series • June 11 - August 26, 2021

Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux

Still from Hourglass Sanatorium. Courtesy of Fixafilm.

Now playing in our theaters through August 26!

Last fall, the New York Film Festival was forced to adapt to the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, with its screenings taking place virtually and at drive-in theaters across the city… but not in cinemas, of course. Now that it’s possible to hold in-theater screenings in New York City again, we thought it only right to bring back much of the NYFF58 lineup to be screened and seen as these films were meant to be. So, this summer, join Film at Lincoln Center in the air-conditioned darkness of the Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center to see these films writ large in a special series of encore screenings of 33 titles from NYFF58.

In addition to such highlights as Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance (screening on 35mm!), Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, John Gianvito’s Her Socialist Smile, and Orson Welles’s Hopper/Welles, we’ll also be including a run of Anders Edström & C.W. Winter’s The Works and Days, Heinz Emigholz’s Streetscapes [Dialogue] alongside his two related works from last year’s Currents section (The Last City and The Lobby), Luis López Carrasco’s El futuro alongside a run of his Currents standout The Year of the Discovery, Cristi Puiu’s NYFF58 Main Slate entry Malmkrog, a special run of the new restoration of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, all five parts of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe (including a run of the NYFF58 Opening Night Film, Lovers Rock), and much, much more… See you at the movies!

For in-theater screenings, please review the FLC in-theater safety and health policies here.

Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux is sponsored by:

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Days

Tsai Ming-liang
2020
Taiwan/France
127 minutes
Taiwanese

In one of Tsai Ming-liang’s best and sparest works, Lee Kang-sheng plays a variation on himself, wandering through a lonely urban landscape and seeking treatment for a chronic illness; at the same time, a young Laotian immigrant working in Bangkok goes about his daily routine. The lives of these two solitary men eventually converge.

Isabella

Matías Piñeiro
2020
Argentina
80 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles

Never has Argentinian filmmaker Matías Piñeiro’s art been more graceful or structurally complex than in his latest, in which he again uses a Shakespeare text to anchor a loose yet intellectually rigorous examination of life’s loves, labors, and futile pursuits.

Past Screenings

Mangrove

Steve McQueen
2020
UK
126 minutes

An epic piece of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, Mangrove tells the true story of Frank Crichlow, the Trinidad-born owner of a café in Notting Hill who was arrested for protesting the police’s intimidation and brutality. This is a vivid and gripping dramatization of these events and the resulting landmark 1970 court case of Crichlow and the other defendants, who came to be known as the Mangrove Nine.

Red, White and Blue

Steve McQueen
2020
UK
80 minutes

In Steve McQueen’s vivid adaptation of a true story set in the early ’80s, John Boyega gives an impassioned yet nuanced performance as Leroy Logan, a member of the London Metropolitan police force who both witnessed and experienced first-hand the organization’s fundamental racism.

Alex Wheatle

Steve McQueen
2020
UK
66 minutes

In 1981, Alex Wheatle lands in a halfway house in Brixton, where he quickly acclimates to the West Indian neighborhood’s customs and styles, forming something like a family with his new friends and acquaintances. But when the Brixton Riots break out, Alex finds himself incarcerated, leading to a political awakening that changes his life forever.

Education

Steve McQueen
2020
UK
63 minutes

The culminating installment of the Small Axe anthology is a chilling portrait of the British education system in the 1970s, capturing the impossible circumstances facing West Indian students from their very first day of school.

Lovers Rock

Steve McQueen
2020
UK
68 minutes

A movie of tactile sensuality and levitating joy, Lovers Rock is part of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology of decades-spanning films that alight on various lives in London’s West Indian community. Here, McQueen, in an ecstatic yet no less formally bold mode, charts the growing attraction between Martha (newcomer Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and a brooding stranger (Micheal Ward) over the course of one night at a house party.

The Monopoly of Violence

David Dufresne
2020
France
86 minutes
French with English subtitles

In this essential and timely documentary about police violence in contemporary France, filmmaker and journalist David Dufresne examines the ways in which a government justifies brutal acts against its own citizens, enacting totalitarian methods to keep the populace under its control.

The Inheritance

Ephraim Asili
2020
USA
100 minutes

An endlessly generative work of politics, humor, and philosophy, Ephraim Asili’s feature-length debut takes place almost entirely within the walls of a West Philadelphia house where a community of young people have come together to form a collective of Black artists and activists.

There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse

Nicolás Zukerfeld
2020
Argentina
63 minutes
English and Spanish with English subtitles

Nicolás Zukerfeld’s third feature is a wry, surprising work of filmmaking-as-criticism that traces a mysterious and amusing arc across the vast oeuvre of pantheon auteur Raoul Walsh, before suddenly reinventing itself as an essayistic investigation into memory, cinema, and their shared mutability.

Ouvertures

The Living and the Dead Ensemble
2020
UK/France
132 minutes
Haitian Creole and French with English subtitles

In this first film from The Living and the Dead Ensemble—a collaboration among artists and performers from Haiti, France, and the United Kingdom spearheaded by artist Louis Henderson and curator Olivier Marboeuf—a group of young actors translate, rehearse, and debate their Creole production of Édouard Glissant’s play Monsieur Toussaint, creating a space in which the ghosts of Haiti’s colonial past return to address its present.

Hopper/Welles

Orson Welles
2020
USA
130 minutes

Now playing!

In November 1970, two movie mavericks, one already a legend (Orson Welles) and the other on his way to mythic status (Dennis Hopper), met for an epochal conversation, sharing their candid thoughts and feelings about cinema, art, and life. This entertaining and revealing footage, never before seen in full, has been resurrected by producer Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski.

Muhammad Ali, the Greatest

William Klein
1974
France
123 minutes
English and French with English subtitles

William Klein’s masterful portrait of Ali is arguably the most complex documentary about an athlete ever made and exhilarating evidence that the three-time undisputed heavyweight champion of the world was one of the key cultural and political figures of his time.

Smooth Talk

Joyce Chopra
1985
USA
92 minutes

Now Playing! · New 4K Restoration

In her first lead role, 18-year-old Laura Dern gave one of her most stirring, layered performances in Joyce Chopra’s adaptation of a Joyce Carol Oates short story about a teenager whose sexual exploration during her summer days in the Northern California suburbs takes a dangerous turn when she meets a mysterious stranger.

The Disciple

Chaitanya Tamhane
2020
India
127 minutes
Bengali, English, Hindi, and Marathi with English subtitles

Indian filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane’s much-anticipated follow-up to Court is a finely crafted labor of love set in the world of Hindustani classical music, starring singer—and remarkable first-time actor—Aditya Modak as a man living in Mumbai who tries to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a maestro in the Khayal raag music tradition.

Her Socialist Smile

John Gianvito
2020
USA
93 minutes

In his new film, John Gianvito (The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein) meditates on a particular moment in early 20th-century history: when Helen Keller began speaking out passionately on behalf of progressive causes. The film is a rousing reminder of Keller’s undaunted activism for labor rights, pacifism, and women’s suffrage.

My Mexican Bretzel

Nuria Giménez
2019
Spain
74 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles

Mid-century home movies in glorious color and onscreen subtitles taken from the diaries of one Vivian Barrett provide the narrative skeleton for a singular exploration of storytelling in Nuria Giménez’s first feature, an imaginative cinematic sleight of hand.

Simone Barbes or Virtue

Marie-Claude Treilhou
1980
France
77 minutes
French with English subtitles

New 4K Restoration!

A criminally overlooked work from the post-post-New Wave era of French cinema, Marie-Claude Treilhou’s stylish and atmospheric feature debut follows a porno theater usher through a series of curious encounters with acquaintances and eccentric strangers alike.

The Plastic House

Allison Chhorn
2019
Australia
46 minutes
Khmer with English subtitles

Economical yet expansive, and largely wordless, The Plastic House takes place inside and around a dilapidated greenhouse that belongs to filmmaker Allison Chhorn’s Cambodian family; in this quiet environment, she oversees inspiring regrowth despite the sometimes harsh natural elements.

Night of the Kings

Philippe Lacôte
2020
France/Ivory Coast/Canada/Senegal
93 minutes
Dioula, French, and Ivorian slang with English subtitles

Paying homage to the tradition of the griot in West African culture, this original vision from breakout Ivory Coast filmmaker Philippe Lacôte tells the story of a pickpocket (Koné Bakary), newly arrived at a correctional facility in the Ivorian capital of Abidjan, who, in order to stay alive, must keep his fellow inmates entertained with wild tales over the course of a night.

Flowers of Shanghai

Hou Hsiao-hsien
1998
Taiwan
113 minutes
Cantonese and Shanghainese with English subtitles

New 4K Restoration

Hou Hsiao-hsien made his seventh festival appearance with this transfixing masterwork, a ravishingly beautiful chamber drama that follows the intertwined fortunes and intrigues of four “flower girls” serving in the opulent brothels of fin-de-siècle 19th-century Shanghai.

The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)

C.W. Winter, Anders Edström
2020
USA/Sweden/Japan/UK
575 minutes
English, Japanese, and Swedish with English subtitles

Five seasons, four parts, eight hours: the dimensions of C.W. Winter and Anders Edström’s film are as incommensurable as its central figure. Tayoko Shiojiri, a vegetable farmer who works and cares for her ailing husband in a small village north of Kyoto, Japan, is the nominal core of this monumental work, observed through precise tableaux and dense sonic collage that bend distinctions between fiction and documentary.

The Last City

Heinz Emigholz
2020
Germany
100 minutes

In Heinz Emigholz’s ambitious and surprisingly funny film, five cities around the world become the backdrops for a series of spiraling tête-a-têtes on such issues such as war crimes, racism, family, religion, sex, and cosmology. As one character says, it’s a film of “social taboos, the paradoxical logic of dreams, an infinite round dance.”

Streetscapes [Dialogue]

Heinz Emigholz
2017
Germany
132 minutes
English and German with English subtitles

A director speaks at length to a psychoanalyst, confiding his obsessions, fears, ideas about cinema, and psychological blocks. Emigholz’s magnum opus is a playful, moving treatise on trauma and architecture in which foreground and background carry equal weight.

The Lobby

Heinz Emigholz
2020
Germany/Argentina
76 minutes

An Old White Male (John Erdman) holds court in the lobbies of various apartment buildings in Buenos Aires and expounds with measured disgust on death, consciousness, and the state of contemporary human relations. Heinz Emigholz’s spare continuation—and sardonic distillation—of certain themes explored in The Last City is morbid, confrontational, and hilarious.

The Year of the Discovery

Luis López Carrasco
2020
Spain
200 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles

Shot on Hi-8 videotape entirely within a smoky snack bar, with occasional interruptions by archival news bulletins and TV commercials, Luis López Carrasco’s second feature excavates the forgotten histories of 1992—a pivotal year in which Spain celebrated both the Olympic Games in Barcelona and the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, and ushered in a new age of neoliberalism.

El Futuro

Luis Lopez Carrasco
2013
Spain
67 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles

"El Futuro tries to critically look at the values and customs that Spanish society acquired stunningly fast at the beginning of the ’80s. These were values, behaviors, and new ways of living that I have also shared and lived." —Luis Lopez Carrasco

Fauna

Nicolás Pereda
2020
Mexico/Canada
70 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles

Nicolás Pereda’s ticklish and dark-toned feature mixes realism and absurdity in the story of a television actress who joins her estranged brother and new boyfriend to visit her parents’ rustic home in the Mexican countryside, where they encounter culture clash and familial tensions. But Pereda has a metafictional trick up his sleeve.

The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror

Raúl Ruiz, Valeria Sarmiento
2020
Chile
64 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles

This latest dispatch from beyond the grave by the legendary Chilean director Raúl Ruiz (completed, as ever, by his widow, the filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento) tells the surrealistic tale of a sickly literature professor haunted the memory of his wife and attempting to carry on as normal despite the ever-weakening boundary between his dreams and waking life.

Beginning

Dea Kulumbegashvili
2020
Georgia
125 minutes
Georgian with English subtitles

In her striking feature debut, Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili tells the devastating story of a persecuted family of Jehovah’s Witness missionaries in a remote village from the perspective of a traumatized wife and mother.

Xiao Wu

Jia Zhangke
1997
China
112 minutes
Mandarin with English subtitles

New Restoration!

Among the most essential filmmakers of the past several decades, Jia Zhangke launched his career with this, his 1997 debut about a pickpocket struggling to keep up with the current of China’s transformation into an economic powerhouse.

Atarrabi and Mikelats

Eugène Green
2020
France/Belgium
123 minutes
Euskara with English subtitles

The sacred Atarrabi and the profane Mikelats follow wildly divergent paths in Eugène Green’s tale of two brothers, a modern-dress take on Basque myth perched on the line between earnest spirituality and sly satire.

Malmkrog

Cristi Puiu
2020
Romania
201 minutes
French, German, Hungarian, and Russian with English subtitles

A turn-of-the-20th-century Christmas Eve gathering among five members of the European elite at an elegant Transylvanian estate becomes the setting for an increasingly intense succession of conversations in Cristi Puiu’s pristine, sometimes terrifying vision of the simmering violence beneath the colonialist’s veneer of politesse.

Slow Machine

Joe DeNardo, Paul Felten
2020
US
72 minutes

The thriller genre is exploded and reassembled in DeNardo and Felten’s funny and alluring work on paranoia, surveillance, and performance, featuring an intriguingly eclectic cast: experimental theater performers Stephanie Hayes and Scott Shepherd, the musician Eleanor Friedberger, and Chloë Sevigny, among others.

Her Name Was Europa

Anja Dornieden, Juan David González Monroy
2020
Germany
76 minutes
Dutch and English with English subtitles

Berlin-based filmmakers Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy fashion a poetic and deadpan 16mm work of fanciful nonfiction based on historical attempts to bring back the aurochs, a breed of wild cattle extinct since the early 17th century.

The Hourglass Sanatorium

Wojciech Has
1973
Poland
124 minutes

New 4K Restoration!

The collective trauma of the Holocaust looms over this adaptation of Jewish author Bruno Schulz’s visionary and poetic reflection on the nature of time and death, which won the Jury Award at Cannes.

Past Screenings

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