currents Opening Night · U.S. Premiere · Q&A with Eduardo Williams on Sept. 30 & Oct. 1

Armed with a 360-degree camera, Argentinean director Eduardo Williams returns to the bold, time-and-continent-skipping world of his 2016 film The Human Surge and constructs something even more immense, fearless, and breathtakingly beautiful, shooting in Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and Peru and achieving an unprecedented fluidity between spaces and feelings.

ALLENSWORTH

James Benning
2022
U.S.
65 minutes

Q&A with James Benning and Kevin Jerome Everson on Oct. 8 & 9

The town of Allensworth, California, was founded in 1908, established, run, and entirely financed by African Americans; decades later, the once thriving town was all but abandoned, later to be reconstructed. In his new film, James Benning uses his structuralist approach to landscape to etch an evocative portrait of the town. Preceded by Kevin Jerome Everson’s Air Force Two and Boyd v. Denton.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

Joanna Arnow
2023
U.S.
88 minutes
Opens April 26, 2024

In her unsparing, acerbically funny feature debut, Joanna Arnow stars as an emotionally detached young Brooklynite drifting through unremarkable days and nights, which include an on-again-off-again BDSM relationship with a mildly disinterested older dom. Arnow finds a core of poignant truth about the ways people search for those elusive, ever-shifting things like emotional happiness and sexual gratification. Preceded by Ted Fendt’s Unhappy Hour.

Showtimes

April 26

April 27

6:45 PM

April 28

April 29

April 30

May 1

May 2