Main Slate is the core of the program, a selection of the most exceptional new films from around the world.
Opening Night · North American Premiere • Todd Haynes Q&A on Sept. 29 at 6pm screening and intro at 9pm screening
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.
Centerpiece · North American Premiere • Q&A with Sofia Coppola, Cailee Spaeny, and Jacob Elordi on Oct. 6 at 6pm and Extended Intro at 9pm screening
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.
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.
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.
Q&A with Raven Jackson on Oct. 9 & 10
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.
Q&A with Andrew Haigh on Oct. 1 & 2
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.
Q&A with Justine Triet on Oct. 7 & 8
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.
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.
Q&A with Alice Rohrwacher on Oct. 7 & 8
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.
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.
U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Rodrigo Moreno on Oct. 11 & 12
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.
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.
North American Premiere • Q&A with Lisandro Alonso 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.
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.
Intro by Alma Pöysti on Oct. 1
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Q&A with Annie Baker on Oct. 8 & 9
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.
U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Marco Bellocchio on Oct. 8
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.
U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Catherine Breillat and Lea 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
