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New York Film Festival, September 29 - October 15, 2023
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Main Slate

Main Slate is the core of the program, a selection of the most exceptional new films from around the world.

May December

  • Todd Haynes
  • 2023
  • U.S.
  • 113 minutes

Exclusive 35mm Engagement Ends Thursday!

Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a popular television star, is ingratiating herself into the lives of Gracie (Julianne Moore), whom she’ll be playing on-screen, and her much younger husband, Joe (Charles Melton), to better understand the psychology and circumstances that more than 20 years ago made them notorious tabloid figures. From a sensational premise, the consummate film artist Todd Haynes (Safe, Carol) has constructed an American tale of astonishing richness and depth, which touches the pressure and pleasure points of a culture obsessed equally with celebrity and trauma.
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Priscilla

  • Sofia Coppola
  • 2023
  • U.S.
  • 113 minutes

Centerpiece · North American Premiere

Sofia Coppola, who in her remarkable filmography has so often returned to intimate portraits of women living complicated lives behind closed doors, has found a subject exquisitely tailored to her interests in Priscilla Presley, whose love affair and marriage to Elvis kept her in the public eye before she had truly experienced the world.

Ferrari

  • Michael Mann
  • 2023
  • U.S.
  • 130 minutes

Closing Night · North American Premiere • Q&A with Michael Mann on Oct. 13 at 6pm screening and intro at 9pm screening

Michael Mann brings his astonishing command of technique and storytelling to bear on his thrilling new film, an emotional, elegantly crafted dramatization of the life of the legendary car manufacturer and entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari at a professional and personal fulcrum, starring Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz.

About Dry Grasses

  • Nuri Bilge Ceylan
  • 2023
  • Turkey
  • 197 minutes
  • Turkish with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Nuri Bilge Ceylan on Oct. 9 & 10

The latest deeply philosophical drama from Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a work of elegant, novelistic filmmaking set in a village nestled within the bleak landscape of the East Anatolia region in Turkey. Here, an art teacher named Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) is struggling through what he hopes to be his final year at an elementary school, complicated by a friendship with a charismatic new teacher (Cannes winner Merve Dizdar) and an accusation of impropriety with a student.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

  • Raven Jackson
  • 2023
  • U.S.
  • 97 minutes

Ends Thursday!

One of the most visually striking, profoundly moving American moviemaking debuts in years, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is an arresting immersion into the inner world of a young woman raised in rural Mississippi.

All of Us Strangers

  • Andrew Haigh
  • 2023
  • U.K.
  • 105 minutes
British director Andrew Haigh, whose 2011 feature breakthrough Weekend is among the most widely beloved queer romances of the 21st century, has returned with an expertly modulated, emotionally overwhelming love story suspended in a metaphysical realm. In a quartet of superb performances, Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, and Claire Foy pierce straight to the heart.

Anatomy of a Fall

  • Justine Triet
  • 2023
  • France
  • 150 minutes
  • French and English with English subtitles
The winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s drama about a famous novelist (played by Toni Erdmann’s Sandra Hüller) accused of killing her husband after his body has fallen from a high window at their home in the French Alps is a riveting procedural and a delicate inquiry into the impossibility of ultimate truth in people’s relationships.
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The Beast

  • Bertrand Bonello
  • 2023
  • France
  • 146 minutes
  • English and French with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Bertrand Bonello on Oct. 8 & 9

Using Henry James’s haunting 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle” as his film’s provocative inspiration, Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama, Coma) has created a dynamic and disturbing parable that jumps between three different time periods (1910, 2014, and 2044) and tells the story of a young woman (Léa Seydoux) who undergoes a surgical process to have her DNA—and therefore memories of all her past lives—removed.

La Chimera

  • Alice Rohrwacher
  • 2023
  • Italy
  • 133 minutes
  • Italian with English subtitles
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). Preceded by Pier Paolo Pasolini – Agnès Varda – New York – 1967.

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

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Ryûsuke Hamaguchi on Oct. 5 & 7

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.

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.
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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

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Bas Devos & Liyo Gong on Oct. 8 & 9

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

North American Premiere

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.

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
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

U.S. Premiere

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.

Last Summer

  • Catherine Breillat
  • 2023
  • France
  • 104 minutes
  • French with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Catherine Breillat and Léa Drucker on Oct. 10 & 12

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

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Angela Schanelec on Oct. 4 & 5

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

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Kleber Mendonça Filho on Oct. 9 & 10

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. Preceded by Pier Paolo Pasolini – Agnès Varda – New York – 1967.

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

Q&A with Felipe Gálvez on Oct. 2 & 4

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

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

North American Premiere • Q&A with Neo Sora on Oct. 11 & intro on 12

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

Q&A with Trân Anh Hùng on Oct. 5 & 7

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

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

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Joanna Arnow on Oct. 5 (joined by Alysia Reiner, Parish Bradley & Peter Vack) & Oct. 7 (joined by Graham Swon, Pierce Varous & Bart Cortright)

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.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

  • Thien An Pham
  • 2023
  • Vietnam
  • 177 minutes
  • Vietnamese with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Thien An Pham on Oct. 3 & 4

Winner of the prestigious Camera d’Or for best first film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the enthralling Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell from Vietnamese filmmaker Thien An Pham is a reverie on faith, loss, and nature expressed with uncommon invention and depth that follows a thirtysomething man after he leaves Saigon for a trip back to his rural hometown following a family tragedy.

Last Things

  • Deborah Stratman
  • 2023
  • U.S./Portugal/France
  • 35mm
  • 50 minutes
  • French and English with English subtitles

Presented on 35mm • Q&A with Deborah Stratman and Blake Williams on Oct. 7 & 8

An active decentering of the human or animal, Deborah Stratman’s mesmeric new film is a geohistorical inquiry into life on earth from the perspective of rocks: those formations of crystal and mineral that existed before the existence of people—and will one day outlive us. Preceded by Blake Williams’s Laberint Sequences.

Mambar Pierrette

  • Rosine Mbakam
  • 2023
  • Cameroon/Belgium
  • 93 minutes
  • French and Pidgin with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Rosine Mbakam on Oct. 9 & 10

In her captivating, quietly powerful new film, Rosine Mbakam returns to her home country of Cameroon to follow the daily life of a good-natured yet exhausted seamstress (played by the director’s cousin Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat) struggling to make ends meet in the city of Douala.

The Night Visitors

  • Michael Gitlin
  • 2023
  • U.S.
  • 72 minutes

World Premiere • Q&A with Michael Gitlin, Leonardo Pirondi, and Zazie Ray-Trapido on Oct. 1 & 3

Film and video artist Michael Gitlin (The Earth Is Young) magnifies the surreal beauty and ecological significance of moths in his eye-opening and richly philosophical experimental documentary/essay film that explores a crucial element of our planet’s biodiversity that many of us may never consider. Preceded by Leonardo Pirondi and Zazie Ray-Trapido’s When We Encounter the World.

Nowhere Near

  • Miko Revereza
  • 2023
  • U.S./Philippines
  • 95 minutes
  • Tagalog and English with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere • Virtual Q&A with Miko Revereza on Sept. 30 & Oct. 1

Both diaristic and delicately abstract, this long-gestating, ruminative work from Miko Revereza reflects the filmmaker’s attempts to understand his and his family’s experiences as undocumented Filipino immigrants in the U.S.

A Prince

  • Pierre Creton
  • 2023
  • France
  • 82 minutes
  • French with English subtitles

North American Premiere · Q&A with Pierre Creton on Sept. 30 & Oct. 1

In the alternately blissful and forbidding French countryside, an enveloping, cross-generational saga unfolds among a young gardening apprentice and the three men training him, all of whom become instrumental in both his professional tutelage and sexual coming-of-age.

Jean-Luc Godard + Wang Bing + Pedro Costa

  • Jean-Luc Godard, Wang Bing, Pedro Costa
  • 89 minutes

Q&A with Wang Bing on Oct. 2 & 3

Featuring Jean-Luc Godard’s Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars, the intricate and beautiful “trailer” that Godard put together in preparation for another feature film; the North American premiere of Wang Bing’s Man in Black, a minimalist yet intensely emotional portrait of Wang Xilin, one of China’s leading classical composers; and the U.S. premiere of Pedro Costa’s The Daughters of Fire (As Filhas do Fogo), an entirely entrancing musical of ecstasy and ache.

Mangosteen + We Don’t Talk Like We Used To

  • Tulapop Saenjaroen, Joshua Gen Solondz
  • 76 minutes

Q&A with Tulapop Saenjaroen and Joshua Gen Solondz on Oct. 2 & 3

Featuring the North American premiere of Tulapop Saenjaroen’s blend of family drama and process documentary, Mangosteen, and the U.S. premiere of Joshua Gen Solondz’s travelogue-cum-cinematic noise show We Don’t Talk Like We Used To.

Currents Program 1: Surface Tension

  • 78 minutes

Q&A with Carolina Fusilier, Adam Piron, Aria Dean, and Narges Kalhor on Oct. 5 & 7

Featuring the North American premiere of Aria Dean’s Abattoir U.S.A.!, the world premiere of Carolina Fusilier’s Mercurial Currents, the U.S. premiere of Narges Kalhor’s Sensitive Content, Adam Piron’s Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image), and the North American premiere of Jeamin Cha’s Nameless Syndrome.

Currents Program 2: Stranger Than Paradise

  • 71 minutes

Q&A with Justin Jinsoo Kim, Mackie Mallison, Jorge Jácome, Shambhavi Kaul, and Kim Torres on Oct. 7 & 8

Featuring the world premiere of Mackie Mallison’s Live From the Clouds, Jorge Jácome’s Shrooms, the U.S. premiere of Justin Jinsoo Kim’s The Far and Near, the U.S. premiere of Shambhavi Kaul’s Slow Shift, and the U.S. premiere of Kim Torres’s Solo la Luna comprenderá (The Moon Will Contain Us).

Currents Program 3: Inside Out

  • 69 minutes

Q&A with Whammy Alcazaren, Jordan Strafer, Jamie Crewe, and Steve Reinke on Oct. 7 & 8

Featuring Takeshi Murata and Christopher Rutledge’s Larry, Whammy Alcazaren’s Bold Eagle, the world premiere of Jordan Strafer’s LOOPHOLE, the North American premiere of Jamie Crewe’s False Wife, and the U.S. premiere of Steve Reinke’s Sundown.

Currents Program 4: Close Encounters

  • 74 minutes

Q&A with Kevin Jerome Everson, Ross Meckfessel, and James Edmonds on Oct. 8 & 9

Featuring Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie’s Intersection, Maryam Tafakory’s Mast-Del, the U.S. premiere of James Edmonds’s Disappearances, the North American premiere of Kevin Jerome Everson’s If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move, the world premiere of Luke Fowler’s N’Importe Quoi (for Brunhild), and the world premiere of Ross Meckfessel’s Spark from a Falling Star.

Currents Program 5: Burden of Dreams

  • 84 minutes

Q&A with Julio Hernández Cordón, Tomás Paula Marques, Sonia Oleniak, and Charlotte Pryce on Oct. 8 & 9

Featuring Tomás Paula Marques’s Dildotectonica, Charlotte Pryce’s and so it came about (A Tale of Consequential Dormancy), Sonia Oleniak’s Coral, the North American premiere of Catarina Vasconcelos’s Nocturne for a Forest, and the North American premiere of Julio Hernandez Cordón’s The Rays of a Storm.

Currents Program 6: Site Specific

  • 87 minutes

Q&A with Ayo Akingbade and Huw Lemmey on Oct. 9 & 11

Featuring the North American premiere of Dane Komljen’s Projekt, the U.S. premiere of Ayo Akingbade’s The Fist, and the North American premiere of Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe’s Ungentle.

Revivals

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

Abraham’s Valley

  • Manoel de Oliveira
  • 1993
  • Portugal
  • 203 minutes
  • Portuguese with English subtitles

North American Premiere of Restoration

Among the most essential films in Manoel de Oliveira’s vast, epoch-spanning oeuvre is adapted from a 1991 transposition of Madame Bovary to 20th-century Portugal, starring Leonor Silveira as a young woman ensnared within a loveless marriage.

The Dupes

  • Tewfik Saleh
  • 1972
  • Syria
  • 107 minutes
  • Arabic with English subtitles

North American Premiere of Restoration

An excruciatingly suspenseful and eminently modern work of political cinema that evokes The Wages of Fear and Kafka in equal measure, this 1972 masterpiece follows three Palestinian refugees as they agree to a questionable-seeming plan to secretly cross the border from Iraq to Kuwait in search of employment.

Household Saints

  • Nancy Savoca
  • 1993
  • USA
  • 125 minutes

World Premiere of Restoration • Q&A with Nancy Savoca on Oct. 7

Based on Francine Prose’s fifth novel, Nancy Savoca’s comic chronicle of a spirited Italian-American New York family perfectly balances humor, tragedy, and pathos. Featuring Vincent D’Onofrio, Tracey Ullman, Lili Taylor, Michael Imperioli, Judith Malina, and others. Screening with Savoca’s 1982 short Renata.

Pressure

  • Horace Ové
  • 1975
  • U.K.
  • 125 minutes

Joint World Premiere of New Restoration

One of the most important British films of the 1970s and an enduringly potent document, Horace Ové’s fiction feature debut chronicles the experience of Tony, a young man caught between his parents’ submissiveness and his brother’s Black militancy.

Return to Reason: Short Films by Man Ray

  • Man Ray
  • 1923-1928
  • France
  • 76 minutes

North American Premiere of Restoration · Q&A with Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan on Oct. 8 & 10

Restored on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, Man Ray’s first foray into filmmaking, the wildly improvisational and unapologetically fragmentary Return to Reason, is here paired with three other newly restored early films by Ray and set to haunting and hypnotic new original music by SQÜRL (Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan). Preceded by Pier Paolo Pasolini – Agnès Varda – New York – 1967.

Un rêve plus long que la nuit

  • Niki de Saint Phalle
  • 1976
  • France
  • 82 minutes
  • French and Swiss German with English subtitles

North American Premiere of Restoration · Intro with Arielle de Saint Phalle & Laura Duke Condominas on Oct. 3 & 7

In her second feature (and her first solo feature), the multidisciplinary artist Niki de Saint Phalle pursues her own take on the fairy tale and the result is a visionary exploration of female desire that unfurls according to the logic of dreams and poetry.

La Roue

  • Abel Gance
  • 1923
  • France
  • 426 minutes
One of silent cinema’s undeniable high-water marks, Abel Gance’s monumental work of psychological realism (about the doomed love of a railroad engineer for his adopted daughter) is at once a towering classic of early narrative cinema and a genuine formal experiment whose gambits shaped our understanding of film style.

The Stranger and the Fog

  • Bahram Beyzaie
  • 1974
  • Iran
  • 146 minutes
  • Farsi with English subtitles

North American Premiere of Restoration

A visually ravishing work that invents its own mythology in order to critique the social conditions of 1970s Iran, Bahram Beyzaie’s visionary drama (banned for decades following the revolution) is one of the most mysterious and magisterial films of the Iranian New Wave.

The Strangler

  • Paul Vecchiali
  • 1970
  • France
  • 95 minutes
  • French with English subtitles
The psychological thriller receives one of its most distinctive treatments in Paul Vecchiali’s third feature, a melancholic meditation on isolation and compulsion about a serial killer who murders unhappy-looking women and the obsessed detective who’s trying to catch him.

Tell Me a Riddle

  • Lee Grant
  • 1980
  • U.S.
  • 93 minutes

Q&A with Lee Grant, Brooke Adams, and Fred Murphy on Sept. 30

Lee Grant’s theatrical directorial debut is a moving meditation on aging and coming to terms with the past, about an elderly couple (Melvyn Douglas and Lila Kedrova) who set out on a pilgrimage to visit their children and grandchildren. Screening with Grant’s 1976 short, The Stronger.

The Woman on the Beach

  • Jean Renoir
  • 1947
  • U.S.
  • 35mm
  • 71 minutes

North American Premiere of Restoration • Presented on 35mm

In Renoir’s beguiling, almost ghostly last film in Hollywood, a PTSD-riddled man (Robert Ryan) meets a woman (Joan Bennett) on a deserted beach, and soon their mutual lust comes to overwhelm each of their nightmarish interactions.

Talks

Talks features in-depth conversations with filmmakers, critics, curators, and more.

NYFF Talks are presented by:


Free Talk: The 2023 Amos Vogel Lecture – Paul B. Preciado

  • 90 minutes

Free and open to the public!

For the third edition of the Amos Vogel Lecture, we are proud to welcome writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado, whose debut feature, Orlando, My Political Biography, screens in the NYFF61 Main Slate.

Deep Focus

In-depth dialogues with festival filmmakers and their creative collaborators.

Free Talk: Todd Haynes

  • 60 minutes

Free and open to the public!

Todd Haynes (NYFF61 Opening Night selection May December) will present and discuss the U.S. premiere of Image Book, a short film by Haynes exploring the production of his new film, made as part of a commission by the Centre Pompidou for its collection “Où en êtes-vous?

Free Talk: Nikki Giovanni

  • 60 minutes

Free and open to the public!

Legendary poet and activist Nikki Giovanni (NYFF61 Spotlight selection Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Story) breaks down her writing practice, her creative and political trajectories, and the experience of transmuting her life story into cinema.

Free Talk: Sandra Hüller

  • 60 minutes

Free and open to the public!

Europe’s leading—and perhaps most fearless—actress, Sandra Hüller (NYFF61 Main Slate selections Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest) discusses her illustrious career and the making of her latest bravura performances.

Free Talk: Catherine Breillat

  • 60 minutes

Free and open to the public!

French auteur Catherine Breillat (NYFF61 Main Slate selection Last Summer) explores her rigorous formal approach, the abiding thematic interests of her filmography, and her unflinching commitment to probing the repressed tensions that underlie myriad cultural taboos in this extended conversation.

Crosscuts

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

Free Talk: Wang Bing & Eduardo Williams

  • 60 minutes

Free and open to the public!

This talk brings together two masterful chroniclers of the present, Wang Bing (NYFF61 Main Slate selection Youth (Spring) and Eduardo Williams (NYFF61 Currents selection The Human Surge 3, for a conversation about their form-bending play with the cinematic medium and their radical approaches to time and space.

Free Talk: Joanna Arnow & Nancy Savoca

  • 60 minutes

Free and open to the public!

Nancy Savoca (NYFF61 Revivals selections Household Saints and Renata) and Joanna Arnow (NYFF61 Currents selection The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed) discuss their respective experiences navigating the New York indie filmmaking landscape across decades, their wry approaches to dialogue, direction, and mise-en-scène, and more.

Free Talk: Sandra Adair & Jonathan Alberts

  • 60 minutes

Free and open to the public!

Join Sandra Adair (NYFF61 Spotlight selection Hit Man) and Jonathan Alberts (NYFF61 Main Slate selection All of Us Strangers)—both members of American Cinema Editors—for an in-depth conversation about the craft and profession of film editing and the complex ways in which the editor’s creative labor comes into contact with the work of cinematographers, actors, and others.

Free Talk: Annie Baker & Raven Jackson

  • 60 minutes

Free and open to the public!

NYFF61 Main Slate filmmakers Annie Baker (Janet Planet) and Raven Jackson (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt) discuss the evolution of their artistry from the page or the stage to the screen, and their respective approaches to crafting idiosyncratic women characters.

Roundtables

Panel discussions that connect the festival to the themes of the moment.

Film Comment Live: From the Picket Line

  • 60 minutes

Free and open to the public!

Moderated by Film Comment editor Devika Girish and FC contributor Madeline Whittle, this roundtable will bring together representatives from WGA East and SAG-AFTRA to discuss this year’s historic actors’ and writers’ strikes and the history of labor organizing in the film industry.

Film Comment Live: Trust Issues

  • 90 minutes

Free and open to the public!

Join Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute, World Records editor Jason Fox, and NYFF61 filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho (Pictures of Ghosts), Rosine Mbakam (Mambar Pierrette), and Frederick Wiseman (Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros) for a discussion about the slippery nature of truth on the screen.

Film Comment Live: Festival Report

  • 60 minutes

Free and open to the public!

Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are joined by critics Molly Haskell, Adam Nayman, and Kelli Weston for a spirited wrap-up discussion about the movies they’ve seen in the NYFF lineup.

Special Events

Cinephile Game Night: NYFF61 Edition

  • 60 minutes

Free and open to the public!

Featuring a mix of movie trivia and other popular Cinephile games like Six Degrees, Filmography, and Inglorious Basterd, Cinephile Game Night is a trivia night like no other.

IndieWire Presents: Screen Talk Live

  • 60 minutes

Free and open to the public!

Join IndieWire’s Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson and Deputy Managing Editor Ryan Lattanzio for a special live edition of Screen Talk, the independent news site’s weekly podcast.