New York Film Festival

New York Film Festival

Official Selections of the New York Film Festival
SAN VITTORE
SAN VITTORE
Every time children visit their parents at San Vittore, Milan’s oldest prison, they’re subjected to thorough security checks – backpacks searched, toys checked, pat downs, metal detectors, endless waks down bare corridors. Incorporating drawings made by the children while they wait (in some the prison is transformed into a castle, the prisoners into kings and queens), this striking short documentary from Yuri Ancarini  meticulously depicts the lingering psychological and emotional trauma of this process.
VITALINA VARELA
VITALINA VARELA
Winner of the Golden Leopard for Best Film and Best Actress at the Locarno Film Festival, Vitalina Varela is the masterful new film from acclaimed director Pedro Costa. A work of deeply concentrated beauty, it stars nonprofessional actor Vitalina Varela in a remarkable performance (based on her life), as a Cape Verdean woman who hopes to reunite with her husband after decades of separation due to economic circumstance, only to arrive in a strange land mere days after his funeral.
SEGUNDA VEZ
SEGUNDA VEZ
This vital, revolutionary documentary isn't merely a biopic of Oscar Masotta - a pivotal theorist in the Argentinian avant-garde from the 1950s to 1970s - but a treatise on the artistic and political climate of the nation preceding the Dirty War, eerily mirroring the world today. The title, Segunda Vez, originates from a homonymous story written by a contemporary of Masotta’s, Julio Cortázar.
LA FLOR
LA FLOR
A decade in the making, filmed around the world, and featuring the same four remarkable actresses in six episodes (each a different genre), Mariano Llinás’ landmark 14-hour feature film La Flor is an unrepeatable labor of love and madness that redefines the concept of binge viewing; a wildly entertaining exploration of the possibilities of fiction and storytelling. A must-see.


ANGELS ARE MADE OF LIGHT
ANGELS ARE MADE OF LIGHT
A stirring and beautiful documentary from Academy Award nominated director James Longley (Iraq in Fragments), Angels Are Made of Light traces the lives of young students and their teachers at a school in the old city of Kabul. Interweaving the modern history of Afghanistan with present-day portraits, the film offers an intimate and nuanced vision of a society living in the shadow of war.
DREAM OF A CITY
DREAM OF A CITY
Between 1958 and 1960 Walter Hess and Manny Kirchheimer shot black and white 16mm film from Wall Street to midtown New York to the Delaware River. The footage was left unedited. Nearly 60 later, Kirchheimer took up the challenge of editing it, adding music and sound that would mesh with the surrealism of the material. The result is a dynamic and compact symphony of a city.
ASAKO I & II
ASAKO I & II
From the Academy Award nominated director of DRIVE MY CAR. A truly original Vertigo riff, based on a novel by Tomoka Shibasaki, Asako I & II is a mysterious and intoxicating pop romance. Ryusuke Hamaguchi's beguiling film traces the trajectory of a love—or, to be accurate, two loves—found, lost, displaced, and regained.
IN MY ROOM
IN MY ROOM
Sometimes the end of the word can be a new beginning. In this boldly original take on the last man on earth genre, filmmaker Ulrich Kohler – part of the acclaimed Berlin School, a loosely defined group that includes Christian Petzold and Maren Ade – tells the story of a man adrift who awakens one morning to discover that seemingly all of humanity has disappeared.
CANIBA
CANIBA
A new documentary from the groundbreaking filmmakers behind Leviathan, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Caniba reflects on the discomfiting significance of cannibalistic desire in human existence through the prism of one Japanese man, Issei Sagawa, and his mysterious relationship with his brother, Jun Sagawa.
DID YOU WONDER WHO FIRED THE GUN?
DID YOU WONDER WHO FIRED THE GUN?
“In 1946, my great-grandfather murdered a black man named Bill Spann and got away with it.” So begins this acclaimed documentary which takes us on a journey through the American South – interweaving scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird and Rosa Parks’ investigation into the Recy Taylor case – to uncover the truth behind a horrific incident and the societal mores that empowered it.
ALL THE CITIES OF THE NORTH
ALL THE CITIES OF THE NORTH
Charting the languorous, mysterious existence of two men who seem to share a deep, liminal understanding beyond words, until a third man enters their secluded space, Dane Komljen's debut feature, All the Cities of the North, is a radically open-ended but ravishingly beautiful work that’s animated by rhythms and ideas entirely its own.
END OF LIFE
END OF LIFE
“In our culture, almost everyone fears death,” says Ram Dass, the noted spiritual guru and author, and one of the subjects in this extraordinary documentary. Directed by John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik, who underwent training as doulas in order to accompany people nearing death, End of Life is a deeply moving, revelatory work that captures the last years of five individuals in the process of dying.
NOT RECONCILED
NOT RECONCILED
Straub-Huillet's heralded feature debut eschews conventional form and storytelling to chart the origins and legacy of Nazism, as well as the moral demands of obedience and sacrifice within the German bourgeois family, in this vigorous adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s novel.
CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH
CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH
Using letters Anna Magdalena Bach wrote to her husband, Johann Sebastian, filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet created one of the most precise, rewarding biopics ever put to screen. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, this masterpiece has been immaculately restored.
EYES DO NOT WANT TO CLOSE AT ALL TIMES
EYES DO NOT WANT TO CLOSE AT ALL TIMES
A faithful adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s Othon, the classic tragedy that premiered at the court of Louis XIV at Fontainebleau in 1664 and today is more hallowed than actually performed, Eyes do not want to close… depicts the power vacuum that followed Emperor Nero’s death.
HISTORY LESSONS
HISTORY LESSONS
This complex interpretation of Brecht’s unfinished novel The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar explores history as it has been written by the victors, with their hero worship of tyrannical leaders (whether Caesar or Hitler), and offers an alternate view of history writing as fractured and potentially revolutionary.
MOSES AND AARON
MOSES AND AARON
One of Straub-Huillet's major films, this adaptation of Schoenberg’s unfinished opera is a thrilling and rigorous consideration of Biblical and archaeological history; set almost entirely within a Roman amphitheater whose history lends every precise line-reading and gesture, every startling camera move and cut, a totalizing force.
THE INCONSOLABLE ONE
THE INCONSOLABLE ONE
Returning from the forest of shades, a quietly defiant Orpheus tells a Bacchante it was free will, not destiny, which compelled him to cast the fatal gaze on his wife Eurydice, recognizing their love as a thing of the past and his own place in the world of living souls.
AN HEIR
AN HEIR
Another film based on Straub’s memories of growing up in Metz and a work by Maurice Barrès, in which a young country doctor, the son of a French Alsatian bourgeois, is forced to choose between “the French soul and the German deed."
SARAH WINCHESTER, PHANTOM OPERA
SARAH WINCHESTER, PHANTOM OPERA
A film about ghosts and madness that is itself a kind of ghost, this short from master Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama, Saint Laurent) tells the story of Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune who was driven to insanity by unseen forces.
AN AVIATION FIELD
AN AVIATION FIELD
The newest work to emerge from Harvard’s groundbreaking Sensory Ethnography Lab, Joana Pimenta’s An Aviation Field is a mesmerizing short film, a ghost story about buried cities, lost civilizations and Western colonialism.
88:88
88:88
Referencing the digital display of electric appliances after the power’s been repeatedly cut off, Isiah Medina’s audacious experimental work – one of the most acclaimed in recent years – is a personal meditation on family, friendship and the experience of living in poverty.
THE HUMAN SURGE
THE HUMAN SURGE
One of the year’s most bracingly original debuts, The Human Surge is a global journey that jumps from Argentina to the Philippines to Mozambique, a road movie that fuses fiction and documentary for a portrait of today’s youth at a time of economic uncertainty and illusory hyper-connection.
SCRAP VESSEL
SCRAP VESSEL
Using found snapshots, diary entries and 16mm Chinese melodramas, filmmaker Jason Byrne resurrects the ghosts of a decommissioned cargo ship - once used to carry coal along the Yangtze - as it crosses the Indian Ocean to be salvaged for scrap.
MIMOSAS
MIMOSAS
Winner of the Critics Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Oliver Laxe’s stunning new film, Mimosas, is a breathtakingly-shot Western that follows a mysterious caravan transporting a dying sheikh into the Moroccan Atlas Mountains.
THE ILLINOIS PARABLES
THE ILLINOIS PARABLES
Filmmaker Deborah Stratman recounts eleven episodes in American history — from the violent eviction of the Cherokee to the invention of the nuclear reactor to the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton — to consider how societies are shaped by belief and ideology.
DON'T BLINK - ROBERT FRANK
DON'T BLINK - ROBERT FRANK
One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, a documentary about Robert Frank, the legendary photographer and filmmaker behind the seminal book “The Americans” and landmark films like Pull My Daisy.
FISH TAIL
FISH TAIL
The impact of global industrial overfishing on a small community of fishermen in the Azores is explored in this intimate, beautiful documentary.