The 26th New York Film Festival took place September 23 – October 9, 1988 at Film at Lincoln Center.

Main Slate

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar) with Night of the Living Duck (Greg Ford and Terry Lennon) (Opening Night)
Red Sorghum (Zhang Yimou) with Words (Chuck Workman) (Closing Night)
36 Fillette (Catherine Breillat) with Elle et lui (François Margolin)
Ashik Kerib (Sergei Parajanov)
Asya’s Happiness (Andrei Konchalovsky) (Retrospective selection)
“Avant-Garde Voices”: I…Dreaming and Marilyn’s Window (Stan Brakhage) Lived in Quotes (Laurie Dunphy), Honor and Obey (Warren Sonbert), and Fake Fruit Factory (Chick Strand)
Bird (Clint Eastwood) with Koko (George Griffin)
Daughter of the Nile (Hou Hsiao-hsien) with Astronomy (Susan Rogers)
Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies) with The Short and the Curlies (Mike Leigh)
Felix (Christel Buschmann, Helke Sander, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Margarethe von Trotta) with Chet’s Romance (Bertrand Fèvre)
Golub (Jerry Blumenthal & Gordon Quinn) and Falkenau, the Impossible (Emil Weiss)
Hard Times (João Botelho) with April 16th, 1989 (David Byrne)
High Hopes (Mike Leigh) with Treacle (Peter Chelsom)
Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophuls)
Jacob (Mircea Daneliuc) with The Zip (Joann Kaplan)
The Last of England (Derek Jarman) with Cause and Effect (Mary Perillo and John Sanborn)
The Man with Three Coffins (Lee Jang-ho) with Souvenir (Adele Friedman)
Mapantsula (Oliver Schmitz) with Utter (Henion Han)
La Maschera (Fiorella Infascelli) with Sarah (Edgardo Cozarinsky)
The Onset of an Unknown Age (Andrei Smirnov and Larisa Shepitko) (Retrospective selection)
Opening Night (John Cassavetes) with Central Park in the Dark (Rudy Burckhardt and Christopher Sweet)
Pelle the Conqueror (Bille August) with Junior (Gus Van Sant)
Salaam Bombay! (Mira Nair)
A Winter Tan (Jackie Burroughs, Louise Clark, John Frizzell, John Walker & Aerlyn Weissman) with Ray’s Male Heterosexual Dance Hall (Bryan Gordon)

NYFF26 POSTER BY MILTON GLASER