(Clockwise from left: Payal Kapadia, RaMell Ross, and Jia Zhangke)

New York, NY (Sept. 24, 2024) – Film at Lincoln Center announces Talks for the 62nd New York Film Festival (September 27–October 14). The NYFF62 Talks program complements the film selection with a robust lineup of lively and in-depth conversations among NYFF artists and audiences. NYFF62 Talks are presented by HBO®.

The career-spanning Deep Focus talks include a conversation between RaMell Ross, director of this year’s Opening Night Selection Nickel Boys, and Barry Jenkins, director of The Underground Railroad, sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter; an in-depth discussion about the making of No Other Land and the role of documentary in the face of political violence with directors Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor; and a special conversation with author Sigrid Nunez, whose novels have inspired two films in the NYFF62 lineup: The Friend and Centerpiece selection The Room Next Door.

The fourth edition of the Amos Vogel Lecture will be delivered by legendary auteur Jia Zhangke, whose latest feature, Caught by the Tides, screens in the Main Slate. The Amos Vogel Lecture is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Crosscuts conversations focus on unique and inspired pairings of filmmakers and artists across NYFF sections, genres, and styles. This year’s lineup includes talks between Zeinabu irene Davis (Revivals selection Compensation) and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (Currents selection The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire), who will discuss their debut features, both radical love stories shaped by the social and political conditions of the African diaspora in Europe and North America; Alex Ross Perry (Pavements) and Andrei Ujică (TWST / Things We Said Today), for a wide-ranging dialogue about musical fandoms across generations, cultural memory, and mythmaking; Miguel Gomes (Grand Tour) and Payal Kapadia (All We Imagine as Light), for an exchange about their artful uses of docufiction and play with past and present; and Julia Loktev (My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow) and Roberto Minervini (The Damned), for a discussion about crafting cinematic depictions of war, among other topics.

Two special NYFF Roundtables include: New Asian Auteurs, which brings together three newcomers to the NYFF Main Slate: filmmakers Neo Sora (Happyend), Trương Minh Quý (Việt and Nam), and Yeo Siew Hua (Stranger Eyes) for a conversation about their careers, their inspirations, and the new directions of Asian cinema today; and On exergue – on documenta 14, a panel about the making of the 14-hour-long Currents selection and its subject, the 2017 edition of the documenta quadrennial, and the ethical and material complexities involved in conceiving any major international art showcase today.

Looking for a chance to win tickets to sold-out NYFF62 screenings? Test your movie knowledge at Cinephile Game Night, returning to NYFF for its third year, hosted by Cinephile: A Card Game creator Cory Everett and Cinephile Game Night co-hosts Jordan Raup, Conor O’Donnell, and Dan Mecca. These free events are sponsored by The Travel Agency: A Cannabis Store.

Film Comment, FLC’s award-winning publication, will lead two conversations recorded live for the Film Comment Podcast: Collective Protagonists, moderated by Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute, which will bring together Rob Nilsson and John Hanson, directors of Revivals selection Northern Lights, and Brett Story and Stephen Maing, directors of Spotlight selection Union, for a discussion on subverting the myth of the individual hero and making films about people power; and the annual Festival Report, a spirited critics’ roundtable on the highs and lows of the NYFF62 slate. The Festival Report will also include a reception in honor of the New York Film Critics’ Circle and feature NYFCC members Bilge Ebiri and Lovia Gyarkye as panelists.

NYFF will also host IndieWire Presents: Screen Talk Live with Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson and Deputy Managing Editor Ryan Lattanzio for a special live edition of the independent news site’s weekly podcast. 

Talks are organized by Devika Girish and Madeline Whittle, in collaboration with Dennis Lim.

All Talks and Game Nights are free and will be held in the Amphitheater at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, with the exception of the Amos Vogel Lecture by Jia Zhangke. Free tickets for NYFF62 Talks will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis beginning one hour prior to each event at the box office. Tickets are limited to one per person, subject to availability. The Amos Vogel Lecture will be held in the Walter Reade Theater; tickets are $10 for FLC Members and $15 for the General Public, and are on sale now. For those unable to attend, select recordings from these events will be available online on the Film at Lincoln Center Podcast and Film at Lincoln Center’s YouTube channel at a later date. 

NYFF62 is generously supported by Co-Chairs Almudena and Pablo Legorreta, Imelda and Peter Sobiloff, and Nanna and Dan Stern; and Vice-Chairs Susannah Gray and John Lyons, and Tara Kelleher and Roy Zuckerberg.

The New York Film Festival also offers festival screenings in four partner venues across the city: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) (Brooklyn), The Bronx Museum (Bronx), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens).

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival is an annual showcase of the best in world cinema. Since 1963, NYFF has shaped film culture and continues an enduring tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The 62nd edition of the festival takes place September 27–October 14, 2024. Tickets are available now.

TALKS DESCRIPTIONS
The Amphitheater is located in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (144 W 65th Street).
The Walter Reade Theater is located at 165 W 65th Street.

THE 2024 AMOS VOGEL LECTURE: Jia Zhangke
2021 marked the birth centenary of Amos Vogel, the pioneering film programmer, author, and co-founder of the New York Film Festival. To celebrate this occasion and honor Vogel’s path-blazing legacy, NYFF inaugurated the Amos Vogel Lecture, to be delivered annually by an artist or thinker who embodies the subversive spirit of Vogel’s cinephilia and brings it into conversation with the present and future of cinema. 

For the fourth edition of the Amos Vogel Lecture, we are proud to welcome legendary auteur Jia Zhangke, whose latest feature, Caught by the Tides, screens in the NYFF62 Main Slate. In a career of nearly three decades, Jia has built a filmography that is relentlessly probing and experimental in form—spanning shorts, features, documentaries, realist fiction, and genre thrillers—while maintaining a consistent and humane focus on how people are swept up in the vicissitudes of China’s (and the world’s) history and politics. His latest combines footage shot by him over 23 years (including scenes and outtakes from past films) and distills his abiding interests in questions of modernity, urbanity, and change into a shimmering, elusive narrative centered on a woman played by Zhao Tao, Jia’s muse and partner. Caught by the Tides culminates an oeuvre that exemplifies Vogel’s curiosity, internationalism, and close attention to the intersections of people, cinema, and history. This lecture will be interpreted by Vincent Cheng. The Amos Vogel Lecture featuring Rolex Testimonee Jia Zhangke is presented in partnership with the watchmaking brand.

Tuesday, October 8, 5:00pm, Walter Reade Theater

DEEP FOCUS
In-depth dialogues with festival filmmakers and their creative collaborators

RaMell Ross, in Conversation with Barry Jenkins
Director RaMell Ross has crafted something of a new American masterpiece with NYFF62 Opening Night selection Nickel Boys. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Black teens at a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida (inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys), Nickel Boys brings Ross’s extraordinary felicity and radical sense of perspective as a photographer of Black life in the South to a historical fiction that is as much about the trauma of racism in the U.S. as about the politics of subjectivity and spectatorship. We are thrilled to welcome RaMell Ross for a wide-ranging conversation with Barry Jenkins—another masterful filmmaker known for his visionary and lyrical approach to depicting Blackness and the American South onscreen, including in his own Colson Whitehead adaptation, 2020’s The Underground Railroad series. Sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter.
Sunday, September 29, 6:00pm, Amphitheater

No Other Land
Since its premiere at the Berlinale in February, the remarkable documentary No Other Land, directed by a collective of four Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, has cut a blazing, award-winning trail through festivals worldwide, not least for its startling timeliness. Depicting the rare friendship and joint struggle of two young journalists—Basel Adra, a Palestinian Arab resident of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli Jew from Jerusalem—as they document and oppose the expulsion of the residents of Masafer Yatta by Israeli forces, No Other Land is a testament to the Palestinian people’s long history of resistance to Israeli occupation, and to the power and possibility of solidarity even in the most unexpected and difficult circumstances. We are thrilled to invite directors Adra, Abraham, and Rachel Szor for an in-depth conversation about the making of the movie, shooting and editing a film in volatile and dangerous circumstances, and the role of documentary in the face of political violence.
Tuesday, October 1, 6:00pm, Amphitheater

Sigrid Nunez
With her novels The Friend (winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction) and What Are You Going Through, New York–based author Sigrid Nunez has supplied the extraordinarily rich source material for not one, but two films in the NYFF62 lineup: Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Spotlight standout The Friend, starring Naomi Watts as a writer mourning the complicated loss of a beloved mentor; and Pedro Almodóvar’s Centerpiece selection The Room Next Door, which follows another writer (Julianne Moore) as she reconnects with a friend from her past (Tilda Swinton) who approaches her with an unusual request. We’re honored to welcome Nunez for a special conversation about her prismatic literary meditations on grief, friendship, and the passage of time; the experience of seeing her creative work adapted into other mediums; and cinema’s alchemical capacity to both translate and transform a novel’s meaning. Moderated by A.O. Scott, critic at large for The New York Times Book Review.
Saturday, October 5, 1:00pm, Amphitheater

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

Alex Ross Perry & Andrei Ujică
The familiar forms and conventions of the music documentary are breezily dispensed with in two singular, bracingly inventive selections from this year’s Spotlight section. Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s shape-shifting account of 1990s indie rock fixture Pavement, takes a cheeky and formally audacious approach to narrating their artistic legacy and pop-cultural footprint, while TWST / Things We Said Today is an obliquely melancholic and surprisingly tender inquiry into the icons and textures of 1960s Beatlemania from veteran nonfiction auteur Andrei Ujică. We’re excited to bring together Ross Perry and Ujică for a wide-ranging conversation about musical fandoms across generations, cultural memory and mythmaking, and how experiments with documentary cinema can produce new ways of understanding archival materials and affective histories. Moderated by writer and editor Vikram Murthi.
Thursday, October 3, 6:00pm, Amphitheater

Zeinabu irene Davis & Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Feature-filmmaking debuts made 25 years apart, Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (NYFF62 Revivals) and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (NYFF62 Currents) share a number of remarkable thematic affinities. Taking inspiration from works of poetry to eloquently dramatize questions of language, self-expression, and creative agency, both films play ingeniously with the frameworks of genre and form to tell radical love stories that unfold across time and space, marked by the cultural, social, and political forces that have defined the African diaspora in Europe and North America. Join Davis and Hunt-Ehrlich for a far-reaching conversation about the influences and inspirations behind their debut features, both hauntingly lyrical portraits of brilliant Black women navigating personal relationships and political commitments with unflinching grace and fierce conviction.
Sunday, October 6, 6:00pm, Amphitheater

Miguel Gomes & Payal Kapadia
When Payal Kapadia won a historic Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her second feature, All We Imagine as Light (the first Indian film to play in competition at Cannes in 30 years), she paid homage to another Cannes prizewinner whose work has deeply influenced her: Miguel Gomes, whose Grand Tour won the award for Best Director. The resonances between their films go beyond Cannes laurels and directorial inspiration. All We Imagine as Light traces the stories of three women in present-day Mumbai, while Grand Tour follows a British colonial officer and his fiancée as they traipse across various East Asian cities in 1918—but both are city symphonies that center love stories within broader political contexts and are driven by the pulsings of female desire. This discussion will bring Kapadia and Gomes—both practitioners of artful docufiction—together for a conversation about their influences, aspirations, and methods. Moderated by Devika Girish.
Wednesday, October 9, 4:00pm, Amphitheater

Julia Loktev & Roberto Minervini
NYFF62 Main Slate selections The Damned, by Roberto Minervini—a naturalistic period drama set on a remote western frontier during the American Civil War—and My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, by Julia Loktev—a sweeping, urgent vérité documentary that follows an ensemble of dissident journalists in Russia in the months leading up to the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—represent major new entries in their respective directors’ impressively rigorous bodies of work. Each film forges a vivid and extraordinarily detailed portrait of the ways in which geopolitical forces shape human relationships, vocations, and attitudes on an intimate scale. We’re pleased to host Minervini and Loktev for a conversation about crafting cinematic depictions of war, whether imminent or long-past; the experience of moving between narrative and documentary modes of storytelling; and their perspectives as immigrant filmmakers working in (and outside of) the United States. Moderated by Madeline Whittle.
Wednesday, October 9, 6:00pm, Amphitheater

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

New Asian Auteurs
Three newcomers to the NYFF Main Slate—Neo Sora (Happyend), Trương Minh Quý (Việt and Nam), and Yeo Siew Hua (Stranger Eyes)—represent an emerging generation of auteurs from Asia. Spanning Japan, Vietnam, and Singapore, their films wrestle with the political histories and futures of the continent—including entrenched legacies of imperialism and fast-encroaching realities of authoritarianism and surveillance—to craft radical new cinematic vocabularies, while also drawing upon the work of the masters who’ve come before them. This roundtable will bring together the three directors for a conversation about their careers, their inspirations, and the new directions of Asian cinema today. Moderated by Kevin Lozano, Associate Literary Editor at The Nation.
Monday, September 30, 4:30pm, Amphitheater

On exergue – on documenta 14
Reflecting the ambitions of its subject, Dimitris Athiridis’s exergue – on documenta 14 plays out over 14 hours to trace the making and near-breaking of the historic German quadrennial’s 14th edition, through the innumerable barriers and controversies faced by Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk and his curatorial team. As a gesture toward de-centering Europe’s art world from the North, Szymczyk proposed the exhibition take place both in its original home of Kassel, Germany and in Athens, Greece—all during Europe’s mid-2010s financial crises. Athiridis observes the team and contributing artists as they face off against politicians, bureaucrats, handlers, critics, and other adversaries in their efforts to make progress with the project. This panel brings together Athiridis, Szymczyk, D14 artist Naeem Mohaiemen, and curator and writer Serubiri Moses in a conversation exploring the making of exergue and D14; how its portrayal unwittingly signaled major political, financial, and cultural policy shifts in Europe; and the ethical and material complexities involved in conceiving any major international art showcase today. Moderated by curator and NYFF Currents Programmer Rachael Rakes.
Wednesday, October 2, 5:00pm, Amphitheater

FILM COMMENT LIVE
Critical conversations about themes of note in the NYFF lineup, hosted by the editors of the eminent magazine

Film Comment Live: Collective Protagonists
Narrative accounts of movements, whether in literature or cinema, often fetishize the myth of the charismatic hero who single-handedly drives change. In fact, the true protagonists of history are almost always collectives: groups of people who come together to achieve great things. Two films in this year’s NYFF lineup grapple beautifully with the challenge of narrating stories of movements without giving in to the allure of the heroic individual protagonist. Rob Nilsson and John Hanson’s Revivals selection Northern Lights (1978) stages the founding of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota, formed in the mid-1910s by Dakotan farmers, in the backdrop of a love story, using a dramatized approach to explore the tensions between personal desires and collective commitments. Made more than four decades later, Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s documentary Union (2024), screening in Spotlight, takes on another chapter in the history of the American labor struggle: the 2020 unionization drive of the Amazon plant in Staten Island, and the challenges of an autonomous movement that requires leadership but is rooted in democracy. Moderated by Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute, this panel will bring together Nilsson, Hanson, Story, and Maing for a discussion on the practical, formal, and political considerations of making films about people power.
Saturday, October 5, 7:00pm, Amphitheater

Film Comment Live: Festival Report
Every year, as the festival draws to a close, a group of critics gathers together for a spirited wrap-up discussion with Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute about the movies they’ve seen in the NYFF lineup. This year, this end-of-fest ritual will take place in collaboration with the New York Film Critics Circle, which is coming up on its 90th anniversary in 2025. NYFCC members Bilge Ebiri and Lovia Gyarkye will join for the discussion, covering their highlights from the NYFF62 selection, and the panel will be followed by a reception celebrating the NYFCC’s many decades of championing a robust community and culture of film criticism in New York.
Friday, October 11, 7:00pm, Amphitheater

SPECIAL EVENTS
Cinephile Game Night: NYFF62 Edition
The New York Film Festival is proud to welcome back Cinephile for our third year of Cinephile Game Night events during the festival at the EBM Amphitheater! 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. Featuring Cinephile: A Card Game creator Cory Everett and Cinephile Game Night co-hosts Jordan Raup, Conor O’Donnell, and Dan Mecca, along with surprise special guests, the events will feature multiple trivia rounds including NYFF history and beyond, with chances to win tickets to this year’s edition and more prizes. Come meet and mingle with your fellow movie buffs for an evening of festival fun. There’s no need to bring Cinephile to participate––only your movie-loving brain is required. Sponsored by The Travel Agency: A Cannabis Store.
Saturday, September 28, 7:30pm, Amphitheater – RSVP
Sunday, September 29, 8:00pm, Amphitheater – RSVP
Monday, September 30, 7:30pm, Amphitheater – RSVP
Tuesday, October 8, 7:30pm, Amphitheater – RSVP 

IndieWire Presents: Screen Talk Live
Join IndieWire’s Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson and Deputy Film Editor Ryan Lattanzio for a special live edition of Screen Talk, the independent news site’s weekly podcast. In what promises to be an animated conversation, the hosts will discuss the fall film festival season, new releases, awards buzz, and industry news.
Monday, October 7, 4:00pm, Amphitheater

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER
Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) is a nonprofit organization that celebrates cinema as an essential art form and fosters a vibrant home for film culture to thrive. FLC presents premier film festivals, retrospectives, new releases, and restorations year-round in state-of-the-art theaters at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. FLC offers audiences the opportunity to discover works from established and emerging directors from around the world with a passionate community of film lovers at marquee events including the New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films.  

Founded in 1969, FLC is committed to preserving the excitement of the theatrical experience for all audiences, advancing high-quality film journalism through the publication of Film Comment, cultivating the next generation of film industry professionals through our FLC Academies, and enriching the lives of all who engage with our programs. 

Support for the New York Film Festival is generously provided by Official Partners HBO® and The New York Times; Contributing Partners Netflix, BritBox, Criterion, Bloomberg Philanthropies, MUBI, Dolby, the School of Visual Arts BFA Film, The Travel Agency: A Cannabis Store, New York Film Academy, Manhattan Portage, and Unifrance; Media Partners Variety, Deadline Hollywood, WABC-TV, The Hollywood Reporter, The WNET Group, IndieWire, The Envelope by the Los Angeles Times and IMDb. Additional support provided in part by the NYC’s Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. American Airlines is the Official Airline of Film at Lincoln Center. 

For more information, visit filmlinc.org and follow @TheNYFF on X and Instagram.

For press inquiries regarding Film at Lincoln Center, please contact:
John Kwiatkowski, Film at Lincoln Center, [email protected]
Eva Tooley, Film at Lincoln Center, [email protected]