The Close-up

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with the team behind the opening night selection of this year’s New Directors/New Films. Presented by Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, the 55th edition of New Directors/New Films takes place April 8-19, with many filmmakers scheduled to attend in person. Get tickets at newdirectors.org The following conversation features Leviticus director Adrian Chiarella and lead actors Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen, moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Madeline Whittle. Sundance favorite Leviticus expounds daringly on the horror-movie truism that sexual desire makes you vulnerable—notably, to gruesome death. Named for the book of the Old Testament used to justify homophobia, the wrenching and terrifying feature debut from Adrian Chiarella begins with Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) breaking into an abandoned mill, their matey horseplay soon surrendering to its powerful homoerotic subtext. Fans of Heated Rivalry will app

This week we’re excited to present a recent conversation with acclaimed German filmmaker Christian Petzold as he discusses the NYFF50 selection Barbara (2012) in a conversation moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Make sure to catch Petzold’s latest feature, the NYFF63 selection Miroirs No. 3 currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/miroirs Set in 1980, Barbara, the first chapter of Christian Petzold’s trilogy “Love in Times of Oppressive Systems,” centers around a doctor—played by the incomparable Nina Hoss, in her fifth film with the director—exiled to a small town from East Berlin as punishment for applying for an exit visa from the GDR. Planning to flee for Denmark with her boyfriend, Barbara remains icy and withdrawn around her colleagues, particularly with the lead physician, who is hiding a secret of his own. With her patients, however, the guarded doctor is kind, warm, and protective, even risking her own safety for one of her charges. Masterfully controlle

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Two Prosecutors director Sergei Loznitsa, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. An NYFF63 Main Slate selection, Two Prosecutors is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Janus Films. The latest film from the great Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa is a scalpel-precise tale of the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy. Adapting a novel by Soviet writer and political prisoner Georgy Demidov, set in the Soviet Union in 1937, Loznitsa follows the attempts of an idealistic government-appointed prosecutor to expose the mistreatment of a dissident Bolshevik writer who has been jailed and tortured without evidence of wrongdoing. As he gradually comes to realize, the lack of cause for the man’s imprisonment is hardly unique under Stalin’s regime, and the neophyte lawyer may be putting himself in danger by exposing his own moral righteousness. Loznitsa constructs his story with a patient yet unmistakable sense of mo

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from June of 2023. In this conversation, director Béla Tarr discusses his 2000 feature Werckmeister Harmonies with Film at Lincoln Center Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini as part of Tarr’s two-day visit to FLC three years ago. FLC will present “Farewell to Béla Tarr,” a seven-film tribute to the late Hungarian filmmaker whose singular body of work stands among the most rigorous and influential in modern cinema, March 27-31. View full screening schedule and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/tarr Werckmeister Harmonies stands among the defining achievements of Béla Tarr’s late period and remains, alongside Sátántangó, one of his most widely celebrated works. Directed with Ágnes Hranitzky and adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, the film unfolds as a sustained immersion in a weather-beaten provincial town unsettled by the arrival of a traveling circus bearing a colossal stuffed whale—and rumors of a shadowy “Prince.” At its center

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Dry Leaf director Alexandre Koberidze and composer Giorgi Koberidze as they discuss their new film. An NYFF63 Currents selection, Dry Leaf opens at Film at Lincoln Center on Friday, March 20 with Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/leaf This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In soccer, a “dry leaf” is a kick that produces an unpredictable landing of the ball. Shaken by the disappearance of his grown daughter, a sports photographer goes looking for her through a Georgian landscape strewn with football fields. An invisible companion in tow, he meets potential witnesses whose perspectives prove distorted or contradictory. Confirming his position as one of contemporary cinema’s most intrepid artists, director Alexandre Koberidze (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, NYFF59) shot the film on an antiquated Sony Ericsson phone. What might seem a perverse

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Academy Award-nominated actress Lesley Manville as she discusses the new film Midwinter Break with FLC programmer Madeline Whittle. Directed by Polly Findlay and based on the 2017 novel Bernard MacLaverty, Midwinter Break is a stirring meditation on faith, commitment, and the enduring power of love, as a longtime couple takes a life-changing trip to Amsterdam. The film co-stars Academy Award nominee Ciaran Hinds. Midwinter Break is now playing in select theaters,, courtesy of Focus Features.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Miroirs. No. 3 director Christian Petzold as he discusses his new film with NYFF programmer Florence Almozini. An NYFF63 selection, Miroirs No. 3 opens at Film at Lincoln Center on March 19 with Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. See the film and more films from Christian Petzold at our seven-film showcase from March 16-19 of the renowned German director’s signature works. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/petzold Christian Petzold’s (Transit, NYFF56) haunting, beautifully crafted new film stars Paula Beer as a pianist from Berlin who’s taken in by a mysterious woman in an isolated country house after surviving a violent car crash.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Pompei: Below the Clouds director Gianfranco Rosi as he discusses his documentary with FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. An NYFF63 selection, Pompei: Below the Clouds opens at Film at Lincoln Center on March 6th with in-person filmmaker Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets now at filmlinc.org/clouds The great Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi (Notturno, NYFF58) specializes in kaleidoscopic portraits of people living amid anxiety and uncertainty. Among his most striking and monumental works, his latest details with pointillist precision and unnerving beauty a region in Naples living under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius and above the simmering Campi Flegrei volcanic caldera, which has in recent years experienced increasingly frequent and alarming tremors. In this volatile environment, Rosi finds archeologists reckoning with both uncovered ancient artifacts and the wreckage of tomb raiders, squads of digg

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with director Rebecca Zlotowski and lead actress Jodie Foster as they discuss the NYFF63 selection A Private Life. A Private Life is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Zlotowski’s unpredictable and playful murder mystery stars an entrancing Jodie Foster, in her first French-language performance, as an American psychoanalyst in Paris whose tightly knit world begins to unravel after the sudden death of a patient. Unpredictable and loose-limbed, A Private Life, like its incandescent star in her most dexterous role in years, is a complete delight. A Private Life is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation between FLC Programmer Madeline Whittle and Digital Marketing Manager Erik Luers as they discuss the upcoming retrospective Looking for Ms. Keaton, taking place at Film at Lincoln Center February 13-19. This week-long showcase celebrates the late Diane Keaton, a paradigm-shifting performer whose contributions to the art and craft of screen acting cemented her legacy as an auteur in the truest sense of the word. View the full screening schedule and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/keaton After the conversation, be sure to listen to Diane Keaton’s acceptance speech of Film at Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Award at our special Gala honoring the iconic actress from the spring of 2007. Looking for Ms Keaton is sponsored by Criterion, your trusted curator of great cinema.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival between filmmakers Oliver Laxe and Ben Rivers, moderated by NYFF programming advisor Antoine Thirion. Oliver Laxe’s Sirat returns to Film at Lincoln Center for a theatrical engagement beginning next Thursday, February 5th. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/sirat. On top of sharing an enthusiasm for mystery, the elements, and utopias, Ben Rivers and Oliver Laxe also shared a producer and a shooting location on their latest films. Rivers’s Mare’s Nest and Laxe’s Sirât are both apocalyptic road movies; the first follows a child through a variety of haunted landscapes in Spain and the United Kingdom, while the second follows a man, his young son, and a motley group of ravers as they try to find their way out of a besieged desert on the borderlands of Morocco, near Spain. Each film is a radical enigma that invites spectators to engage with cinema sensorially. NYFF was pleased to welcome Laxe and Rivers for a wide-ranging conversatio

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with director Hlynur Pálmason as he discusses the NYFF63 selection The Love That Remains. This conversation was moderated by NYFF programmer Justin Chang. The Love That Remains opens at Film at Lincoln Center this Thursday, January 29 with in-person Q&As and screenings of Pálmason‘s companion film Joan of Arc. View showtimes and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/loveremains Charting the gradual evolution of a family in the midst of an irreparable fracture, Hlynur Pálmason’s follow-up to his feature film Godland is a poignant domestic drama that observes life’s changes with humor and whimsy, set against the majestic, ever-shifting Icelandic landscape. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we're excited to present a conversation with director Lav Diaz and lead actor Gael García Bernal as they discuss the NYFF63 selection Magellan with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Interpretation by Gil Quito. Every astonishing visual composition carries historical and political weight in the monumental new film from singular Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, who mounts an absorbing story of colonial conquest and obsession, starring Gael García Bernal as Ferdinand Magellan. Magellan is now in theaters, courtesy of Janus Films. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with One Battle After Another cast member Benicio del Toro as he discusses his performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's new film that’s been heralded as one of the year’s finest. This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Programmer Tyler Wilson. Paul Thomas Anderson’s most viscerally thrilling film to date is a total blast, an epic, comic adventure of the weird new America that spans years and stretches from across the treacherous rolling-hill highways of the southwest and beyond. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, but with a flavor and cinematic rush that’s pure PTA, One Battle After Another is an exhilarating, ultimately moving portrait of undying commitment to family amidst the mania of our contemporary world.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Cover-Up directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, film subjects Seymour Hersh and Camille Lo Sapio, and producers Yoni Golijov and Olivia Streisand. This conversation was moderated by NYFF programmer Justin Chang. Cover-Up will be available on Netflix beginning December 26th. For the past six decades, Seymour Hersh has been at the front lines of political journalism in the United States. Hersh’s breakthrough reportage has brought to the public’s attention many of the most damning constitutional wrongdoings and cover-ups, from the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam to the CIA’s involvement in plots to assassinate foreign leaders to the Iraq invasion and systematic tortures at Abu Ghraib. In many cases, the revelations of his work have led to governmental reckonings and legal ramifications, yet Hersh, now 88 and surrounded by boxes of files from decades of tireless work, sees himself not as a crusader but as a citize

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Father Mother Sister Brother director Jim Jarmusch and cast members Adam Driver, Indya Moore, Luka Sabbat, Vicky Krieps, and Tom Waits. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. The NYFF63 Centerpiece selection, Father Mother Sister Brother will open at Film at Lincoln Center on December 24. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/jarmusch For years, Jim Jarmusch has written, directed, and produced delicate, character-driven films. Winner of the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion, Father Mother Sister Brother is a perceptive study in familial dynamics, a feature film carefully constructed in the form of a triptych. The three chapters all concern the relationships between adult children reconnecting or coming to terms with aging or lost parents, which take place in the present, and each in a different country. Siblings Jeff and Emily (played by Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) check up on their hermetic fa

We’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with director Bi Gan as he discusses the NYFF63 Main Slate selection Resurrection. Resurrection opens at Film at Lincoln Center on Thursday, December 11. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/resurrection This phantasmagoric dream machine from visionary Chinese director Bi Gan is an elusive yet monumental love letter to a century of cinema. Unfolding over five chapters that feature a dazzling array of styles, Resurrection is a cascade of imagery united by a luminous mythopoetic conceit: in a sci-fi-coded world where people have lost the desire to dream in the hopes of prolonging life, rogue “fantasmers” continue to stoke their imaginations and exist within unreality. From this magical premise, the film sends its ever-morphing protagonist through a series of genres, from Méliès-inflected silent fantasy to wartime thriller to con-artist buddy picture to millennial vampire romance—the latter depicted in one of Bi’s customary, and ever astonishi

This week we’re excited to present a special conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with members of the filmmaking team behind the Main Slate selection BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, including director Kahlil Joseph, screenwriter Madebo Fatunde, artist Kaneza Schaal, and filmmakers Savanah Leaf and Raven Jackson, moderated by Jon-Sesrie Goff, Program Officer at the Ford Foundation. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions opens in select theaters this Friday, November 28th. Visual artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph’s video installation BLKNWS debuted in galleries and museums across the country in 2019, immersing viewers in the imagined world of a television news network from a Black perspective. After expanding this concept into a short film, Joseph has developed it even further into a feature film, and the result is a celebration of Black life that reconceptualizes and remediates common, corporate notions of journalism. Joseph’s sprawling film is an uninterrupted gush of ideas, mixing newly shot footage and exta

This week we’re excited to present a special conversation with Peter Hujar’s Day director Ira Sachs. An NYFF63 Main Slate selection, Peter Hujar’s Day is now playing daily at FLC. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/hujar FLC and Janus Films recently presented a deep-dive discussion into the inspiration behind the film and the connection between Peter Hujar and his deeply felt legacy in New York City. Held in the Amphitheater at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, this free talk with writer/director Ira Sachs was moderated by Antonio Monda, writer and Artistic Director of the international literary festival Le Conversazioni. The photographer Peter Hujar, whose images exist in an important lineage and dialogue with the work of groundbreaking gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, forms the center of the latest movie by fearless independent American filmmaker Ira Sachs. Based on rediscovered transcripts from an unused 1974 interview by nonfiction writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall), in which she aske

This week we’re excited to present a special conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival between Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe, moderated by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Maddie Whittle. This talk is sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter. Two films in this year’s NYFF lineup center on artists confronting the passage of time: Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon stars Ethan Hawke as the legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart, fretful and embittered at the prospect of his one-time creative partner scaling the heights of musical-theater celebrity; Kent Jones’s Late Fame adapts Arthur Schnitzler’s novella about a once-upon-a-time New York poet, played by Willem Dafoe, who is intoxicated by the sudden attentions of a coterie of twentysomething would-be literati. Each film taps into extraordinary reserves of wit and melancholy via the contributions of their lead actors, titans of contemporary American cinema and exemplary interpreters of the cultural forces that have defined their respective generations. NYFF was thrille