Playlist
A film in which two celebrations of life, a wedding in France and a commemoration in Guinea Bissau, are organically intertwined with the threads of a family and heritage that live and travel between these two worlds. Perpetual circular movement framing reality.
Seize moments de ma vie (Sixteen Moments of My Life) is an intimate cinematic portrait of legendary German actress and singer Ingrid Caven. Directed by Albert Serra, the film documents a unique live performance built around sixteen songs from Caven's repertoire, intertwining music, memory, performance, and the passage of time into a meditation on an extraordinary artistic life. The project originated from the one-night stage performance Heidschi Bumbeidschi – Seize moments de ma vie, filmed live by Serra.
Inspired by Yoko Hayasuke's autobiographical account Journal of a Radioactive Brain, Hanabi (Fire Flower) is an experimental documentary by Ana Vaz that journeys through post-Fukushima Japan, intertwining personal testimony, environmental memory, and the enduring consequences of nuclear catastrophe. Blending documentary, essay film, and poetic observation, the film follows individuals and communities living with the invisible legacy of radiation while reflecting on grief, resilience, and humanity's relationship with the natural world.
Set high in the mountains, fall comes to an end and a family prepares for the long winter ahead.
Russia, 2022. When Gleb, a successful company director, finds himself under siege from mounting corporate pressures and an increasingly unstable world, the collapse of his carefully ordered life accelerates toward violence.
An ordinary workday on a building site. Forty-year-old crane operator Thomas receives a call from his wife: he has to pick her up from the hospital. Once there, he finds her sitting alone on a park bench, crying.
Led by a stellar cast including Sophie Okonedo and David Oyelowo, Arie and Chuko Esiri's second feature Clarissa is a sensory and hypnotic adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, set in Lagos.
Essay praising human life and work, the everlasting beauty and expression of human thought.
Monumental picture exploring the identity and fate of the Armenian nation.
The last collaboration of Artavazd Peleshian and cinematographer Mikhail Vartanov is a film-essay about Armenia's shepherds, about the contradiction and the harmony between man and nature, scored to Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
Philosophical essay about the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, its influence on the destiny of the world in the 20th century.
People's struggle through Soviet mechanisation period. The film starts with homage to Peleshian's Armenian roots.
Made in 1982 by Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian, Our Century is a timeless film made of archival footage from the entire previous century. The film is not written in a narrative mode but resembles a meditation on space exploration, humanity's obsession with excess, and its instinctive vocation for colonization and the occupation of worlds. The faces of astronauts defeated by weightlessness, war images, monumental explosions, the first lunar shots, the burning sun, strange experiments... Everything evokes the disaster that never ceases to come.
David Zimmerman, almost 40, is a photographer but no one knows it. When friends drag him to a wild party, he spots a woman in the crowd and can't take his eyes off her, he follows her… A few hours later, David wakes up : he's in the body of the unknown woman.
Elegy for the Forgotten, on an Endless War is an experimental short documentary by Iranian filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi. Through archival imagery, personal narration, and layered soundscapes, the film reflects on the enduring legacy of war, political violence, exile, and collective memory in Iran. Combining essay film and visual experimentation, Khoshnoudi creates a poetic meditation on loss, resistance, and the persistence of historical trauma across generations.
After an abortion, a woman roams the streets, engaging in a sequence of understated encounters bathed in the glow of neon lights.
From mouth to cave to fire to screen to war to skin, this is a dizzying 16mm portrait of an increasingly chaotic present, one whose political contours are affected by everything and nothing all at once. In the words of Zadie Smith: "Time is not what it is / But how it is felt"
On the French Riviera, two gangs of kids compete in the perilous game of cliff jumping. Géo, barely five years old, discovers over the course of a summer a world where friendship blends with rivalry, and where the first stirrings of the heart emerge against the dazzling Mediterranean landscape.
Featuring a career-making performance from Slow Horses' Rosalind Eleazar and supporting turns from Daniel Kaluuya, Adam Driver, and Anna Kendrick, Chris Rock's latest as writer-director brilliantly satirizes the bigotry and hustle at the heart of Hollywood.
The Gheorghius, a devout Romanian Norwegian couple, resettle in a village set in a distant fjord where they become close to their neighbours, the Halbergs. Their children bond despite their different education. When adolescent Elia Gheorghiu shows up at school with some bruises on her body, the community asks itself if the traditional education that the Gheorghiu children get from their parents might have anything to do with it.
September 1940. Henri Marre arrives alone in Vichy as the authoritarian regime settles in. Broke, estranged from his family, and carrying copies of his self-published manifesto Notre Salut (Our Salvation), the 49-year-old is determined to secure what he believes is his rightful place in the new administration. In his writing, Henri sets out his patriotic convictions and his engineer's methodology: efficiency above all. Claiming he wants to help save France after defeat, he does whatever is required to remain useful, serving the machinery of the new order with increasing skill. But he may be pursuing something more urgent: escape from his own ruin.
After the death of their mother, twin sisters face eviction from the loft that has been their home for more than three decades – a place like a living time capsule, filled with layers of memory, art, motherhood, sisterhood and New York history.
Follows Sanghee as she visits her mother on Jeju Island after 10 years, reuniting with her brother and meeting her stepfather and his daughter while navigating family dynamics and personal pursuits.
She has just finished the shoot of an independent film and now has to give three interviews about it. Afterwards, in her acting class, her teacher asks her to reenact the interviews. But for some reason, she is unable to remember them.
Taiwan, an island in the southern seas. For both mainland China and Japan that ruled the island for 50 years, Taiwan is the south -hot and humid. But today, in the 90's, what shape does Taiwan find itself in? Kao is riding the mini-train to Ping Chi to set up a 10 day gambling den whith his friend Hsi. Kao is taking Flat-Head, his acolyte, and Pletzel, Flat Head's girlfriend, who works part-time in a nightclub. Kao's girlfriend Ying, who works in the same nightclub as Pletzel, doesn't like the people around Kao, finding them dangerous. But Kao has already made a deal with Hsi to invest in a nightclub in Shanghai. Ying doesn't want him to go. She wants him to stay in Taiwan to open a restaurant…
Set in the vibrant era of late 80s New York, the film follows Jimmy George, a Downtown performance artist in an extraordinary moment between great illness and death when, still, all beauty and love is possible.
Set against the backdrop of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming follows a young woman navigating the emotional fractures of war, memory, and displacement. As the boundaries between dreams and reality blur, she struggles to preserve hope, identity, and human connection amid profound personal and collective upheaval.
In James Gray's deeply felt and intense drama, two brothers become entangled in a scheme that turns out to be too good to be true. As they try to navigate their way through the dangerous world of the Russian mafiya, family bonds begin to fray with life-altering consequences.
Fevers explores perception as a heightened, unstable bodily experience through layered moving images, sound, archival fragments, and digitally manipulated material. The exhibition considers memory, violence, sensation, the instability of images, and the relationship between bodily states and visual perception. Works including Orphan Drift (2025), Fevers (2025), and Negative Hands (2024) create immersive compositions in which images and sounds fragment, overlap, and resist straightforward interpretation.
Jesse Eisenberg directs Academy Award winner Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti in a dark comedy about a bored suburban housewife who finds purpose acting in community theatre.
Amid a pandemic and the breakup of a marriage, loneliness sparks new forms of escapism. A film star becomes a companion and pop culture a way of coping, as the lines between reality and fantasy dissolve.
Creates a (non-)space linking his loved ones across different realms.
The uninterrupted light trail of one year and ten months, condensed down to 20 minutes, filmed on a self-made camera. Daily rhythms accelerate, slowly at first, then more intensely. A structuralist film about transience.
A daring clarion call and one of the most significant works of Indian political cinema, John Abraham's extraordinary final film Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother) follows a young man in 1970s Kerala as he journeys — with a progressive swell of companions — to inform a mother of her son's death, amid widespread unrest.
This ambitious, beguiling narrative debut from acclaimed Filipino filmmaker and experimentalist John Torres follows a grieving detective who finds himself increasingly ensnared while investigating a case involving a sinister navigation app causing physical and psychological debris.
A washed-up New York party promoter is forced to turn his life around when an unexpected visitor arrives.
American filmmaker Julia Loktev, born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent media journalism in Putin's Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country's invasion of Ukraine. Structured in five chapters, Loktev's film is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety.
In Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo, Palestinian filmmaker and artist Kamal Aljafari documents one of Japan's great maverick artists — now 85 — as he makes one last attempt to attain a passport decades after his was confiscated.
In 17th-century France, Father Urbain Grandier's protection of the city of Loudun from the corrupt Cardinal Richelieu is undermined by a sexually repressed nun's accusation of witchcraft.
A material hybrid of film and textile, as the intermediary device of a laser printer transcribes weaving patterns onto strips of 16mm clear leader, connecting the material process of handmade films with hand-crafted textile production. Pattern drafts are the graphical score for weaving – grids of light and dark representing the over and under of weft threads between the warps. The printer strains to align the image, as powdered toner smudges and fibers peel away like stray threads. The graphic repetition of grids, lines, and squares assert a structural form that is fragile and vulnerable to erasure. In the archeological record, textiles are often lost to time. Here, a new form emerges – grids of ink and plastic, flickering projected light and dark.
Lee Chang-dong's eagerly anticipated new film brings stories of relationships, generational and class divides, in this gripping tale of two couples playing games with themselves and one another.
Misael works alone. Armed with his axe, he fells trees in the forest. An unexpected responsibility upends his life, and the rhythm of his days gradually dissolves into a wilderness where human reason no longer holds meaning.
In rural France, Christophe (10) tries to live up to his rigid and distant father on the family farm. But the young boy starts to lean over and collapse without warning – on the tractor, at school, at dinner… A doctor finds the solution: Christophe must wear an iron corset to keep himself upright. Forced to reinvent his life away from the farm, Christophe discovers a new passion for music, meets a new friend, and follows her into his first mischief. But will any of this really fix what is out of balance?
Amid German reunification in 1990, 50-year-old Patty first loses her job and then her friend Jelena. In a small East German town, she collects discarded objects and meets the younger Franz. When her flat becomes so full of belongings that she can no longer enter it, she sets out into a colorful forest. A journey through landscapes and history begins—carrying away more than just her.
Palestinian scholar Edward Said is profiled in his own words, drawing upon decades of archives, to explore the legacy of his groundbreaking works including Orientalism and The Question of Palestine.
At the top of Morne Fortune, on the Caribbean island of Iyanola (Saint Lucia), an obelisk stands. Officially, it celebrates those who restored British dominion over the island in 1796. Yet it conceals another story: that of the Black freedom fighters, lost to the silence that followed the return of slavery. It is from this silence that Morne Fortune unfolds. Moving between digital, celluloid and 3D virtual landscapes, the film explores the intimate relationship Saint Lucians have with Caribbean colonial heritage. Between transmission, resistance, and healing, it searches for what remains alive where official history has fallen silent.
With the erudition and insight of a literary scholar and the gumption of an amateur detective, Argentinian auteur (and raconteur) Mariano Llinás (La Flor, TIFF '18) explores the life and fiction of the legendary writer Jorge Luis Borges through objects and places.
A group of French high-school students travel to Naples on a school trip to discover the ruins of Pompeii and the bodies petrified by Vesuvius. There, they are drawn into a dizzying descent. One by one, they are swept up in desire and anger, until they surrender to them completely.
In the early 17 century, a soldier arrives at an isolated Protestant village in Germany claiming to be the heir to an abandoned farmstead. Even though he proves to be a good man, the villagers' suspicions about his identity grow and they force a reckoning.
Seven-time Academy Award nominee Mike Leigh returns with an uplifting story of family and how to deal with grief, featuring remarkably emotional performances from Kate O'Flynn and Alice Bailey Johnson.
The land belongs to those who work it. But what about houses, homes, the place where one can rest and start a family? Image and sound unfold the history of the underlying structures that turn the right to a home into a tool of control, exploitation or dispossession.
In Mexico, Tere, a musician-composer, opens her home to a TV interview with a friend, as topics meander and new voices drift in. An absurdist comical chamber piece that skewers art-world hypocrisy, mocks pretension and celebrates a singular womanly bond.
When a theft goes awry, a veteran pickpocket is sent on a mission through New York to reclaim the stolen goods. Harry is a classic native New Yorker, an old-school hustler who has moved through life lubricating palms with pickpocket cash since the 1980s. He stays smooth, continually sharpening his skills, but times are changing for Harry. Now it's 2025, and the daily take from the streets? Fancy trackable phones. Cashless wallets full of credit cards. Gym bags holding cryptocurrency and guns. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is a nostalgic portrait of a hustler getting lapped by today's digitally networked world, who now must prepare for the final act of his life. Director Noah Segan's modern metropolis is powered by the ephemera of a time gone by, with OG street action brought to radiant life by a terrific cast — led by John Turturro's exceptional turn as Harry.
Raúl is a cult filmmaker in the midst of a creative crisis. When tragedy strikes one of his closest collaborators, he draws inspiration from it to write his next film. Little by little, he imagines Elsa, a filmmaker in the midst of writing a script, whose journey begins to mirror his own.
At architecture college in 1974 New Delhi, student Annie fails his final exams four times because the dean has it in for him. Now he is facing his fifth attempt. This whimsical campus comedy with a screenplay by Arundhati Roy became a cult hit.
Gianina, a young Romanian, works as a housekeeper for a bourgeois family in Bordeaux. In the evenings, she rehearses the role of a maid with an amateur theater troupe in an adaptation of The Diary of a Chambermaid by Octave Mirbeau. She takes care of Louen, her employers' son, while her own daughter is growing up away from her, in Romania.
Director of a care facility for the elderly, Marie-Lou strives to introduce an innovative care philosophy based on listening and respecting residents' dignity, despite resistance from part of her staff. Her encounter with Mari, a Japanese theater director battling cancer, will profoundly reshape her path. By forming a deep, supportive friendship, the two women join forces in a shared struggle to "make the impossible possible."
A tragedy brings a mother, daughter, and teenage boy together. Struggling with blame and forgiveness, the unlikely trio take a trip to Tenerife for a family holiday that never happened. Under the glow of the sun, past and present quietly start to overlap.
Bobby shuttles between Vienna and Salzburg, picking up strangers. Their conversations range from casual to intimate, revealing how anonymous connections create warmth in modern Europe.
A visual and acoustic reflection about perception, deception, truth and the medium of film itself. Between visibility, irritation, structure and dissolution, a space arises for one's own vision. An experimental film that wants to be experienced.
After a fortune teller warns him that his elderly mother may die soon, Sakol sets out on a one-day pilgrimage to nine temples as a remedy. Just two weeks before her birthday, he brings his ailing mother, along with his wife, brother, sister, and children, on the trip amid the splendor of Thai architecture.
Feeling as if he unfairly cheated death too many times, Shikishima, a surviving Kamikaze pilot is attacked on Odo Island along with many war plane engineers by a gargantuan monster. After the engineers die due to Shikishima failing to distract the monster, an overwhelming amount of guilt weighs on him, especially after a homeless woman and a baby move into his home when he returns. Shikishima, now on a personal mission, teams up with a large group of veterans to finally take down the monster known as Godzilla.
Blues musician Al Cook lives in an apartment filled with memories. Outside, the world carries on without him. But when his home is slated for demolition, out of the ruins of his existence, a long-forgotten dream suddenly resurfaces.
In Svilengrad, a small town on the Bulgarian border, Veska, crosses paths with Said, an old acquaintance whose car has been stolen. Offering her help, she brings him along to the excavation site where she is working as an archaeologist. As they reconnect, Veska is pulled more into the shady world that he (Said) has emerged from, soon embarking on her own exploration of the criminal ties that lurk beneath the surface of this seemingly innocent town at the outskirts of Europe. As figures from her own past start to close in, Veska is forced to confront the truth about the town and her experiences.
At a time when elements of fascisation are becoming ever more apparent, ever more pervasive, artist Vika Kirchenbauer takes a personal look at what is in the air in present-day Germany.
A decade after his death, one of the most significant and compelling filmmakers of the past century has one last trick up his sleeve: a trove of never-before-seen footage that he believed to be the most important he ever filmed. Genre-defying director William Greaves searches for the divine origins of his own creativity at a cocktail party he masterminded in 1972 for the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance.
One of the foundational films of the New German Cinema, the debut feature by the polymath artist and writer Alexander Kluge, about an East German woman's acclimating to life on the other side of the wall, is a defining work of midcentury cinematic modernism.
A fascinating, ahead-of-its-time synthesis of fiction and documentary, Allen Fong's third feature follows a couple from Hong Kong as they navigate domestic trials and tribulations before eventually heading to the United States.
Made at the legendary Russian film school VGIK while Pelechian was a student, this early short film shows the daily labor of men tasked with clearing the way for train passage through the Armenian mountains.
A rare color film for Pelechian, in which a woman's face movingly fills the frame as she gives birth.
Ava DuVernay follows her epochal 2016 documentary 13th with a thrillingly expansive sequel of sorts, which passionately and persuasively details how the tenets of the 14th Amendment, ratified post–Civil War, are now under systematic attack.
A dizzying mix of archival and original footage, Barbara Hammer's provocative and pioneering first feature boldly pulls back the curtain on the queer experience.
As California's wildfires rage and extreme weather drives bears and other animals into the filmmaker's yard to scavenge, everyday life becomes a series of unnerving omens. In Certainties, snippets of video-diary and home security camera footage from the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains are collaged to reveal an ominous domesticity, with a fruit tree in the yard but nature out of joint.
Shapes blister and tumble across frame lines, colors splash, bleed, and vanish, machinic noise rumbles and churns. Produced using an entirely photochemical process on 35mm film, with an optical soundtrack generated photochemically, Day One is an odyssey of light and color, an exploration of the primary materials of analog filmmaking, and a miniature cosmos activated inside the cinematic apparatus.
Camilo Restrepo, the director of 2020's Los conductos (New Directors/New Films 2020), reappropriates and remixes a real General Motors promotional film depicting an early-1960s exhibition across the Darién Gap in Chevrolet Corvairs. As the representatives of the global North's industrial might bridge the same chasm that stands between today's migrants and the United States, Restrepo considers the unequal flows of people and property between the Americas.
This dreamlike astonishment from Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light, NYFF45) suggests a world balanced on the edge of the corporeal and the mythic—a work of feral cinematic expression that contrasts elemental pleasure and authoritarian brutality.
Charlotte Wells (Aftersun, NYFF60) drops into the YWCA of the Greater Capital Region to visit Paula Spiro, a legendary drummer and drum teacher (whose former students include Luscious Jackson drummer and original Beastie Boy Kate Schellenbach). Having left New York in 2024, the elderly Spiro recalls her life in the city with wonderment and an unerring sense of rhythm, in a tribute to the artists and queer elders being pushed out of the place they shaped.
New York avant-garde legend André Gregory, now in his nineties, teams up with actors Larry Pine and Gerry Bamman to film a reading of Samuel Beckett's Endgame in this enormously moving document of an inextinguishable creative spark, executive produced by Martin Scorsese.
Jackie (Tallie Medel) is a social worker in training picking at the knots of her own unresolved issues in microbudget maestro Dan Sallitt's sequel to his notorious-yet-gentle 2012 taboo-buster The Unspeakable Act. Preceded by Nathan Silver's Sounds From Home.
Sofia Coppola's dynamic craftsmanship in creating her personal vision for 2006's Marie Antoinette (NYFF44) is on full display in this video diary shot by her mother, Eleanor Coppola, on the film's set in Versailles in 2005.
A veterinarian (Victoria Pedretti) drives through the dark to check on a prized white horse, only to be caught up in the intrigues of its shady owners, and a probing late-night conversation about classical philosophy, modern dance, and the nature of vocation. Novelist, musician, and filmmaker Eliza Barry Callahan turns genre on its ear, with voluptuous nocturnal celluloid cinematography by Alfonso Herrera Salcedo.
Visual artist and filmmaker Éric Baudelaire (Un film dramatique, NYFF57) returns with another marvelous, improvisatory collaboration with school-age kids, this time at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris.
Shot largely in New York between 1976 and 1984, this newly restored, seldom-screened film from critic and artist Fred Camper is a fragmentary, diaristic work, capturing a cluttered and melancholic world on silent Super 8 Ektachrome reversal film.
A girl in a collectibles store covets a rare figurine in Heather Landsman's sexy hyperpop vignette. Online communities, fandom, shoplifting, and the stealth action video game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty become interlocking, quicksilver metaphors for the furtive, grasping workings of identity and desire under surveillance. Featuring local cult heroes Isobel Fox and Will Menaker in key supporting roles.
One of the city's legendary cruising spots, Jacob Riis Park in the Rockaways, is today, despite encroaching gentrification, the public space where queer and trans New Yorkers, especially of color, can be most comfortable in the least clothing. Juxtaposing priceless archival material with sunny and sensual new footage, J. Wortham's documentary is a history, a celebration, and a rallying cry.
Contemporary suburban Athens becomes the site of astronomical, ethereal beauty in Greek filmmaker Jacqueline Lentzou's audacious film, which glances at the ephemerality of life with humor and poignancy as it charts a consequential day for 15-year-old Jo.
Fluttering forms and buzzing shards of light conjure a grimy monochrome world in Rebecca's Mess. Punctuated by eruptions of pixelation, apologetic text, and jump-scare abstractions, Jamie Crewe's tense and sinister work creates a hybrid organic-electric space in which lurking dolls peer out at the spectator from a haze of cursed video.
An anniversary commission of Torino's Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Jia Zhangke's (Caught by the Tides, NYFF62) latest spans the past, present, and future of moving-image culture, from the shadow puppets made by a girl in Guangdong to the smartphone videos her mother sends her from Torino, where she's traveled to reunite with her husband, but found only a stranger. As in her spouse Jia's features, Zhao Tao is the still point in a turning, globalized world, with all its disconnections and surprising symmetries.
This exuberant yet sobering documentary from Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest)—with the help of London schoolkids equipped with cameras—goes behind the scenes at Abbey Road to capture the recording of a charity album from War Child Records, which aids children in conflict zones. The screening will be followed by an extended Q&A with Glazer.
Working in collaboration with painter Huh Yun-hee, Jonathan Seungjoon Lee documents a year-long practice of filming the sunrise through multiple exposures on four 100-foot rolls of 16mm film, one for each season, with seven separate sunrise shoots layered onto each roll. In lush, dizzying compositions, sea and sunrise, paint and celluloid, line and color collide in thick, vertiginous superimpositions of lilac, gold, and aquamarine.
The title of Ben Balcom and Josh Weissbach's collaborative film suggests both the form of letter-writing and the act of making meaning. Cryptic voices and ghostly images accumulate and collide in eerie soft focus and fleeting alternations of light and shadow, as noise steadily coalesces into a signal.
In Karissa Hahn's enigmatic silent film, a series of dizzying whip-pans seems to reveal a sunlit woodland scene, which quickly dissolves into abstracted shapes, flickers of shadow and light, and curious traces of the natural and human-made. Deceptive in its simplicity, Moored Shadow constructs an impossible landscape from motion and monochrome.
On the soundtrack of National Seating, Pleas Everson Sr. narrates the history of his many jobs—farming, bus-driving, washing cars, army service, factory work, truck-driving—while the camera explores the beat-up interior and exterior of a 1951 GMC school bus. Taking its title from National Seat, the factory where Pleas worked for 18 years, Kevin Jerome Everson's film moves from the micro to the macro, connecting one man's private work history to larger questions of labor, the body, time, and employment—first in detailed close-up, then in unstable stereoscope.
In Kleber Mendonça Filho's inaugural NYFF Encounters short film, Jafar Panahi recalls the cinephilia of his youth from the surreal remove of the 2025 New York Film Festival.
The playful and inventive They're Here places the viewer within a community of New Yorkers who have had close encounters with UFOs and reexamined their lifestyles as a result.
In his final film, Luchino Visconti offers a poison-pill variation on the theme that consumed his career—the moral decay of the soul-sick aristocracy—while achieving a masterful synthesis of stylistic splendor and emotional intensity.
Unorthodox Iranian filmmaker Mani Haghighi's lively, stimulating documentary profiles Nasser Bakhshi, a painter, conceptual artist, collector, and curator—and some would say hoarder—whose monumental archive creates a record of collective memory.
Martine Syms blends recreations with home movies from the life of Brent David Freaney, a lifelong pop girlie who was once, as vintage camcorder footage reveals, a Deep South teenager obsessed with outspoken The Real World: New Orleans castmate Melissa Howard. RW-LO is a nostalgic—and surprising—inquiry into what happens when people start being celebrities, and they stop being real.
Jennifer Jones gives a career-best performance in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's glorious tribute to the otherworldly landscapes where Powell's father grew up, in the first complete restoration of the original version of Gone to Earth.
Initiated in 1968, Morgan Fisher's Screening Room is a site-specific work, a film remade for and shown only in the place in which it was filmed. This latest version (or, to use Fisher's term, "state") of the film—with production executed by filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins with the support of Mostly Works and camerawork by Dan Fridman—leads the spectator into Film at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater in a single tracking shot, a journey that unveils cinema's enigmatic status as, at once, a physical space, a filmic object, and an ephemeral image.
An underseen and criminally overlooked work of the Nouvelle Vague, Paula Delsol's first feature film, about a young woman's encounters with a succession of different men, is a kind of modernist report on the state of women's liberation in 1960s France.
FATHERLAND centres on the relationship between the Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika, actress, writer and rally driver. In the summer of 1949, at the height of the Cold War, father and daughter embark on a challenging and emotional road trip in a black Buick taking them across a Germany in ruins – from US dominated Frankfurt to Soviet controlled Weimar. Returning home after sixteen years of exile in the US, Thomas Mann has to face not only a divided fatherland, but also deep fracture within his own family. With FATHERLAND, Pawlikowski picks up where he left off with his award-winning Ida and Cold War, exploring – in his elliptic, distilled way – the themes of identity, family, love and guilt amid the turmoil and confusion of post-war Europe.
The uncanny landscapes of Lebanon, Syria, and occupied Palestine provide the setting for The Wayfinders, which turns a 2004 3D flight simulation program into a rumination upon themes of loss, displacement, and the right of return. Combining otherworldly tropospheric excursions with evocative narration, Peggy Ahwesh offers a virtual tour of vanished spaces and expunged histories via simulacra of the now-defunct Jerusalem International Airport, once a hub for air travel and mobility throughout a region now ravaged by war, tight border control, and forced departures.
A chaotic tapestry of emblems and luminous portals guide us through the warped signage and smearing surfaces of Hong Kong in Simon Liu's film, a densely layered reverie of civic spaces that appear to be dissolving into irreality. Exploding across uncanny mindscapes, Procedures explores the iridescent somewhere of a city as a labyrinth of gated geometries and stifled energies.
For her majestic work of earthy imagination, filmmaker and photographer Tala Hadid immersed herself in the rugged, fraternal world of a group of horse-riders in central Morocco, as they take part in an equestrian military ritual that dates to the 16th century.
To make Harmony—newly restored by the Chicago Film Society—Tatsu Aoki gathered 16mm footage of pedestrians in Chicago's Loop, and assembled it into as many as 32 layers of superimposition. As striding business-casual slacks and summer dresses effulge into a blur, a formal pattern as rigorous as the urban grid becomes overwhelmed by the vibrating tactility of teeming humanity.
The latest from Ted Fendt is a gentle exploration of the time, space, and syntax of life and literature centered on a small circle of friends and acquaintances in Berlin who meet over the course of a year for a book club tackling the work of magical realist novelist Anna Maria Ortese.
Hong Kong–born artist Tiffany Sia confronts the Cold War legacy of China in this landscape film shot amidst the serene environs of Taiwan's Kinmen archipelago, where a major battle took place at the end of the Chinese Civil War.
In 1980, a group of environmental activists, scientists, and policymakers convened to discuss an alarming government study on climate change. Tom McCarthy (Spotlight) re-creates this historical moment with a brilliant ensemble cast including Paul Rudd, Amy Ryan, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, and more.
An American drama of uncommon intelligence, humor, and grace, the latest from writer-director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) stars Pedro Pascal in a career-best performance as a cellist picking up the pieces of a fractured life.
The oddball brilliance of Werner Herzog—returning to NYFF for the first time since 1982's Fitzcarraldo (NYFF20)—is in full effect in this tale of two sisters (Kate and Rooney Mara, in total sync) who live by their own social and emotional standards and rules.
A garden path, a billiards room, a solarium, a parlor—historical photographs of these shadowy scenes and spectral atmospheres are subject to strange and subtle transformations in Yixuan Zhang's evocative stereoscopic film, which explores the uncanny space-time and illusions of depths hidden within the two-dimensional surface of the screen.
Completed in 1965 but suppressed by Soviet authorities until its eventual release in 1987, Yuri Ilyenko's debut feature is a cryptic, visionary work that chronicles the interiority of an old peasant who is beset by memories and apparitions as he prepares for death.
The ragged, desolate landscapes around eastern California's Owens Lake are rendered in negative monochrome in the latest entry in Adam Piron's film cycle about the brutal history of Indigenous land expropriation in the American West. Deploying images from Thomas Edison's 1894 films of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, The Flesh of the Mountain recounts the violent legacy of white settlers' claim upon Paiute lands for the mining of silver—an essential component of motion-picture film.