FLC announces Winter/Spring 2021 virtual cinema lineup

New York Jewish Film Festival
Among the oldest and most influential Jewish film festivals worldwide, NYJFF each year presents the finest documentary, narrative, and short films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience. Co-presented with the Jewish Museum, the festival’s 2021 virtual lineup showcases 17 features and seven shorts, including the latest works by dynamic voices in international cinema and a brand-new restoration of Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1939 classic The Light Ahead. Read the full press release here.

Tribute to Sam Pollard
Veteran editor, producer, and director Sam Pollard is among cinema’s most dedicated chroniclers of the Black experience in America, moving freely across film and long-form television as well as narrative and documentary for the past four decades. From his collaborations with St. Clair Bourne, Henry Hampton, and Spike Lee to his own documentaries, his works explore complicated American figures and the extended aftershocks of racial inequality with clear-eyed resolve, inspired in their historical and moral urgency and notable for their journalistic thoroughness and cogent structure. This January, Film at Lincoln Center is pleased to celebrate Pollard’s ever-deepening body of work, occasioned by the release of his latest, the virtuosic documentary MLK/FBI (an NYFF58 selection).

Identifying Features
Fernanda Valadez, 2020, Mexico/Spain, 94m
Spanish with English subtitles
Middle-aged Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) has lost contact with her son after he took off with a friend from their city of Guanajuato to cross the border into the U.S., hopeful to find work. Desperate to find out what happened to him—and to know whether or not he’s even alive—she embarks on an ever-expanding and increasingly dangerous journey to discover the truth. At the same time, a young man named Miguel (David Illescas) has returned to Mexico after being deported from the U.S., and eventually his path converges with Magdalena’s. From this simple but urgent premise, director Fernanda Valadez has crafted a lyrical, suspenseful slow burn, constructed equally of moments of beauty and horror, and which leads to a startling, shattering conclusion. Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Audience and Screenplay Awards at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. A New Directors/New Films 2020 selection. A Kino Lorber release.

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
Lili Horvát, 2020, Hungary, 95m
Hungarian and English with English subtitles
Taking the final stanza of Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song” as its starting point, Lili Horvát’s second feature finds its mysterious love story in Budapest’s male-driven field of neurosurgery. Márta Vizy (played with magnetic aplomb by Natasa Stork) is a brilliant brain surgeon who returns to Hungary after spending some time in America and discovers that a doctor with whom she once shared a passionate affair claims never to have seen her before—and that her grip on reality might be compromised. Deftly pivoting between noir, romance, and cool realism, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is at once a clever reworking of genre tropes and an enigmatic meditation on the psychological unmooring of romantic yearning. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Mirror – New Restoration!
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974, Russia, 106m
Russian and Spanish with English subtitles
Andrei Tarkovsky’s fourth feature is perhaps the great director’s most personal and evocative work. It traverses three generations of a poet’s family in 20th-century Russia; his relationships with his wife, mother, and children and the society around him coalesce through events connected only by the interior logic of the poetic subconscious, yielding associations that both mystify and enthrall. Unified by Georgi Rerberg’s delicate lensing, Mirror employs radical shifts in both texture and color, abstracting the elemental minutiae of everyday life (like waves of air spreading across a field or spilled milk pooling on a table) to conjure the nostalgic sensations of memory and an enigmatic feeling of being outside space and time. A Janus Films release.

New York African Film Festival
Film at Lincoln Center and African Film Festival, Inc. will present the 28th New York African Film Festival under the banner “Notes From Home: Recurring Dreams & Women’s Voices.” The programs in this edition showcase the many different “types” of Africa, reflecting the dynamism of Africanness. The selected works explore the ways in which we are all connected in cyclical dreams of hope and change, and also highlight the voices of the women who have been strong catalysts in sparking transformation.

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema
Rendez-Vous with French Cinema returns in March with another edition that exemplifies the variety and vitality of contemporary French filmmaking. The films on display, by emerging talents and established masters, raise ideas both topical and eternal, and many take audiences to entirely unexpected places. Highlights from recent Rendez-Vous with French Cinema editions include Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama, Julia Ducournau’s Raw, Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties, Justine Triet’s Victoria, and Mathieu Amalric’s Barbara. Co-presented with UniFrance Films, the 26th edition of Rendez-Vous will demonstrate that the landscape of French cinema is as fertile, inspiring, and distinct as ever.