The 27th New York Film Festival took place September 22 – October 9, 1989 at Film at Lincoln Center.

Main Slate

Too Beautiful for You (Bertrand Blier) with No More Disguises (Tom Sigel and Boryana Varbanov) (Opening Night)
Breaking In (Bill Forsyth) with Animated Self Portraits (Various) (Closing Night)
Ariel (Aki Kaurismäki) with London Suite (Vivienne Dick)
“Avant-Garde Visions”: Mercy (Abigail Child), Friendly Witness (Warren Sonbert), and Water and Power (Pat O’Neill)
Black Rain (Shohei Imamura)
A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien) with Super Soap (Ah Da Ma Kexuan)
Confession: A Chronicle of Alienation (Georgi Gavrilov) with The Inspector (Artur Omar)
Current Events (Ralph Arlyck) and Dreams from China (Fred Marx)
Dancing for Mr. B: Six Balanchine Ballerinas (Anna Belle & Deborah Dickson) with This Time Around (Jane Aaron)
The Documentator (Istvan Darday & Gyorgyi Szalai)
Intolerance (D.W. Griffith) (Retrospective selection)
Life and Nothing But (Bertrand Tavernier) with Please Don’t Stop (Stephanie Maxwell)
Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien) and Book of Days (Meredith Monk) with Black-Eyed Susan (Portrait of an Actress) (Stuart Sherman)
The Mahabharata (Peter Brook)
Monsieur Hire (Patrice Leconte) with C’mon Babe (Sharon Sandusky)
My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan) with J.P. Somersaulter’s Dot to Dot Cartoon Cartoon (J.P. Somersaulter)
Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch) with The Black Tower (John Smith)
Near Death (Frederick Wiseman)
The Plot Against Harry (Michael Roemer) with Pas a Deux (Monique Renault and Gerrit van Dijk)
Roger & Me (Michael Moore) with A Western (Laurie Dunphy)
A Short Film About Killing (Krzysztof Kieslowski) with The Mourner (Helen Dabrowski-Torres)
Speaking Parts (Atom Egoyan) with Under the Sea (Paul Glabicki)
Strapless (David Hare) with The Soulful Shack (John Roberts)
Sweetie (Jane Campion)
A Tale of the Wind (Joris Ivens & Marceline Loridan) with Rain (Joris Ivens)
Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (Charlotte Zwerin) with Ostensibly (Rudy Burckhardt)
Yaaba (Idrissa Ouedraogo) with Kakania (Karen Aqua)

NYFF27 POSTER BY JENNIFER BARTLETT