THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER TO HOST
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: OPENING ACT
September 20 – 26

The week before the festival kicks off, revisit landmark films from international filmmakers whose newest works will be spotlighted in the upcoming 51st New York Film Festival

Includes works from the Coen Brothers, Claire Denis, Arnaud Desplechin, Lav Diaz, James Gray, Paul Greengrass, Spike Jonze, Hirokazu Kore-eda and more

New York, NY (August 27, 2013) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: OPENING ACT (September 20-26), a showcase of international films from the brightest names in contemporary world cinema, whose new titles will be spotlighted in the upcoming 51st New York Film Festival (kicking off on September 27). For the week leading up to Opening Night, audiences will have a rare chance to catch up and rediscover some of the finest previous work from these filmmakers.

“This year’s New York Film Festival lineup features both returning filmmakers and relative newcomers, with a collective body of work behind them that is formidable,” said Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Cinematheque Programming. “This series, which will continue as an annual event, gives some context to the diverse festival slate but is also an occasion for us to show a wide range of terrific movies, from modern classics to cult favorites to genuine rarities.”

Revelatory debuts by James Gray (LITTLE ODESSA) and Hirokazu Kore-eda (MABOROSI) highlight deeply personal familial relationships. Rarely screened documentaries include Jia Zhangke’s USELESS, a multi-angle meditation on the inner workings of contemporary China through its intricate clothing factories and Claude Lanzmann’s SOBIBOR, OCT. 14, 1943, 4 P.M. a detailed account from one man’s perspective of the uprising that took place at a Nazi extermination camp. Unconventional dramatic theater adaptations include Abdellatif Kechiche’s GAMES OF LOVE AND CHANCE and Arnaud Desplechin’s PLAYING ‘IN THE COMPANY OF MEN.’ Also on the bill are landmark, critically acclaimed films like Joel Coen’s MILLER’S CROSSING, Claire Denis’ BEAU TRAVAIL, Paul Greengrass’s BLOODY SUNDAY, Spike Jonze’s ADAPTATION, Tsai Ming-liang’s THE RIVER and more. From modern classics to elusive deep cuts, there’s something here for the festival veteran and the neophyte alike.

Tickets will go on sale on this Thursday, August 29. Single screening tickets are $13; $9 for students and seniors (62+); and $8 for Film Society members. A three-film package is $30; $24 for students and seniors (62+); and $21 for Film Society members. The package discount prices apply with the purchase of tickets to three films or more. Visit www.FilmLinc.com for complete film festival information. Stay tuned for more announcements on the upcoming 51st New York Film Festival, and check out up-to-date information, film listings and schedules at http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013 .

Films, Descriptions & Schedule

ADAPTATION (2002) 114 min
Director: Spike Jonze
Country: USA
“Do I have an original thought in my head?” Charlie Kaufman’s dizzying screenplay concerns, among other things, orchids, neurosis, detachment and passion, “Happy Together,” banana-nut muffins, and a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, who decides during a bout of intense writer’s block to write himself into his own script. Anchored by a go-for-broke comic performance from Nicolas Cage (as both Charlie and his goofball, fictional identical twin brother Donald) and visionary direction from the great Spike Jonze, Adaptation is one of the canonical on-screen depictions of the creative process, and one of the most imaginative American films of the new century.
Thursday, Sept. 26, 6:30pm
Spike Jonze’s HER is the Closing Night Gala Selection at this year’s NYFF
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/her

AT SEA (2007) 60 min
Director: Peter Hutton
Country: USA
Peter Hutton drew on his years of experience as a merchant seaman to create this large-scale, compressed epic, voted the best avant-garde film of the past decade in a 2011 Film Comment poll. Shot in a series of steady, meticulously composed takes, AT SEA follows a massive container ship from its construction in South Korea to its lifetime out on the water to its final dismantling in Bangladesh. Taken as a wordless critique of modern global capitalism, an elegiac reflection on the passing of time, or an exercise in pure sensory immersion, the film is an overwhelming experience, in keeping with its epigraph from Joseph Conrad: A man who is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea…
Screening with:
SKAGAFJÖRDUR (2004) 28 min
Director: Peter Hutton
Country: USA
Hutton’s 2004 short, filmed on the northern Icelandic coast, is a loving tribute to the filmmaker’s favorite nature photographers and landscape painters: a beautifully shot study of reflections and mirages, jagged mountaintops and wisps of smoke, thick horizontal strips of cloud and faint, vertical shafts of light.
Monday, Sept. 23, 7:00pm
Peter Hutton’s THREE LANDSCAPES screens at this year’s Views from the Avant-Garde during NYFF.

BEAU TRAVAIL (1999) 92 min
Director: Claire Denis
Country: France
Claire Denis’s loose retelling of Billy Budd, set among a troop of Foreign Legionnaires stationed in the Gulf of Djibouti, is one of her finest films, an elemental story of misplaced longing and frustrated desire. Under a scorching sun, shirtless young men exercise to the strains of Benjamin Britten under the watchful eye of Denis Lavant’s stone-faced officer Galoup, their obsessively ritualized movements simmering with barely suppressed violence. When a handsome recruit wins the favor of the regiment’s commander, cracks start to appear in Galoup’s fragile composure. In the tense, tightly disciplined atmosphere of military life, Denis found an ideal outlet for two career-long concerns: the quiet agony of repressing one’s emotions, and the terror of finally letting loose.
Friday, Sept. 20, 7:00pm
Claire Denis’s BASTARDS (Les Salauds) screens at this year’s NYFF.

http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/bastards

BLOODY SUNDAY (2002) 107 min
Director: Paul Greengrass
Countries: UK/Ireland
This critical breakthrough showcases Paul Greengrass’s signature ability to make the recent past seem viscerally present. The titular Sunday was January 30 1972, when a group of British troops massacred 14 unarmed civil rights marchers in the Northern Irish city of Derry. Greengrass limits his focus to the 24 hours surrounding the massacre, documenting the proceedings with an activist’s righteous anger, a historian’s sense for the politics of the period, a journalist’s attention to the relevant facts and, last but not least, a filmmaker’s eye for the visual texture of his chosen time and place. The result feels like watching history unfold in real time, an impression that’s not entirely inaccurate: of the film’s many extras, a handful marched on that Sunday themselves.
Thursday, Sept. 26, 9:00pm
Paul Greengrass’s CAPTAIN PHILLIPS is the Opening Night Gala Selection at this year’s NYFF.
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/captain-phillips

GAMES OF LOVE AND CHANCE (L’Esquive) (2003) 123 min
Director: Abdellatif Kechiche
Country: France
In Abdellatif Kechiche’s CĂ©sar-sweeping second feature, a group of foul-mouthed teens from the Paris banlieues act out their own romantic roundelay during a school production of Marivaux’s 18th-century comedy of manners Games of Love and Chance. Shy Krimo (Osman Elkharraz) loves sociable actress Lydia (Sara Forestier), but she has troubles of her own: fending off the jealous threats of a violent ex and the tough-love verbal jabs of an outspoken best friend. Kechiche gives a deft, nimble touch to the kids’ barbed exchanges, without ever letting us forget the social tensions and economic hardships threatening their fragile equilibrium.
Sunday, Sept. 22, 4:15pm
Abdellatif Kechiche’s BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR screens at this year’s NYFF.
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/blue-is-the-warmest-color

HESUS THE REVOLUTIONARY (Hesus, Rebolusyunaryo) (2002) 112 min
Director: Lav Diaz
Country: Philippines
Lav Diaz’s dystopian thriller—practically a short by the standards of this master of cinematic duration, clocking in at just under two hours—takes place in an eerily familiar near-future, full of graffitied buildings and plagued by guerilla warfare. In a Philippines kept under lockdown by a heavily contested military regime, poet-cum-freedom-fighter Hesus travels the country fleeing government authorities, daydreaming of a happier childhood, and struggling with his guilt over having carried out a brutal order from his revolutionary superior. An unusual foray into the genre filmmaking, Hesus the Revolutionary is still very much of a piece with Diaz’s subsequent work: a film of philosophical richness and barely muted anger.
Saturday, Sept. 21, 4:30pm
Lav Diaz’s NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY (Norte, Hanggannan ng Kasaysayan) screens at this year’s NYFF.

http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/norte-the-end-of-history

I CAN NO LONGER HEAR THE GUITAR (J’entends plus la guitar) (1991) 98 min
Director: Philippe Garrel
Country: France
Arguably Philippe Garrel’s masterpiece, I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar is a surpassingly delicate meditation on love, loss and the passage of time. As always, Garrel and his scenarist Marc Cholodenko are working in the realm of poetically refracted autobiography, one level away from psychodrama. The incandescent Johanna Ter Steege is the Nico figure and the late Benoit RĂ©gent is the Garrel stand-in, and their scenes together play like instants plucked from the past and preserved in crystalline form, under perfectly captured natural light (thanks to the great Caroline Champetier behind the camera). The guitar that is no longer heard, except in memory, belongs to the Velvet Underground, an echo of yesterday’s dreams. —Kent Jones, Film Comment
Wednesday, Sept. 25, 6:45pm
Philippe Garrel’s JEALOUSY (La Jalousie) screens at this year’s NYFF.

http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/jealousy

LITTLE ODESSA (1994) 98 min
Director: James Gray
Country: USA
James Gray was just a year out of film school when he shot this wrenching, deeply personal Brighton Beach-set crime drama about the slow implosion of a Russian-Jewish family. By the film’s release, he had developed a reputation as one of America’s most inventive genre filmmakers, earned the admiration of Claude Chabrol, and guided Tim Roth to a career-highlight performance as a hitman on the outs with his employers, struggling not to implicate his younger brother in his criminal life. Inspired in equal measure by the paintings of Edward Hopper and the elegiac earth-tones of New Hollywood, Little Odessa has a visual sensibility all its own, and confirmed Gray as a major new talent in world cinema.
Sunday, Sept. 22, 6:45pm
James Gray’s THE IMMIGRANT screens at this year’s NYFF.
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/the-immigrant

MABOROSI (1995) 109 min
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Country: Japan
One of Japan’s foremost contemporary filmmakers made his feature debut with this delicate portrait of loss and regeneration. Five years after a young wife and mother loses her husband in an unforeseen tragedy, she re-marries and moves to a small rural fishing village. She adapts gradually, but still finds herself subject to an ache she can’t soothe or name. Like Yasujiro Ozu before him, Hirokazu Kore-eda has a rare sensitivity to the place of individuals within the natural world, a cautious faith in the restorative powers of nature, family and romantic love, and an equally strong conviction, expressed with the lightest of touches, that some things can never be restored.
Tuesday, Sept. 24, 6:30pm
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON (Soshite Chichi ni Naru) screens at this year’s NYFF.
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/like-father-like-son-kore-eda

MILLER’S CROSSING (1990) 115 min
Director: Joel Coen
Country: USA
“Nothing more foolish than a man chasin’ his hat.” With this bleak, sometimes hilarious Prohibition-era noir—their third feature—the Coen Brothers secured their reputation among the most distinctive voices in American movies. Rich in period detail, rapid-fire quips, betrayals, shifting alliances, tommy guns, and, yes, hats, the film also features career-highlight turns from John Turturro as a sniveling informant and Marcia Gay Harden as a jaded gangster’s moll, as well as an unforgettable “Danny Boy”-scored shootout. Miller’s Crossing is one of the Brothers’ finest moments, and a high point of the ’90s gangster film revival.
Sunday, Sept. 22, 9:00pm
Joel & Ethan Coen’s INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS screens at this year’s NYFF.
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/inside-llewyn-davis

NIGHT AND DAY (2008) 144 min
Director: Hong Sang-soo
Country: South Korea
A successful painter facing pot possession charges flees his sleepy Korean home for the streets of Paris in Hong Sang-Soo’s ambling portrait of mid-life male discombobulation. A run-in with an old flame, now unhappily married, a series of tearful phone calls to the wife back home, a cautious affair with a young art student, a visit to a church, brief stirrings of lust and affection and homesickness and regret—Hong captures it all with effortless grace and calm matter-of-factness, until a late-film swerve into fantasy caps the whole thing off with a mischievous question mark.
Friday, Sept. 20, 9:00pm
Hong Sang-soo’s NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON (Nugu-ui ttal-do anin Haewon) screens at this year’s NYFF.
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/nobodys-daughter-haewon

PLAYING ‘IN THE COMPANY OF MEN’ (2003) 121 min
Director: Arnaud Desplechin
Country: France
The celebrated playwright Edward Bond wrote In the Company of Men (no relation to Neil Labute’s film of the same title) at the height of his disgust over modern capitalist culture: a young businessman goes to ruin trying to outmaneuver his arms-manufacturer father. Arnaud Desplechin did for Bond’s play what Louis Malle did for Uncle Vanya: the dramatic action itself, shot with a hyperactive handheld camera, alternates with footage of the actors auditioning, rehearsing, and gearing up to perform. Desplechin locates Bond in a high-tragedy tradition stretching from Sophocles to Shakespeare: at one point, deciding the play lacks enough female roles, the cast splice in one of Ophelia’s scenes from Hamlet.
Wednesday, Sept. 25, 9:00pm
Arnaud Desplechin’s JIMMY P: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN screens at this year’s NYFF.
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/jimmy-p-psychotherapy-of-a-plains-indian

PULSE (2001) 118 min
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
With this slow-burn slice of supernatural horror, Kiyoshi Kurosawa took a now-familiar premise—ghosts making contact with the living through computer monitors and laptop screens—and spun it into an unsettling reflection on isolation, impotence and loss. Kurosawa eschews shock effects for something stealthier, keeping his audience always a little in the dark, playing on their nerves with cryptic signals and impeccable sound design. If the horror film has traditionally appealed to our fear of death, Pulse taps into an even deeper fear: that of, in the film’s words, being quietly trapped in our own loneliness forever.
Saturday, Sept. 21, 9:00pm
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s REAL screens at this year’s NYFF.
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/real

THE RIVER (1997) 115 min
Director: Tsai Ming-liang
Country: Taiwan
After spontaneously agreeing to play a drowned corpse in a film, a young man (Lee Kang-sheng) develops chronic, inexplicable neck pain. Meanwhile, his mother embarks on an affair with a pornographer, his father spends free evenings pursuing chance sexual encounters at a local bathhouse, and the family’s shared apartment keeps suffering from mysterious plumbing issues… Tsai Ming-Liang’s third feature is at once overtly metaphorical and deeply committed to the ebb and flow of everyday life: a film about individuals in crisis that builds patiently to a devastating emotional climax.
Tuesday, Sept. 24, 9:00pm
Tsai Ming-liang’s STRAY DOGS (Jiao You) screens at this year’s NYFF.
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/stray-dogs

SOBIBOR, OCT. 14, 1943, 4 P.M. (2001) 95 min
Director: Claude Lanzmann
Country: France
Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m. is comprised primarily of an interview Lanzmann conducted in 1979 with a Holocaust survivor named Yehuda Lerner about the uprising at Sobibor, a Nazi extermination camp in eastern Poland, the only successful Jewish-prisoner insurrection of the war. This film isn’t just an epilogue to Shoah, it’s a rebuttal to the dominant mythology of Jewish acquiescence and martyrdom, and as such, a critique of turning history into the comforts of fiction. It’s historiography with a vengeance. —Manohla Dargis, Film Comment, July/August 2001
Sunday, Sept. 22, 2:00pm
Claude Lanzmann’s THE LAST OF THE UNJUST (Le Dernier des injustes) screens at this year’s NYFF.
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/the-last-of-the-unjust-le-dernier-des-injustes

USELESS (2007) 81 min
Director: Jia Zhangke
Country: China
The second documentary feature by acclaimed director Jia Zhangke (Platform, The World) is a three-part, multi-angle reflection on China’s clothing industry. A group of women sits behind sewing machines in a fluorescent-lit garment factory and struggle to make it to the lunch hall through an inexplicably locked gate. A haut couture designer develops a new line, “Useless,” in response to her country’s recent record of bottom-line-motivated mass-production. And, in the rural province of Shanxi, a traditional tailor gives up his trade to become a miner. Their stories suggest a modern China in flux, struggling to close a series of ever-widening internal divisions: between its cities and its villages; its artists and its workers; its recent history and its distant past.
Saturday, Sept. 21, 7:00pm
Jia Zhangke’s A TOUCH OF SIN (Tian Zhu Ding) screens at this year’s NYFF.
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/films/a-touch-of-sin

Public Screening Schedule

Screening Venues:
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam

Friday, September 20
7:00PM  Beau Travail (92m)
9:00PM  Night and Day (144m)

Saturday, September 21
4:30pm Hesus the Revolutionary (112m)
7:00pm Useless (81m)
9:00pm Pulse (118m)

Sunday, September 22
2:00pm Sobibor, Oct. 14 1943, 4 p.m. (95m)
4:15pm Games of Love and Chance (123m)
6:45pm Little Odessa (98m)
9:00pm Miller’s Crossing (115m)

Monday, September 23
7:00pm Skagafjördur (28m) + At Sea (60m)

Tuesday, September 24
6:30pm Maborosi (109m)
9:00pm The River (115m)

Wednesday, September 25
6:45pm I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar (98m)
9:00pm Playing ‘In The Company of Men’ (121m)

Thursday, September 26
6:30pm Adaptation (114m)
9:00pm Bloody Sunday (107m)

About Film Society of Lincoln Center
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility and understanding of the moving image. Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year's most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, LatinBeat, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, Rendez-Vous With French Cinema, and Spanish Cinema Now. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment Magazine, Film Society recognizes an artist's unique achievement in film with the prestigious “Chaplin Award.” The Film Society's state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year round programs and the New York City film community.
The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from Royal Bank of Canada, Jaeger-LeCoultre, American Airlines, The New York Times, Stonehenge Partners, Stella Artois, illy café, the Kobal Collection, Trump International Hotel & Tower New York, the National Endowment for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, visit www.filmlinc.com and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.

FOR MEDIA SPECIFIC INQUIRIES, PLEASE CONTACT:

Film Society of Lincoln Center
John Wildman, (212) 875-5419, [email protected]
David Ninh, (212) 875-5625, [email protected]