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Main Slate

32 of the most exciting new feature films from around the world.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

  • Joel Coen
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 105 minutes
Joel Coen’s boldly inventive visualization of The Scottish Play is an anguished film that stares, mouth agape, at a sorrowful world undone by blind greed and thoughtless ambition, starring a strikingly inward Denzel Washington as the man who would be king and an effortlessly Machiavellian Frances McDormand as his Lady.

The Power of the Dog

  • Jane Campion
  • 2021
  • Australia/New Zealand
  • 127 minutes
Jane Campion reaffirms her status as one of the world’s greatest—and most gratifyingly eccentric—filmmakers with this mesmerizing, psychologically rich variation on the American western, in which a melancholy young widow (Kirsten Dunst) on a Montana cattle ranch in the 1920s is tormented by her new husband’s sullen and bullying brother (Benedict Cumberbatch).

Parallel Mothers

  • Pedro Almodóvar
  • 2021
  • Spain
  • 120 minutes
  • Spanish with English subtitles
Two women, a generation apart, find themselves inextricably linked by their brief time together in a maternity ward, bound by a secret with ties to a deep trauma in Spanish history. Charismatic stars inhabit characters who are singular among those drawn by Almodóvar in a career defined by striking portraits of women.

A Chiara

  • Jonas Carpignano
  • 2021
  • Italy
  • 120 minutes
  • Italian
A rising star of a resurgent Italian cinema, Jonas Carpignano continues his deeply felt project of observing life in contemporary Calabria with this gripping character study of a teenage girl, Chiara (a revelatory Swamy Rotolo), who gradually comes to discover that her close-knit family is not all that it seems.

Ahed’s Knee

  • Nadav Lapid
  • 2021
  • France/Israel/Germany
  • 109 minutes
  • Hebrew with English subtitles
A film of radical style and splenetic anger, Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid’s shattering follow-up to his bat-out-of-hell Synonyms accompanies a celebrated but increasingly dissociated director to a small town in the desert region of Arava for a screening of his latest film; here he descends into a spiral of rage aimed at the Israeli government.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

  • Radu Jude
  • 2021
  • Romania/Luxembourg/Czech Republic/Croatia
  • 106 minutes
  • Romanian with English subtitles
In his angry, gleefully graceless Berlinale Golden Bear winner, Radu Jude crafts an invigorating, infuriating film in three movements centering around the trials of a teacher (Katia Pascariu) at a prestigious Bucharest school whose life and job are upended when her husband accidentally uploads their private sex tape to the internet.

Benedetta

  • Paul Verhoeven
  • 2021
  • France/Netherlands
  • 127 minutes
  • French with English subtitles
Based on true events, Benedetta unearths the story of Benedetta Carlini, a 17th-century nun who believed she saw visions of Christ and engaged in a sexual relationship with a fellow sister at her abbey; this delirious, erotic, and violent melodrama is told with a boundless spirit for scandal, and unabashedly courts blasphemy.

Bergman Island

  • Mia Hansen-Løve
  • 2021
  • France/Germany/Belgium/Sweden
  • 113 minutes
  • English, French, and Swedish with English subtitles
A masterful blend of the personal and the meta-cinematic, Mia Hansen-Løve’s meditation on the reconciliation of love and the creative process casts Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth as married filmmakers who venture to the remote Swedish island of Fårö, where director Ingmar Bergman lived and made many of his masterpieces.

Il Buco

  • Michelangelo Frammartino
  • 2021
  • Italy/France/Germany
  • 93 minutes
  • Italian with English subtitles
Michelangelo Frammartino’s long-awaited first feature in a decade, following Le Quattro Volte, is another work of nearly wordless natural beauty that touches on the mystical, based on the true adventures of a group of young speleologists who in 1961 descended into a hole in the mountains of Calabria to explore what was then the third-deepest known cave on Earth.

Drive My Car

  • Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
  • 2021
  • Japan
  • 179 minutes
  • Japanese with English subtitles
Inspired by a Haruki Murakami short story, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi spins an engrossing, expansive epic about love and betrayal, grief and acceptance, charting the unexpected, complex relationships that a theater actor-director forges with a trio of people out of professional, physical, or psychological necessity.

The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation

  • Avi Mograbi
  • 2021
  • France/Finland/Israel/Germany
  • 110 minutes
  • Hebrew and English with English subtitles
In his provocative and direct new documentary, Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi, acting as his own on-screen narrator, very specifically and pointedly asks what are the circumstances, logic, and day-to-day processes that have allowed the normalization of Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories.

Flee

  • Jonas Poher Rasmussen
  • 2021
  • Denmark/France/Sweden/Norway
  • 90 minutes
  • Danish, English, Russian, Swedish, and Dari with English subtitles
This illuminating and heartrending animated documentary tells the true story of Amin, whose life has been defined by escape: first from Afghanistan, then from post-Soviet Russia. Now planning to marry a man he met in his new homeland, Denmark, Amin begins to look back over his life, opening up about his past, his trauma, the truth about his family, and his own sexuality.

France

  • Bruno Dumont
  • 2021
  • France/Germany/Belgium/Italy
  • 133 minutes
  • French with English subtitles
Léa Seydoux brilliantly holds the center of Bruno Dumont’s unexpected, unsettling new film as France de Meurs, an unflappable superstar TV journalist whose career, homelife, and psychological stability are shaken after she carelessly drives into a young delivery man on a busy Paris street.

Futura

  • Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, Alice Rohrwacher
  • 2021
  • Italy
  • 110 minutes
  • Italian with English subtitles
A collective of three Italian filmmakers known for their politically acute cinema—Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden), Francesco Munzi (Black Souls), and Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro)—revealingly interview a cross-section of their nation’s youth about their hopes, dreams, and fears for the future.

The Girl and the Spider

  • Ramon and Silvan Zürcher
  • 2021
  • Switzerland
  • 98 minutes
  • German with English subtitles
A minor-key symphony of inscrutable glances and irresolvable tensions, the Zürcher brothers’ alternately droll and melancholy film charts a few days in the lives of two young people on the verge of change: Lisa, who is in the process of moving into a new apartment, and her current roommate, Mara, who’s staying behind.

Hit the Road

  • Panah Panahi
  • 2021
  • Iran
  • 93 minutes
  • Persian with English subtitles
The son of acclaimed, embattled Iranian master filmmaker Jafar Panahi makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and ultimately deeply moving comic drama that takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns.

In Front of Your Face

  • Hong Sangsoo
  • 2021
  • South Korea
  • 85 minutes
  • Korean with English subtitles
After years of living abroad, a middle-aged former actress (Lee Hye-young) has returned to South Korea to reconnect with her past and perhaps make amends in Hong Sangsoo’s beguiling and oddly cleansing mix of the spiritual and the cynical.

Întregalde

  • Radu Muntean
  • 2021
  • Romania
  • 104 minutes
  • Romanian with English subtitles
Leading Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean knowingly plays off and subverts conventions of horror films and social realist drama as he follows a trio of well-meaning aid workers from Bucharest on a food delivery mission to the rural hinterlands of the Întregalde area of Transylvania, where they find themselves trapped.

Introduction

  • Hong Sangsoo
  • 2021
  • South Korea
  • 66 minutes
  • Korean with English subtitles
In this complexly structured puzzle box of unpredictable, poignant human behavior, a group of characters—most crucially parents and their grown offspring—try to relate to one another via a series of thwarted or stunted meetings and introductions, centered around a young man (Shin Seok-ho) on the cusp of adulthood.

Memoria

  • Apichatpong Weerasethakul
  • 2021
  • Colombia/Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Mexico/Qatar
  • 35mm
  • 136 minutes
  • English and Spanish with English subtitles
In the grandest yet most becalmed of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s works, Jessica (Tilda Swinton), an expat botanist visiting her hospitalized sister in Bogotá, becomes ever more disturbed by an abyssal sound that haunts her sleepless nights and bleary-eyed days. It’s a personal journey that’s also historical excavation, yielding a film of profound serenity.

Neptune Frost

  • Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman
  • 2021
  • USA/Rwanda
  • 105 minutes
Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision co-directed with Anisia Uzeyman, a sci-fi punk musical that takes place amidst the hilltops of Burundi, where a collective of computer hackers emerges from within a coltan mining community.

Passing

  • Rebecca Hall
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 98 minutes
A cornerstone work of Harlem Renaissance literature, Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing is adapted to the screen with exquisite craft and skill by writer-director Rebecca Hall, and features meticulous performances by Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as reacquainted childhood friends whose lives have taken divergent paths.

Petite Maman

  • Céline Sciamma
  • 2021
  • France
  • 72 minutes
  • French with English subtitles
Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) proves again that she’s among the most accomplished and unpredictable of all contemporary French filmmakers with the gentle yet richly emotional time-bender Petite Maman, concerning 8-year-old Nelly’s complicated response to the death of her grandmother.

Prayers for the Stolen

  • Tatiana Huezo
  • 2021
  • Mexico/Germany/Brazil/Qatar
  • 110 minutes
  • Spanish with English subtitles
In her delicately wrought yet devastating first fiction feature, adapted from the 2014 book by Jennifer Clement, Tatiana Huezo naturalistically chronicles the growth of young Ana, who lives in a mountainous town in rural Mexico gripped by fear of the drug cartels who ruthlessly control the region.

The Souvenir Part II

  • Joanna Hogg
  • 2021
  • United Kingdom
  • 108 minutes
Continuing the remarkable autobiographical saga she had begun in 2019, British director Joanna Hogg—a filmmaker of unceasing visual ingenuity and sociological specificity—creates a film about finding one’s artistic inspiration and individuality that avoids every possible cliché.

Titane

  • Julia Ducournau
  • 2021
  • France
  • 108 minutes
  • French with English subtitles
The winner of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or, Titane is a thrillingly confident vision from Julia Ducournau that begins as a work of intense horror and ends as something else: a film that questions our assumptions about gender, family, and love itself.

Unclenching the Fists

  • Kira Kovalenko
  • 2021
  • Russia
  • 97 minutes
  • Ossetian with English subtitles
Kira Kovalenko won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes for this vivid, concentrated rendering of one woman’s desperate, almost bestial need to escape from her suffocating family life in North Ossetia, located in the Caucasus region of Southern Russia.

The Velvet Underground

  • Todd Haynes
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 120 minutes
Combining contemporary interviews and archival documentation of The Velvet Underground with a trove of avant-garde film from their era, Todd Haynes constructs a vibrant cinematic collage that is as much about New York of the ’60s and ’70s as it is about the rise and fall of the seminal band.

Vortex

  • Gaspar Noé
  • 2021
  • France
  • 142 minutes
  • French with English subtitles
Finding new depths of tenderness without forgoing the uncompromising fatalism that defines his work, Gaspar Noé guides us through a handful of dark days in the lives of an elderly couple in Paris: a retired psychiatrist (Françoise Lebrun) and a writer (Dario Argento) working on a book about the intersection of cinema and dreams.

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?

  • Alexandre Koberidze
  • 2021
  • Georgia/Germany
  • 150 minutes
  • Georgian with English subtitles
Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze has created an intimate city symphony like no other with his new film, which starts out as an off-kilter romance between footballer Giorgi and pharmacist Lisa and continues to radically and pleasurably shape-shift, ultimately becoming a lovely, idiosyncratic portrait of an entire urban landscape.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

  • Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
  • 2021
  • Japan
  • 121 minutes
  • Japanese with English subtitles
In this rapturous, altogether delightful triptych of stories, a lively and intricately woven work of imagination that questions whether fate or our own vanities decide our destinies, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi again proves he’s one of contemporary cinema’s most agile dramatists of modern love and obsession.

The Worst Person in the World

  • Joachim Trier
  • 2021
  • Norway
  • 121 minutes
  • Norwegian with English subtitles
Acclaimed Norwegian director Joachim Trier catapults the viewer into the world of his most spellbinding protagonist yet: Julie (the magnetic Renate Reinsve), a med-school dropout navigating her twenties and juggling emotionally heavy relationships with two very different men.

Spotlight

NYFF’s showcase of the season’s most anticipated and significant films.

Belle

  • Mamoru Hosoda
  • 2021
  • Japan
  • 121 minutes
  • Japanese with English subtitles
In his densely beautiful, eye-popping animated spectacle, Mirai director Mamoru Hosoda tells the exhilarating story of a shy teenager who becomes an online sensation as a magical pop star named Belle in a parallel virtual universe known as the “U."

C’mon C’mon

  • Mike Mills
  • 2021
  • 108 minutes
A soulful Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a kindhearted radio journalist taking care of his sister’s troubled young son while trying to complete a project in writer-director Mike Mills’s latest effort, another warm, insightful, and gratifyingly askew portrait of American family life.

Dune

  • Denis Villeneuve
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 155 minutes
A mythic and emotionally charged hero’s journey, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding in visionary filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal novel.

The French Dispatch

  • Wes Anderson
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 107 minutes
  • English and French with English subtitles
As brimming with finely tuned texture as a juicy issue of a vintage magazine, The French Dispatch features precision work from a full masthead of collaborators, with director Wes Anderson’s deadpan whimsy complementing the film’s palpable sense of nostalgia.

Jane by Charlotte

  • Charlotte Gainsbourg
  • 2021
  • France
  • 86 minutes
  • French with English subtitles
Charlotte Gainsbourg’s wise and wondrous film about her legendary mother, Jane Birkin, consists of several intimate conversations between parent and child, affording a spare, loving window into the emotional lives of two women as they talk about subject matter that ranges from the delightful to the difficult.

The Lost Daughter

  • Maggie Gyllenhaal
  • 2021
  • USA/Greece
  • 121 minutes
In her striking feature directorial debut, Maggie Gyllenhaal adapts a 2006 novel by Elena Ferrante about Leda (brilliantly played by Oscar-winner Olivia Colman), a divorced professor on a solitary summer vacation who becomes intrigued and then oddly involved in the lives of another family she meets there.

Marx Can Wait

  • Marco Bellocchio
  • 2021
  • Italy
  • 95 minutes
  • Italian with English subtitles
In his most achingly personal film to date, legendary Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio uses the occasion of a family reunion in his hometown of Piacenza to excavate and discuss a traumatic event: the suicide his twin brother Camillo.

Red Rocket

  • Sean Baker
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 128 minutes
Adding to his gallery of jet-fueled portraits of economic hardship within marginalized pockets of the U.S., director Sean Baker trains his restless camera on Mikey, a wildly narcissistic former porn star who has returned from L.A. to his depressed, postindustrial hometown of Texas City.

The Souvenir

  • Joanna Hogg
  • 2019
  • UK/USA
  • 119 minutes
Joanna Hogg mines her own autobiography to craft a portrait of the artist as a young woman in early 1980s London. An eminently refined and moving bildungsroman about the ties that inexplicably bind, The Souvenir—as its title suggests—is also an absorbing evocation of a time, place, and national mood.

Spotlight: Amos Vogel Centenary Retrospective

We pay tribute to the centenary of late film programmer and festival co-founder Amos Vogel—who offered the city “films you cannot see elsewhere,” and whose uncompromising dedication to the medium’s radical possibilities inspired NYC film culture as it exists today—with a special Spotlight sidebar.

Experience the entire retrospective and save with a $60 Pass! On sale now. Learn more here.

The Amos Vogel Centenary Retrospective is sponsored by:

Amos Vogel Program 1: Cinema 16

  • Sidney Peterson, Lester F. Beck, John Huston, Oskar Fischinger
  • 113 minutes
In the fall of 1947, Amos Vogel, a young Austrian émigré, and his wife Marcia founded a venue called Cinema 16, which routinely brought together strikingly different works—pairing, for instance, an abstract animation with a science film, allowing both to be understood, contrapuntally, in a new light.

The New York Film Festival, 1963-1968

Cinema 16 came to a close in 1963. That same year Vogel co-founded the New York Film Festival with Richard Roud, and, as the head of Lincoln Center’s film department, laid the groundwork for the FLC of today. For our tribute, we’ll be highlighting a number of works that were presented during Vogel’s tenure at the festival, each of which reflects, in different ways, his long-standing preoccupations as a programmer.

Amos Vogel Program 2: Barravento

  • Glauber Rocha
  • 1962
  • Brazil
  • 16mm
  • 78 minutes
  • Portuguese with English subtitles
Featured in the Main Slate of the first edition of NYFF, Barravento is a seminal work of Cinema Novo and the debut feature of Glauber Rocha.

Amos Vogel Program 3: Pearls of the Deep

  • Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Evald Schorm, Věra Chytilová, Jaromil Jireš
  • 1965
  • Czechoslovakia
  • 107 minutes
  • Czech with English subtitles
A selection of the 1966 New York Film Festival, Pearls of the Deep is made up of five sections, each directed by a different filmmaker and based on a short story by Bohumil Hrabal.

Amos Vogel Program 4: The New American Cinema

  • Tony Conrad, Peter Emmanuel Goldman
  • 16mm
  • 105 minutes
The Fourth New York Film Festival featured a sampling of the New American Cinema, bringing the underground uptown. Two of the works screened that year, Tony Conrad’s The Flicker and Peter Emmanuel Goldman’s Echoes of Silence, reflect the range of avant-garde activity flourishing at the time.

Amos Vogel Program 5: The Social Cinema in America, 1967

  • Lebert Bethune, Santiago Álvarez, David Neuman and Ed Pincus
  • 92 minutes
As the Fifth New York Film Festival featured a sidebar on “The Social Cinema in America,” we reprise one of the evening's screenings, bringing together Lebert Bethune, Santiago Álvarez, David Neuman, and Ed Pincus.

Amos Vogel Program 6: Personal Cinema

  • 12th and Oxford Street Film Makers, Jaime Barrios, Maxine Tsosie and Mary J. Tsosie
  • 69 minutes
1968 marked Vogel’s final year overseeing the NYFF, and many remarkable (and even today underappreciated) works were selected. One program in particular from that edition was dubbed “Personal Cinema," reprised here.

Film as a Subversive Art

Long a source of inspiration for film programmers, Film as a Subversive Art is a guidebook to cinema’s outer limits, replete with tantalizing descriptions of some of the most radical movies ever made. First published in 1974, this lavishly illustrated volume can be seen as a culmination of Vogel’s work over the previous decades, chronicling as it does the taboo-busting potential of cinema, at the level of form as well as content.

Amos Vogel Program 7: Film as a Subversive Art

  • Dušan Makavejev
  • 90 minutes
  • English, German, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles
For this program, we foreground Amos Vogel's acclaimed book, Film as a Subversive Art, with one of its most iconic titles, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, alongside Nebula II, one of its most obscure entries.

Currents

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

Experience all of Currents and save with a $140 Pass! On sale now. Learn more here.

The Tsugua Diaries

  • Maureen Fazendeiro, Miguel Gomes
  • 2021
  • Portugal
  • 102 minutes
  • Portuguese and Romanian with English subtitles
In this beguiling new film co-directed by Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, a daily journal unfolds in revelatory reverse order, surveying the mundane routines of three housemates living in rural peace during the COVID lockdown; soon, we discover that there’s more going on beyond the limits of the camera frame.

All About My Sisters

  • Wang Qiong
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 175 minutes
  • Mandarin with English subtitles
A major new voice in nonfiction cinema, Wang Qiong documents with unflinching and harrowing honesty her own fractured family, gradually revealing the personal and psychological effects of China’s one-child policy on the individual, the family unit, and women in society at large.

El Gran Movimiento

  • Kiro Russo
  • 2021
  • Bolivia/France/Qatar/Switzerland
  • 85 minutes
  • Spanish with English subtitles
Kiro Russo has mounted a monumental, gently mystical portrait of the contemporary central South American cityscape and those who work within its bowels and environs, set in the alternately harsh and beautiful terrain of La Paz, Bolivia and its surrounding rural areas.

Haruhara-san’s Recorder

  • Kyoshi Sugita
  • 2021
  • Japan
  • 120 minutes
  • Japanese with English subtitles
Kyoshi Sugita creates an evocative portrait of a young woman’s interior world through impressionistic action rather than psychology, fixing his patient camera on meetings with friends, family, and strangers, lunches and teatime, and occurrences both mundane and mystical.

I Want to Talk About Duras

  • Claire Simon
  • 2021
  • France
  • 95 minutes
  • French with English subtitles
A precise, enveloping portrait of the complex romantic relationship between epochal experimental novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras and her much younger, homosexual partner, Yann Andréa, Claire Simon’s latest film is based entirely on transcripts from a 1982 interview between Andréa (Swann Arlaud) and journalist Michèle Manceaux (Emmanuelle Devos).

Just a Movement

  • Vincent Meessen
  • 2021
  • Belgium/France
  • 110 minutes
  • Mandarin, French, and Wolof with English subtitles
Vincent Meessen’s freewheeling yet highly disciplined documentary tells the story of Niger-born artist and Marxist intellectual Omar Blondin Diop, an organizer and communicator of anti-colonialist political theory in France and Senegal who died at 26 in prison after being arrested by the Senegalese government.

Nature

  • Artavazd Peleshian
  • 2020
  • France/Germany/Armenia
  • 63 minutes
  • France/Germany/Armenia
Artavazd Peleshian’s first feature film in nearly 30 years is an epic return to his major theme: humanity in harmony and conflict with the natural world. Rendered in stark black and white, Peleshian’s elegant, relentless montage of found disaster videos imparts an overwhelming experience of nature’s vast, destructive processes of regeneration. Screening with Andrei Ujică’s 2 Pasolini, which follows the Italian auteur and his theological advisor, Don Andrea Carraro, on a trip through 1960s Palestine to scout locations for his 1964 biblical masterpiece The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.

A Night of Knowing Nothing

  • Payal Kapadia
  • 2021
  • France/India
  • 96 minutes
  • Bengali and Hindi with English subtitles
Through a series of letters read aloud to an absent lover, we learn about the fears, desires, and philosophical identity of a young woman named L, a student at the Film and Television Institute of India, in writer-director Payal Kapadia’s brilliantly fragmentary film about contemporary Indian youths engaged in the politics of university life.

Outside Noise

  • Ted Fendt
  • 2021
  • Germany/South Korea/Austria
  • 61 minutes
  • German and English with English subtitles
With his customary mix of narrative restraint and intellectual curiosity, filmmaker Ted Fendt follows a small group of young women through Berlin and Vienna over the course of several months, particularly Daniela, who has just returned from traveling in New York and is dealing with a bout of insomnia.

Prism

  • Eléonore Yameogo, An van. Dienderen, Rosine Mbakam
  • 2021
  • Belgium
  • 78 minutes
  • French and English with English subtitles
The lighting for movie cameras has always been calibrated for white skin; three filmmakers collectively explore the literal, theoretical, and philosophical dimensions of that reality in this discursive, playful, and profound work of nonfiction.

Returning to Reims

  • Jean-Gabriel Périot
  • 2021
  • France
  • 83 minutes
  • French with English subtitles
In just over 80 minutes, filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot provides a fleet, thorough, and incisive sociological examination of the French working class over the past 70 years, using decades’ worth of artfully deployed archival footage, film clips, and TV news reports to illustrate the rise, fall, and hopeful rebirth of the country’s proletariat, as well as how social identity is gradually constructed.

A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces

  • Shengze Zhu
  • 2021
  • USA
  • 87 minutes
  • Without dialogue, featuring Chinese and English text
Documentarian Shengze Zhu’s becalmed, wordless meditation on the vulnerability and resilience of urban spaces before and after the COVID outbreak intersperses exquisitely composed images of life and hope along the Yangtze River with onscreen text translating letters written to loved ones affected by illness and death.

Social Hygiene

  • Denis Côté
  • 2021
  • Canada
  • 76 minutes
  • French with English subtitles
Mischievous Quebecois filmmaker Denis Côté’s absurdist comedy is constructed as a series of frank and often hilarious repartees between an insolent petty thief named Antonin and a succession of largely fed-up women, keeping a pandemic-worthy and humorous distance from one another as they verbally parry and thrust in static long takes.

Ste. Anne

  • Rhayne Vermette
  • 2021
  • Canada
  • 80 minutes
  • English and French with English subtitles
In her evocative, collage-like 16mm film, Rhayne Vermette immerses the viewer in the sounds, textures, and atmosphere of her native Manitoba to limn the outer edges of a twilight-toned narrative centering on a long-missing young woman’s unexpected return to her indigenous Métis community.

The Tale of King Crab

  • Alessio Rigo de Righi , Matteo Zoppis
  • 2021
  • Italy/Argentina/France
  • 106 minutes
  • Italian and Spanish with English subtitles
Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s rousing, bifurcated tale follows the improbable adventures of Luciano (a bewitching Gabriele Silli), a village outcast in late-19th-century rural Italy, whose life is undone by indulgence, leading him to hunt for a mythic treasure in the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego.

Currents Program 1: Acts of Seeing

  • Various
  • 2021
  • 81 minutes
Featuring Zhang Dalei's Day Is Done, Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand's 38, Luise Donschen's ELLE, and Lois Patiño and Matías Piñeiro's Sycorax.

Currents Program 2: Critical Mass

  • Various
  • 2020-2021
  • 85 minutes
Featuring Tiffany Sia's Do Not Circulate, Christopher Harris's Dreams Under Confinement, Eliane Esther Bots's In Flow of Words, Haig Aivazian's All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes, and Virgil Vernier's Kindertotenlieder.

Currents Program 3: Free Form

  • Various
  • 2020-2021
  • 72 minutes
Featuring Justin Jinsoo Kim's Personality Test, Aykan Safoğlu's Dog Star Descending, Pablo Martín Weber's Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse, and Guillermo Moncayo's (No Subject).

Currents Program 4: Still Life

  • Various
  • 2021
  • 66 minutes
Featuring Vika Kirchenbauer's THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER, Morgan Quaintance's A Human Certainty, and Carl Elsaesser's Home When You Return.

Currents Program 5: Pattern Language

  • Various
  • 2020-2021
  • 64 minutes
Featuring Mike Crane's Cutting the Mushroom, Ross Meckfessel's Estuary, Zachary Epcar's The Canyon, and Ericka Beckman's Reach Capacity.

Currents Program 6: Camera Lucida

  • Various
  • 2020-2021
  • 72 minutes
Featuring Rhea Storr's Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical, Miranda Pennell's Strange Object, Shireen Seno's To Pick a Flower, and Morgan Quaintance's South.

Currents Program 7: New Sensations

  • Various
  • 84 minutes
Featuring Kevin Jerome Everson's May June July, Allison Chhorn's Blind Body, Hope Strickland's If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever), Shun Ikezoe's What is it that you said?, Richard Tuohy's In and Out a Window, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Night Colonies.

Currents Program 8: Vibrant Matter

  • Various
  • 2021
  • 93 minutes
Featuring Daïchi Saïto's earthearthearth, Los Ingrávidos's Tonalli, Manuela de Laborde's Fictions, and Tomonari Nishikawa's Six Seventy-Two Variations, Variation 1.

Revivals

This section showcases important works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners.

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Adoption

  • Márta Mészáros
  • 1975
  • Hungary
  • 87 minutes
  • Hungarian with English subtitles
Mészáros brings her documentary background to bear on this masterful parable about female self-actualization in 1970s Hungary, the winner of the Golden Bear at the 1975 Berlinale.

Assault on Precinct 13

  • John Carpenter
  • 1976
  • USA
  • 91 minutes
Carpenter’s taut L.A.-set thriller chronicles the efforts of a small group of cops, administrators, and crooks holed up in a decommissioned police station to survive the night when a merciless street gang shows up seeking revenge.

The Bloody Child

  • Nina Menkes
  • 1996
  • USA
  • 86 minutes
Menkes’s visionary third feature is a fragmentary and hallucinatory investigation into the psychic currents underlying a Gulf War veteran’s apparent murder of his wife.

Bluebeard’s Castle

  • Michael Powell
  • 1963
  • West Germany
  • 60 minutes
  • German with English subtitles
The psychodrama of Bela Bartok and Bela Balázs’s expressionist opera based on the Bluebeard folktale is vividly evoked in Michael Powell’s second-to-last feature sans Pressburger.

Chameleon Street

  • Wendell B. Harris Jr.
  • 1990
  • USA
  • 94 minutes
The Grand Jury Prize winner at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival, Harris's debut feature, about a real-life con man, endures as a brilliant satirical examination of the place of race and class in the performance of American social life. Screening with James Baldwin: From Another Place.

Hester Street

  • Joan Micklin Silver
  • 1975
  • USA
  • 89 minutes
Among the great cinematic portraits of Jewish life in America, Joan Micklin Silver’s debut feature chronicles one woman’s journey to assimilation and her arrival at the crossroads of tradition and modernity.

Kummatty

  • Govindan Aravindan
  • 1979
  • India
  • 90 minutes
  • Malayalam with English subtitles
A poetic work informed by folklore and early cinema alike, key Parallel Cinema director Govindan Aravindan’s Kummatty tells the tale of a trickster “boogeyman” who descends upon a village in Malabar year after year.

Mississippi Masala

  • Mira Nair
  • 1991
  • UK/USA
  • 118 minutes
Denzel Washington stars opposite Sarita Choudhory in Mira Nair’s second fiction feature, which endures as a seminal screen romance of the 1990s and an incisive examination of race relations.

Radio On

  • Christopher Petit
  • 1979
  • UK/West Germany
  • 104 minutes
A sui generis deconstruction of the road movie, Christopher Petit’s Radio On is one of the coolest films of the late 1970s, propelled by an incomparable soundtrack featuring Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Devo, Robert Fripp, and others.

Ratcatcher

  • Lynne Ramsay
  • 1999
  • UK/France
  • 93 minutes
Lynne Ramsay’s brilliant career was launched with this, her debut feature, a raw yet lyrical meditation on childhood set in the 1970s that scours the urban decay of working-class Glasgow to unearth the hopes and dreams of its marginalized residents.

The Round-Up

  • Miklós Jancsó
  • 1966
  • Hungary
  • 87 minutes
  • Hungarian with English subtitles
Miklós Jancsó’s breakout film was this spellbinding drama set in the aftermath of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, meditating upon and exalting its characters’ resistance and perseverance in the face of brutal, authoritarian repression.

Rude Boy

  • Jack Hazan & David Mingay
  • 1980
  • UK
  • 133 minutes
An unforgettable film portrait of a place (England), a time (the end of the 1970s), and a band (The Clash), Rude Boy is still as cool and galvanizing as it was at its 1980 Berlinale premiere.

Sambizanga

  • Sarah Maldoror
  • 1972
  • Angola/France
  • 102 minutes
  • Portuguese with English subtitles
A searing, indelible portrait of anti-colonial struggle in 1970s Africa, Sambizanga is a forceful, stirring evocation of the Angolan population’s plight before the revolution and their intensifying political consciousness during it.

Songs for Drella

  • Ed Lachman
  • 1990
  • USA
  • 55 minutes
Lou Reed and John Cale perform their album dedicated to their late friend and collaborator Andy Warhol in this stripped-down, evocative concert film by legendary cinematographer Ed Lachman.

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song

  • Melvin Van Peebles
  • 1971
  • USA
  • 97 minutes
A frenetic work of restless invention, Melvin Van Peebles’s deeply influential third feature was hailed by no less than Huey Newton as the “first truly revolutionary Black film ever made... [and] presented to us by a Black man.”

Who Killed Vincent Chin?

  • Christine Choy, Renee Tajima-Peña
  • 1987
  • USA
  • 82 minutes
A meditation on the race relations, economic forces, and failings of the American legal system that comprised the backdrop for the murder of a Chinese-American automotive engineer in Detroit in 1982, Oscar nominees Choy and Tajima-Peña’s documentary’s documentary remains a stirring, absorbing elegy for justice unserved.

Talks

Free Talk: 2021 Amos Vogel Lecture – Albert Serra

  • 60 minutes
NYFF's inaugural Amos Vogel Lecture will be delivered by filmmaker Albert Serra and followed by a conversation with the programmers of the NYFF59 Spotlight sidebar devoted to Vogel’s curatorial legacy. Sponsored by MUBI.

Deep Focus

In-depth dialogues with festival filmmakers & their collaborators.

The Making of Mississippi Masala

  • 60 minutes
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film’s landmark release and the premiere of its new restoration, join us for a conversation with director Mira Nair, actress Sarita Choudhury, and cinematographer Ed Lachman, moderated by author, Jhumpa Lahiri. Sponsored by TCM.

Free Talk: Jane Campion

  • 60 minutes
The legendary New Zealand director (The Power of the Dog, NYFF59) partakes in an extended conversation with filmmaker Sofia Coppola (On the Rocks, NYFF58) about the latest entry in Campion’s masterful, decades-spanning oeuvre.

Free Talk: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

  • 60 minutes
Join us for an in-depth conversation with writer-director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, NYFF59) to explore the resonances and shared preoccupations of his new films and his prolific body of work. Moderated by Matías Piñeiro (Sycorax, NYFF59).

Free Talk: Saul Williams & Anisia Uzeyman

  • 60 minutes
Join Williams and Uzeyman for a wide-ranging conversation about crossing borders, both geographic and artistic; the radical possibilities of genre; and the use of cinema as a means of realizing new and better futures. Moderated by Maya Cade, creator of The Black Film Archive.

Free Talk: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

  • 60 minutes
One of world cinema's most original auteurs, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Memoria, NYFF59) engages in a deep-dive conversation about his extraordinary oeuvre and the elliptical novelties and familiar mysteries of his latest masterwork. Moderated by novelist Katie Kitamura.

Crosscuts

Conversations between filmmakers across festival sections, genres, and styles.

Free Talk: Mia Hansen-Løve & Joachim Trier

  • 60 minutes
Mia Hansen-Løve (Bergman Island, NYFF59) and Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World, NYFF59) discuss their influences and inspirations, their distinctively personal and philosophical approaches to cinematic storytelling, and the endlessly generative themes of romantic ambivalence and evolving self-knowledge that animate their new films.

Free Talk: Silvan Zürcher & Alexandre Koberidze

  • 60 minutes
Silvan Zürcher (The Girl and the Spider) and Alexandre Koberidze (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, NYFF59) discuss their filmic inspirations and aspirations, their trajectories within Swiss and Georgian cinema, respectively, and in world cinema at large.

Free Talk: Maggie Gyllenhaal & Kira Kovalenko

  • 60 minutes
Roiling currents of familial and feminist rebellion connect two extraordinary films in the NYFF59 lineup. This special conversation brings the two directors together to discuss their respective forays into filmmaking, the process of realizing their vividly drawn yet enigmatic heroines, and the use of fiction to transcend an untenable status quo.

Roundtables

Panels and discussions that connect the festival to the themes of the moment.

Free Talk: Cinema’s Workers

  • 60 minutes
As questions of labor and equity take center stage in art communities in New York and beyond, this roundtable brings together a multifaceted group of film workers to discuss past and ongoing labor movements in cinema.

Film Comment Live: The Velvet Underground & the New York Avant-Garde

  • 60 minutes
Presented by the editors of Film Comment Magazine, this special roundtable brings together Todd Haynes The Velvet Underground, NYFF59), Ed Lachman Songs for Drella, NYFF59), and critic Amy Taubin to discuss the enduring legacy of the historic moment of artistic innovation their two films so vividly capture.

Film Comment Live: Festival Report

  • 60 minutes
For the festival’s final week, a group of critics gather for a spirited wrap-up discussion with Devika Girish and Clinton Krute, Co-Deputy Editors of Film Comment, about the movies they’ve seen in the NYFF59 lineup. Panelists include Molly Haskell (critic and author), Bilge Ebiri (staff critic, Vulture), and Phoebe Chen (critic and scholar).