FSLC Announces Summer 2018 New Releases & Revivals

The lineup of new releases and revivals for the 2018 summer season at the Film Society of Lincoln Center has been announced, featuring João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa’s Araby (New Directors/New Films 2017) and Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance (New Directors/New Films 2018), as well as Emmanuel Finkiel’s Memoir of War and Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s A Paris Education, both 2018 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema selections. Revivals include Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1966 masterpiece Andrei Rublev and Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig (1973), screening in a new 35mm print as part of our retrospective of the Italian titan. Rounding out the slate are three documentaries: Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s Love, Cecil; Stephen Schible’s Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda; and Lauren Greenfield’s Generation Wealth. Please see below for the complete list of films with run dates and synopses.

Opening June 22

[Exclusive!]
Araby / Arábia
João Dumans & Affonso Uchoa, Brazil, 2017, 97m
Portuguese with English subtitles
Araby begins by observing the day-to-day of Andre, a teenager who lives in an industrial area in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. After a local factory worker, Cristiano, has an accident on the job, he leaves behind a handwritten journal, which the boy proceeds to read with relish. The film shifts into road-movie mode to recount the story of Cristiano, an ex-con and eternal optimist who journeys across Brazil in search of work, enduring no shortage of economic hardship but gaining an equal amount of self-knowledge. Invigorating and ever surprising, Araby is a humanist work of remarkable poise and maturity. A 2017 New Directors/New Films selection. A Grasshopper Film release.

[Exclusive!]
Ludwig
Luchino Visconti, Italy/France/West Germany, 1973, 35mm, 238m
Italian, German, and French with English subtitles
Visconti’s remarkable film about the life and death of Bavaria’s King Ludwig II is an opulent, complex study of romantic ambition in the era of 19th century decadence. Helmut Berger plays the title role as a loner tormented by unrequited love for his cousin, Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Romy Schneider), an obsession with the music of Richard Wagner, and excessive state-funded expenditures. Visconti’s lavishly composed portrait of one of history’s most complicated figures is as much an operatic descent into madness as a requiem to a monarch at the dawn of the modern republican world. An AGFA release. Showing as part of FSLC’s Visconti retrospective. New 35mm print made by Luce Cinecittà.

Opening June 29

[Exclusive!]
Love, Cecil
Lisa Immordino Vreeland, USA, 2017, 98m
British-born Cecil Beaton was perhaps best known for his production design on Oscar-winning films like Gigi and My Fair Lady, but his talents extended far beyond cinema. From Beaton’s World War II photography work for Vogue to his relationship with the Royal Family and his alleged affair with Greta Garbo, director Lisa Immordino Vreeland (Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict) uses previously unseen footage and stills—with excerpts from Beaton’s diary, narrated by Rupert Everett—to illuminate her creative subject’s ambition and inimitable sense of reinvention. A Zeitgeist Films Release in Association with Kino Lorber.

Opening July 6

[Exclusive!]
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
Stephen Schible, USA/Japan, 2017, 102m
English and Japanese with English subtitles
As composer, performer, producer, and environmentalist, few artists have as diverse a background as Ryuichi Sakamoto’s. His work has spanned genres and forms: from pioneering electronic music as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra to crafting globally inspired rock albums, classical compositions, minimal and ambient music collaborations, and over thirty film scores. Following 2011’s Fukushima nuclear disaster and a cancer diagnosis three years later, Sakamoto’s haunting awareness of life crises leads to a resounding new masterpiece. Five years in the making, director Stephen Schible combines substantial footage from Sakamoto’s life and career to make this deep, intimate, and poised documentary of both the artist and his creative process. A MUBI release.

Opening July 20

Generation Wealth
Lauren Greenfield, USA, 2018, 106m
Lauren Greenfield follows her 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles with this extraordinary visual history of our growing obsession with wealth. Simultaneously photographic journey, memoir, and historical essay, Generation Wealth bears witness to the global boom–bust economy, the corrupted American Dream and the human costs of late stage capitalism, narcissism and greed. Through riveting first-person interviews, Greenfield’s journey starts in Los Angeles and spreads across America  and beyond, as she documents how we export the values of materialism, celebrity culture, and social status to every corner of the globe. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Opening August 17

Memoir of War / La douleur
Emmanuel Finkiel, France, 2017, 127m
French with English subtitles
Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical memoir—a heartrending reflection on wartime grief—receives a haunting and hypnotic adaptation. Mélanie Thierry, her face a transfixing canvas of emotion, plays the writer, a member of the Resistance living in Nazi-occupied Paris. Desperate for news of her husband, who has been arrested by the Germans, she enters into a high-risk game of psychological cat and mouse with a Nazi collaborator (Benoît Magimel). But as the months wear on without word of the man she loves, Marguerite must begin the process of confronting the unimaginable. Through subtly expressionistic images and voiceover passages of Duras’s writing, director Emmanuel Finkiel evokes the inner world of one of the 20th century’s most revolutionary writers. A 2018 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema selection. A Music Box Films release.

[Exclusive!]
Notes on an Appearance 
Ricky D’Ambrose, USA, 2018, 60m
Ricky D’Ambrose’s debut feature follows a quiet young man (Bingham Bryant) who mysteriously disappears soon after starting a new life in Brooklyn’s artistic circles. Distraught friends (including Keith Poulson and Tallie Medel) search for him with the help of notebooks, letters, postcards, and other tiny clues; meanwhile, a parallel story about an elusive and controversial philosopher provides a rather sinister backdrop to their pursuit. This dark, minimalist pseudo-detective tale offers plenty of humor and displays a distinctive aesthetic. Following a series of remarkable shorts, D’Ambrose has clearly defined himself as a talent to watch. A 2018 New Directors/New Films selection. A Grasshopper Film release.

Preceded by:
Six Cents in the Pocket
Ricky D’Ambrose, USA, 2015, 14m
This hypnotic work of contemporary cinematic modernism—something like Robert Bresson in Park Slope, but not exactly—concerns a young man apartment-sitting for friends as talk of a plane crash ominously lingers in the air. A NYFF53 selection.

Opening August 24

[Exclusive!]
Andrei Rublev
Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union, 1966, 205m
Russian, Italian, Tatar with English subtitles
Andrei Tarkovsky’s second film is this multifaceted retelling of the 15th-century icon painter, perhaps Russia’s first great artist, as he faces violence and cruelty throughout Medieval Russia and, eventually, a crisis of faith. Initially condemned by Russian authorities, who waited five years before giving it an official release, Tarkovsky’s masterpiece endures as a film unlike any other—a richly shot, elliptical meditation on representation and vision, as well as a profound testament to art made under a repressive regime. New digital restoration. A Janus Films release.

Opening August 31

[Exclusive!]
A Paris Education / Mes provinciales
Jean-Paul Civeyrac, France, 2018, 137m
French with English subtitles
Etienne (Andranic Manet), a serious and impressionable shaggy-haired young cinephile, leaves behind his steady girlfriend (Diane Rouxel) in Lyon to study film in Paris. Settling into a dingy flat with a rotating cast of roommates, he immerses himself in a bohemian world of artists, intellectuals, and fellow film geeks who excitedly share their passion for Bresson, Ford, and obscure Russian directors. It’s a seemingly idyllic life of the mind—until more complicated matters of the flesh, as well as jealous creativity, intrude. Shooting in timeless black and white and interweaving references to philosophy, music, and cinema—from Pascal to Mahler to Parajanov—unsung auteur Jean-Paul Civeyrac conjures a bittersweet ode to the heady days of student life. A 2018 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema selection. A Kino Lorber release.