nyc experimental film festival

MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival Returns For 2024

NYC's premiere film festival specializing in experimental and daring LGBTQ+ filmmaking, is now open for submissions.

Calling all Queer experimental filmmakers! MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, NYC's premiere film festival specializing in experimental and daring LGBTQ+ filmmaking, is now open for submissions . MIX Fest 2024 is planned for this November. 

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With a storied history of featuring work from iconoclastic queer filmmakers like Todd Haynes , Gus Van Sant , and Barbara Hammer, this incredible space for community and artistic invention is preparing to relaunch as a continuing venue and platform to explore the possibilities of experimental queer cinema through ONE NIGHT STAND, a series of monthly screenings at various New York locations uncovering the essential work that has screened as a part of MIX NYC. Filmmaker and former festival director Stephen Winter notes, “There's this incredible surge of young trans filmmakers in NYC and the world right now - and we're thrilled to bring this forum back to life. I love that there will be an experimental, queer media festival this fall.” 

MIX NYC, one of the longest queer film festivals in New York, has had an indelible impact on queer culture through its programming of subversive, exciting, and challenging works from auteurs like Winter and Jennie Livingston, while also cultivating an undeniably joyous and raucous party that happens in conjunction with the screenings. Dip in for a look at some of the early visions of Christine Vachon and Isaac Julien and then migrate to where the music and drinks are happening; it's all a part of the MIX NYC experience. 

Deeply embedded within a part of New York's queer cultural history, the time and place for political, transgressive, and thrilling art and culture will be reignited through these MIX NYC: ONE NIGHT STAND screenings leading up to the big festival in November. " We highly encourage donations to help us make the return of MIX NYC the best it can be," says interim-acting co-director Alex Smith . "For filmmakers who need a space to share their disruptive art and commune with an audience ready and willing to embrace it, MIX NYC is where queer cinema can explode!" 

Submit films here: https://filmfreeway.com/MIXNYCFilmFestival-1  

Catch the next one-night stand screenings at Millennium Film Works, Goethe Institute and Anthology Film Archives

Full Festival in late Fall

For more information about volunteering or joining the Programming Committee, email [email protected] . 

ABOUT MIX NYC:

MIX NYC is the longest-running queer film festival in New York City. Established in 1987, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, by ACT UP stalwarts Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman , this DIY festival was organized in response to experimental film venues in New York City not programming contemporary work by LBGTQ+ filmmakers, and as a mecca for astoundingly transgressive, non-commercially viable works. As the nonprofit home of the annual New York Queer Experimental Film Festival and the ACT UP Oral History Project, MIX NYC has featured early works by filmmakers such as Christine Vachon, Todd Haynes , Isaac Julien, Thomas Allen Harris, Barbara Hammer, Stephen Winter, Juan Carlos Zaldivar, Jonathan Caouette, Jennie Livingston, Gus Van Sant , and Matthew Mishory; and the fest itself has been helmed by some incredible people, including Rajendra Roy and Shari Frilot. 

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Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation

DATE, TIME, & LOCATION: Saturday, November 11 // 3:30PM + 6PM Museum of the Moving Image 36-01 35th Ave, Queens, NY 11106 Saturday, November 18 // 12:30–5PM Block Cinema 40 Arts Cir Dr. Evanston, IL 60208 Sunday, October 29 // 3PM 2220 Arts + Archives 2220 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90057

The Eyeworks Festival is an annual screening series focusing on experimental animation presented by Pioneer Works and taking place in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Founded in 2010, Eyeworks is dedicated to exhibiting distinctive, personal, visionary experimental films that use the technique of animation. The festival’s programs showcase outstanding experimental animation and include classic films and contemporary works.

Eyeworks focuses on works made by individual artists, drawing on the tradition of classic cartoon animation, and the lineages of avant-garde and underground cinema. The aim of Eyeworks is to present works that engage the enormous potential inherent in the artform of animation, and to show pieces that use animation as part of distinctly personal, conceptual, exploratory, and critical practices. David OReilly, Lori Damiano, Nancy Andrews, Caleb Wood, Takeshi Murata, Martin Arnold, Jacolby Satterwhite, Naoyuki Tsuji, Janie Geiser, Laura Harrison, and Barry Doupé have been featured as festival guests, with retrospective screenings. The 2023 festival program will be presented in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.

The Eyeworks Festival is organized by Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré and is based in Los Angeles, it is presented by Pioneer Works.

MIX NYC promotes, produces and preserves experimental media that is rooted in the lives, politics and experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and otherwise queer-identified people. MIX’s work challenges mainstream notions of gender and sexuality while also sending traditional categories of form and consent.

Founded in 1987 by author Sarah Schulman and filmmaker Jim Hubbard, MIX NYC produces New York’s longest-running lesbian & gay film festival. In addition, MIX also hosts free local community screenings, regular monthly screenings and national touring programs throughout the year. To reach out to audiences beyond downtown Manhattan, MIX takes programs to venues in other boroughs and has worked in collaboration with community-based media programs such as Paper Tiger TV, Lesbian Herstory Archives, and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance.

Besides our internationally-renowned queer experimental film festival, MIX NYC is proud to fund A Different Take, a video production workshop for LGBTQ youth, which teaches young people ages 14-24 all aspects of digital video production including scriptwriting, directing, shooting, sound track design & editing. Visit the A Different Take website here .

Our other major project is the ACT UP Oral History Project. The purpose of this project is to present comprehensive, complex, human, collective, and individual pictures of the people who have made up ACT UP/New York. These interviews reveal what has motivated them to action and how they have organized complex endeavors. We hope that this information will de-mystify the process of making social change, remind us that change can be made, and help us understand how to do it. Visit ACT UP here .

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Hyperallergic

Sensitive to Art & its Discontents

The Best Experimental Shorts at the New York Film Festival

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The New York Film Festival, one of the city’s most venerable institutions of cinema, has seen a remarkable spike in popularity this year, with many of its programs rapidly selling out. Even so, the festival’s brilliant Currents section — its lineup of more experimental and risk-taking films — still runs the risk of going overlooked. Of special note here are the Currents shorts programs, which bring together some of the best and most notable short films that have been making the rounds throughout the year. 

One of these programs showcases new works by some of our most inventive directors : France’s Jean-Luc Godard, China’s Wang Bing, and Portugal’s Pedro Costa. The centerpiece is Wang’s Man in Black (2023) , a tribute to classical composer Wang Xilin that both figuratively and literally strips him bare. Nude, the elderly musician prowls a vacant theatre, often making frightened poses of supplication or defense. Eventually, he sits down and addresses the camera, providing context for his odd dance: He recounts his imprisonment and abuse in China throughout the 1960s and ’70s, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. Wang explains how he has expressed his experiences through his music, making this both a documentary testimony and a performance piece.

Costa’s “The Daughters of Fire” (2023) is a hypnotic triptych of three singing women standing amid volcanic landscapes. He has described it as a prelude of sorts to an upcoming feature. Godard’s “Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars” (2023) is the opposite, less a complete work than a proof of concept, describing a feature he was planning at the time of his death last year. Enigmatic and fragmented, it’s a melancholy and completely true-to-form final statement from the legend of the French New Wave.

Godard’s spirit of innovative montage lives on in Adam Piron’s “Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image) ” (2023). When Piron sees an image of a Ukrainian soldier with a “native warrior” tattoo that happens to depict one of Piron’s relatives, he looks into the photo’s provenance. This investigation is from the perspective of a phone screen, complete with a portrait-mode aspect ratio. The image scrolls between TikTok videos, conversations between Piron with friends and relatives, and social media feeds. In the process, the film scrutinizes the overlaps between indigeneity, military tradition, memes, cultural symbols, and ideas of resistance. Similar formal experimentation is seen in Jamie Crewe’s “False Wife” (2022), a frantically edited, often strobe-effected evocation of a drug-fueled rave that even includes instructions for when the viewer should take poppers. (I did not follow such directives, so I may have had an incomplete experience.)

Contrasting these modern takes is the languid deliberation of Shambhavi Kaul’s “ Slow Shift ” (2023), which looks at monkeys going about their lives in the ancient Indian city of Hampi, which according to folklore was the home of Hanuman and the rest of the monkey kingdom in the Ramayana . The film recalls the opening chapter of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) , but without the inciting extranormal incident that caused the apes in that film to begin their evolution toward humanity. Instead, the langurs gambol about and watch the world around them, suggesting life persisting against the incomprehensible backdrop of both human and geological history.

Furthering the observational mode is Ayo Akingbade’s “ The Fist ” (2022), which surveys a Guinness brewery in Nigeria, the first of its kind outside Ireland or the UK. Free of all but the most incidental dialogue and a complex soundscape of industrial noise, it rigorously scrutinizes the different labor processes that go into globalization, eliciting broader thoughts about how these African workers fit into the global economy. No discussion of observational documentary would be complete without a mention of the prolific Kevin Jerome Everson , whose 2023 short “ If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move ” follows two musicians recording and mixing a new track. In the middle of their process is a reference to John Cage’s “4’33 ” (1952) , used as a “soundtrack” of diegetic audio. It’s a discombobulating blend of old and new music — fitting for the mélange of styles to be found in the Currents shorts.

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Dan Schindel

Dan Schindel is a freelance writer and copy editor living in Brooklyn, and a former associate editor at Hyperallergic. His portfolio and links are here. More by Dan Schindel

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New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival

• BAM Film 2024

NewFest returns to BAM to celebrate the 36th anniversary of its annual New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival! Don’t miss the queer cultural event of the fall, featuring a thrilling lineup of highly anticipated LGBTQ+ films from around the world. The schedule includes over 140 premiere narrative, documentary, and short films, TV series, panel conversations, and more—plus parties! In addition to events at BAM, NewFest includes in-person screenings and Q&A’s at SVA Theatre and The LGBT Community Center in Manhattan, and at Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park. And with a Festival Pass, you can enjoy in-person benefits—including exclusive events, reserved seats, and more—and access streaming films virtually throughout the US.

Leadership support for BAM Film provided by The Thompson Family Foundation

Major support for programs in the Lepercq Cinema is provided by The Lepercq Charitable Foundation

Looking For Langston & Tongues Untied: 35th Anniversary Double-Bill

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One of the sharpest and sweetest satires in John Waters’s formidable filmography, Pecker skewers the absurdity of haughty gallery culture while playfully confronting exploitation, consent, and fame.

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Camp icon Divine stars as a frustrated housewife whose domestic life isn’t exactly what she imagined, in John Waters’s perfectly pungent parody of Douglas Sirk’s so-called “women’s pictures.”

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Shorts: Caribbean Pride Power

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Looking ahead to the 2024 New York Film Festival

My experience of the 2024 New York Film Festival (NYFF) was unusual. To be entirely frank, health issues kept me from attending the majority of the NYFF’s press screenings in person. Since the biggest distributors tightly control access to their films, my viewing revolved around the experimental Currents section.

One longstanding issue with the festival has been that its Main Slate consists of a preview of the next 6 months’ New York arthouse releases, no matter how good the films may be. (This year, it opens with RaMell Ross’ Colson Whitehead adaptation “Nickel Boys” and closes with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz.” It also includes gay director Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia” and the queer Vietnamese love story “Viet and Nam.”) So I was not able to preview three of this year’s most prominent LGBTQ-themed films — Jacques Audiard’s trans musical “Emilia Perez,” gay director Luca Guadagnino’s William S. Burroughs adaptation “Queer,” and a documentary on Elton John made by his husband — but I did get to see many of the unabashedly uncommercial films in Currents, which include a tribute to iconic queer author James Baldwin and a nature documentary by gay French filmmaker Pierre Creton. The Revivals section includes two extremely different features by gay men: Filipino director Lino Brocka’s 1980 melodrama “Bona” (opening for its first U.S. release in December) and Clive Barker’s horror classic “Hellraiser.”

Pedro Almodovar’s dramas can be a bit too mature for their own good, but “The Room Next Door” skirts most of the gay Spaniard’s more staid impulses while staying fairly restrained. As a pair of friends guiding each other to life’s end, Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton both give fully lived-in performances. The plot — and Almodovar’s attitude towards it — may be challenging to describe without falling into clichés. One of the side characters is a nihilistic doomer, but “The Room Next Door,” adapted from queer author Sigird Nunez’s novel “What Are You Going Through,” avoids such an attitude by embracing life only on its own terms. While signing her book at Rizzoli, Ingrid (Moore) learns that her old friend Martha (Swinton), a former war correspondent, is struggling with terminal cancer. Even though they grew apart years ago, Ingrid visits Martha in the hospital, and they become closer than ever. Martha insists that she can’t take any more pain, planning to kill herself with a pill ordered off the dark web. Ingrid goes along with her to an Airbnb, where they plan to spend Martha’s last few weeks together.

The clothes and décor of “The Room Next Door” are impeccably fashionable. Even the cancer ward looks like a layout from an upscale fashion magazine. Against this palette of bright colors, Martha’s decline is all the more noticeable. The film makes a few missteps. It relies too heavily on flashbacks early on. A scene in which an arrogant, conservative cop interrogates one of the women only plays as Almodovar grandstanding in favor of the right to euthanasia. The rest of the time, Almodovar picks up where his thoughts about aging in his last feature, “Pain and Glory,” left off. There, Antonio Banderas played a stand-in for the director; here, Martha is much further along the path to the end of her life, but the concerns are much the same. Given this story, “The Room Next Door” is far from a downer; it insists on the importance of friendship as a hedge against life’s cruelty.

The informal title of Yashaddai Owens’ “Jimmy” is a cue that the film will not be a typical biopic. It follows James Baldwin for a brief period when he left the U.S. to live in Istanbul and Paris; the time frame isn’t clear. Owens, who also works as a photographer, takes an impressionist approach. For the scenes in Istanbul, the camera represents Baldwin’s (Benny O. Arthur) point of view, as he wanders around the city.

When he arrives in Paris, the film finally shows his face and voice for the first time. Dialogue is given little emphasis; instead, Owens’ 16mm cinematography and Paco Andreo’s score, mixing orchestral and jazz sounds, are active participants in Baldwin’s experience. Feeling liberated from American racism for the first time, he dances through the streets of Paris and playfully chases a man through his apartment building before sleeping with him. Owens’ black-and-white cinematography finds a wide variety of light and color within its images, which seems like a political point as well as an aesthetic one. It’s exciting to see such a thoughtful approach to the typically dreary run of movies about great artists. This is the exact opposite of Oscar bait.

Moving at a narcotic pace, Truong Minh Quy’s “Viet and Nam” demands great patience. It does not quite reward it. The film, which has already been banned in Vietnam, relates to the lives of coal miners, who find a space deep within their workplace to have sex. Going unnamed within the movie, they’re credited as Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) and Nam (Phan Thanh Hai). Set in 2001, the film is concerned with the long-term impact of the Vietnam War: Nam and his mother are both haunted by the disappearance of his father, a soldier during the ‘70s. They travel to the border of Cambodia to look for evidence of his corpse. Facing pressure to marry women and raise children, Viet and Nam must keep their relationship secret. “Viet and Nam” simulates the experience of gradually losing the ability to focus while watching a film late at night. The dark, moody 16mm cinematography shows off Truong’s eye for framing dust and darkness, but overall, his style comes very close to a direct imitation of gay Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The film is most striking when Viet and Nam find love amidst the material effects of toiling in the mines, as when one wipes his semen off his partner’s nude body.

“You Burn Me” is an improbable blend of scholarship and desire. Since all but one of Greek author Sappho’s poems have survived in fragmentary form (the title comes from one), gay Argentinean director Matias Piñeiro’s film assembles a similar blend of shards. It all but calls out for footnotes. Its origins lie in a chapter of Cesare Pavese’s novel “Dialogues with Leico,” a four-page conversation between Sappho (from whom the word “sapphic” and the concept of lesbianism originate) and nymph Britomart called “The Foam Sea.” Piñeiro fills “You Burn Me” with images of the sea, even going back to the bacterial foam that became the first form of life on earth. (The 16mm cinematography is richly textured.)

Rather than adapt “The Foam Sea” in any straightforward manner, he adopts a form that’s equally poetic and mysterious. He begins by recognizing his own need to film the story, using repeated images — a hand reaching to an apartment buzzer, water running in a sink — as rhythmic motifs. “You Burn Me” is haunted by suicide: that of the characters in Pavese’s novel and the end of the writer’s own life. Yet it reimagines cinema, mixing several media and foregrounding the problems of translation, to do justice to the achievements of Sappho. Although rather opaque on a single viewing, it’s stimulating in the manner of Jean-Luc Godard’s late films, encouraging one to do further research to appreciate it.

French director Pierre Creton makes a living as a farmer, working in rural Normandy. He’s teamed up with Vincent Barré for a series of nature films, the latest being “7 Walks With Mark Brown.” This just might be the most soothing entry in the entire festival. Brown, a botanist, identifies plants in a soft, near-ASMR voice. As the film reaches its end, it goes further back, towards a forest containing some of the oldest surviving plants on earth. If the notion of experiencing a nature hike through film is rather ironic, Creton and Barré lavish caring close-ups upon flowers and grasses. Creton’s recollections of having sex amongst these plants only add to an affection that one can’t miss.

62nd New York Film Festival | Sept. 27th-Oct. 14th | For full schedule and ticket information for these and other films, go to filmlinc.org .

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10 Films You Won’t Want to Miss at the New York Film Festival 2024

Festival runs from september 27 to october 14.

Some track the passing of time by the changing of seasons, by the turning of the Gregorian calendar, or even by the annual surge of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” in early November. For many New Yorker cinephiles, though, time is refracted through the always-reliable, autumnal return of Film at Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival (September 27-October 14). Now in its 62nd edition, the city’s largest film festival once again transforms Lincoln Center into a film-lovers utopia—hosting hotly-anticipated premieres, celebrity appearances, deep-cut restorations, and much more throughout its two-week exhibition.

The New York Film Festival has always been reliable for its simplicity. It boasts excellent curation, a large but manageable lineup, and easily accessible venues that are mostly near one another. Even so, this year’s edition is sure to feel different than last year’s, since that took place during both the WGA’s and SAG’s historic strikes for better working conditions. While the SAG strike didn’t end until November 2023, WGA’s strike reached an agreement during last year’s festival, allowing some writers to book last-minute flights and attend their films’ screenings/Q&A-sessions. This year, both actors and writers will be in attendance—restoring an alternate sense of glamor and grandeur to the festival.

Despite the different energy that may be present during this year’s edition, one thing has surely remained constant: the festival’s excellent lineup. In what has been a difficult year so far for both film and film festivals—both the Sundance and Cannes lineups proved to be underwhelming—NYFF’s lineup shows a lot of promise. As such, it was hard limiting our list to just 10 films. But, we managed to get the job done. Here are the films you won’t want to miss at this year’s New York Film Festival, as selected by one of UTR’s film critics, Kaveh Jalinous.

1. The Brutalist (Main Slate)

Who: Brady Corbet, director of 2018’s underrated Vox Lux , Academy Award-winning actor Adrien Brody, Academy Award-nominated actress Felicity Jones.

What: “An accomplished Hungarian Jewish architect and World War II survivor (Adrien Brody) reconstructs his life in the U.S. and enters the orbit of an obscenely wealthy captain of industry (Guy Pearce) in Brady Corbet’s richly detailed, brilliantly acted recreation of postwar America.”

Why: Even before it premiered to smash acclaim at this year’s Venice Film Festival, we were already excited to see Corbet’s follow-up to a film as daring, harrowing, and unforgettable as Vox Lux . And sure, it helps that the film will be projected in either 35mm or 70mm for all of its festival screenings—an uncommon feature at both NYFF and most other film festivals.

2. Happyend (Main Slate)

Who: Neo Sora, the son of the late musician Ryuichi Sakamoto.

What: “Contemporary global anxieties over the gradual sliding into governmental totalitarianism find an original and touching outlet in this resonant drama set sometime in the near future in a Tokyo high school, where best friends Kou (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) run afoul of their disciplinarian principal (Shiro Sano), who has installed a draconian surveillance system.”

Why: For those who saw Sora’s Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus— a quasi-concert film, quasi-documentary honoring his late father—at last year’s festival or in theaters earlier this year, the plot of Happyend might seem a little shocking or unexpected. But, the precision with which Sora captured his father’s piano performance suggests he already has a keen sense of camerawork and blocking, and we can’t wait to see how he applies his directorial talents to narrative filmmaking.

3. Việt and Nam (Main Slate)

Who: Director Truong Minh Quy, unknown actors Phąm Thanh Hài and Đào Duy Bào Đįnh.

What: “Two young coal miners enjoy secret moments of physical embrace before one of them embarks on a dangerous emigration to Laos. From this personal drama, Vietnamese filmmaker Trương Minh Quý digs deeper to excavate the memories and legacies of a nation.”

Why: Amidst a disappointing Cannes lineup earlier this year, Truong Minh Quy’s film seemed like a standout—both for its intriguing plot synopsis and its divisive reaction amongst critics. NYFF, like any film festival, is one of discovery—and a tender tale between two coal miners in a slowly unwinding narrative to reveal larger truths about a nation’s culture and history as a whole has the potential to be a large discovery. Plus, the film being shot on 16mm (an aesthetic sure to match the film’s reported quiet, meditative quality) is yet another bonus.

4. Universal Language (Currents)

Who: Matthew Rankin, whose feature-length debut, The Twentieth Century , played major fall festivals in 2019.

What: “With deadpan, absurdist charm, Manitoban filmmaker Matthew Rankin, inspired by humanistic Iranian films of the 1970s, triangulates a group of interconnected storylines set in a wintry, bleakly beautiful Winnipeg with surreal, Tati-esque humor.”

Why: We love a synopsis that gives practically nothing away about a film—highlighting the importance of seeing the movie to unlock its narrative and thematic underpinnings—and NYFF’s description of Universal Language does just that. Even so, the working parts—1970s Iranian films, Tati-esque humor and even the Winnipeg setting (when’s the last time you’ve seen a film set in Manitoba’s largest city?) have all captured our attention. We hope the film is as good as its Cannes reviews suggest.

5. Hard Truths (Main Slate)

Who: Veteran British filmmaker Mike Leigh; Secrets & Lies collaborator Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

What: “Mike Leigh returns to a contemporary milieu for the first time since Another Year for this raw, uncompromising domestic drama starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies) in a gutsy, excoriating performance as a middle-aged, working-class woman whose emotional and physical health problems have metastasized into a profound and relentless anger.”

Why: The plot synopsis doesn’t give much away about Leigh’s latest film—even if what we do know so far seems aligned with the broader themes and motifs across the director’s filmography. Regardless, the fact that he’s working with excellent actress Jean-Baptiste again after collaborating in Secrets & Lies (which won the Palme d’Or in 1996) is enough to secure our interest.

6. The Room Next Door (Centerpiece Film, Main Slate)

Who: Acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almódovar, the always-incredible actresses Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.

What: “Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a best-selling writer, rekindles her relationship with her friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war journalist with whom she has lost touch for a number of years. Almodóvar’s finely sculpted drama, his first English-language feature, is the unmistakable work of a master filmmaker.”

Why: The reactions to Almodóvar’s first English-language feature film have been… mixed (the film received a notable 17-minute standing ovation at Venice, followed by largely average/decent reviews from critics). But, the fact that the film went on to take home Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion, has all but restored our interest. Plus, we’re excited to see how excellent performers Moore and Swinton lead what is sure to be an unforgettable film.

7. Stranger Eyes (Main Slate)

Who: Actor Lee Kang-sheng, a frequent collaborator of excellent Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang.

What: “A young married couple’s baby daughter goes missing and suspicion falls on their voyeur neighbor (Lee Kang-sheng, the star of Tsai Ming-liang’s films) in Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua’s riveting and unsettling thriller about contemporary surveillance culture and the mysteries of the human heart.”

Why: They say ‘don’t judge a book by its cover,’ which is sound advice. But, if we’re being completely honest, NYFF’s thumbnail image for Stranger Eyes— depicting a man staring at over 100 tiny scenes, each capturing a different angle of a house—is so interest-piquing, we couldn’t not put this on our list. The intense synopsis, which seems to present a timely commentary on surveillance and neighborly distrust through the conventions of a thriller film, only makes us more excited to see Yeo Siew Hua’s newest.

8. The Sealed Soil (Revivals)

Who: Unknown and underrepresented Iranian director Marva Nabili.

What: “The earliest surviving Iranian film directed by a woman, Marva Nabili’s astonishing debut is a deftly observant and sensually attuned work that conjures the everyday plight of the female subject under the stifling patriarchy of village life in southwestern Iran.”

Why: NYFF’s Revivals section is perhaps the festival’s most consistent sub-section, usually highlighting excellent restored films that have been lost to history for one reason or another. This year’s slate is no exception, but it’s Nabili’s film that has caught our interest most. Iranian cinema is a treasure trove that is slowly being unpacked in New York cinemas—evidenced by MoMA’s excellent Iranian cinema series last year or the recent re-release of Bahram Bayzaie’s The Stranger and the Fog —and we’re excited to see Nabili’s creative vision and perspective on the big screen.

9. Direct Action (Currents)

Who: Experimental filmmaker Ben Russell in collaboration with film installation and performance artist Guillaume Cailleau.

What: “This detailed portrait of the intricate processes of a political eco-activist group in France, a collaboration between American experimental filmmaker Ben Russell and French artist Guillaume Cailleau, is a work of striking, meaningful duration that shows the stakes, pitfalls, and reverberations of taking a militant stance against the injustices of our times.”

Why: It wouldn’t be a film festival if we weren’t eagerly anticipating a three-and-a-half-hour documentary, and Direct Action , whose runtime seems to be essential to provide a portrait of its subject and contextualize them within broader society, definitely has our interest. Plus, the film took home the Best Film Award in the Encounters section at this year’s Berlinale , providing yet another reason to catch this sprawling documentary.

10. Apocalypse in the Tropics (Spotlight)

Who: Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa, whose 2019 film The Edge of Democracy nabbed a Best Documentary nomination at the 2020 Oscars.

What: “In this gripping and urgent follow-up to her Oscar-nominated The Edge of Democracy , Petra Costa dramatizes the chilling rise of the far right in Brazil. Apocalypse in the Tropics focuses on how the evangelical movement paved the way for the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro and poses the threat of a national theocracy.”

Why: We greatly admired The Edge of Democracy, and in that documentary, Costa demonstrated a sharp, natural sense of how to report and analyze topics that were difficult to unpack. Given the five-year gap between that film and Apocalypse in the Tropics , we can’t wait to see how Costa has evolved as a documentarian and how her nonfiction storytelling approach has changed, and in some ways, perhaps stayed the same.

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Sep 06, 2024 Issue #73 - Maya Hawke and Nilüfer Yanya

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Suggestions

New york film festival 2024.

This year’s edition of the festival is a cinematic cornucopia unlike any other.

Gone are the days when cinephiles could just expect “Cannes on the Hudson” from the New York Film Festival. In his fifth year since assuming leadership of the selection committee from Kent Jones, artistic director Dennis Lim continues to bring both vitality and variety to the festival. If there’s a near-constant among the changes, it’s Hong Sang-soo having two movies in the main slate. (This year it’s By the Stream and A Traveler’s Needs .)

Elder statesmen like David Cronenberg, Mike Leigh, and Paul Schrader return with their latest films. But this 62nd edition of the festival, which runs from September 27 to October 24, doesn’t belong to the veterans. If any streak runs through the main slate, it’s the prominence of second features, including RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (this year’s opening-night selection), Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April , and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light . Giving these sophomore outings prime festival real estate is quite a vote of confidence in the next generation of auteurs leveling up on the global cinema circuit. (Not to be outdone, longtime Slant contributor Carson Lund is the lone debut feature filmmaker working in a fictional storytelling mode with Eephus .)

For those whose tastes run to the Croisette, the major prize recipients from this year’s Cannes, including Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winner Anora , are of course well-represented. And so are this year’s winners out of Berlinale (Mati Diop’s Dahomey ) and Venice (Pedro Almodóvar’s subdued but still subversive The Room Next Door , the centerpiece selection). Meanwhile, the closing-night selection, Steve McQueen’s Blitz , will have its premiere screening at the BFI London Film Festival a day before screening for the public in New York.

Documentary also takes up an increased prevalence in the main slate following the festival sunsetting their “Spotlight on Documentary” sidebar. The major world premieres in the lineup are both nonfiction works: Julia Loktev’s five-hour My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow and Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury . Rivaling Hong with his prolific output, Wang Bing also returns with the final two parts of his Youth trilogy: Hard Times and Homecoming .

But the documentary likeliest to make the most noise is the verité chronicle of Palestinian life, No Other Land . The film sparked a political firestorm in Berlin following the festival award acceptance speech by Yuval Abraham, one of the four credited directors of the film. With a group called the New York Counter Film Festival advocating a boycott of the festival in the name of solidarity with Palestine, the film may shape reality in addition to reflecting it.

And all this is to say nothing of the festival’s sidebars and their own embarrassment of riches. Spotlight, which features Luca Guadagnino’s Queer as its centerpiece, boasts no shortage of buzzy titles. Currents helps to surface innovative features and shorts at the cutting edge of film form. Among the many titles ripe for discovery, this year’s lineup offers new films by Jem Cohen and Matías Piñeiro, as well as Canada’s Oscar submission, Michael Rankin’s Universal Language , a one-of-a-kind riff on Iranian cinema. And while the restorations in this year’s Revivals section cover canonical legends of cinema ranging from Robert Bresson to Ousmane Sembène, one title in the mix turned quite a few heads: Clive Barker’s splatter film classic Hellraiser , an extreme offering that demonstrates just how wide a net the festival casts.

While the Toronto International Film Festival may still lay claim to the “festival of festivals” branding, this year’s New York Film Festival offers America’s version of a cinematic cornucopia. With 101 films from 48 countries spread across 18 glorious days, it’s hard to think of another festival that balances such expert curation with a wide variety of choices. Marshall Shaffer

For full reviews of the films in this year’s lineup, click on the links in the capsules below. (Titles will be added across the upcoming weeks.) For a complete schedule of films, screening times, and ticket information, visit Film at Lincoln Center .

All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)

All We Imagine as Light ’s characters are circumscribed by social disadvantages and personal hardships, yet they maintain a stubborn freedom. The film’s urban landscape is gaseous, gyrating, dizzyingly complex. Yet when night falls, it’s quiet and poetic, drawing you into an embrace. Payal Kapadia’s mode of understanding and constructing her Mumbai on screen makes fluid shifts from the cerebral to the viscerally sensual to the didactically political. These are tectonic transitions occurring on the level of the form, and Kapadia makes them look effortless. With this follow-up to A Night of Knowing Nothing , her 2021 docufiction about the student protest movements that swept India after the death of anti-caste student activist Rohith Vemula, Kapadia has created an exceptional document of a city and its people. Ryan Coleman

Anora (Sean Baker)

The eponymous character of Anora , a feisty 23-year-old Brooklyn sex worker, lives the sort of hardscrabble and precarious life that writer-director Sean Baker has vigorously tracked across his work. But while Baker’s protagonists are typically mired in the same place, Ani (Mikey Madison), as Anora emphatically prefers to be called, manages to escape the familiar, and crash through the class divide with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Her quixotic quest to remain among Russian oligarchs is a riotously funny neorealist farce that will be familiar to fans of Tangerine and Red Rocket , though at times it feels like the rougher edges of Baker’s vision have been smoothed out in the interest of driving home an easily digestible allegory. Mark Hanson

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)

Even though it also concerns an architect fighting entrenched elites to achieve his singular vision, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist doesn’t bow before the altar of The Fountainhead . Yet he takes a gauntlet thrown down early in King Vidor’s 1949 film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel—no place originality exists in architecture, and the past cannot be improved upon—more seriously than either artist. Corbet’s epic, like Adrien Brody’s László Toth, remains unconcerned with choosing between honoring the past and catering to the present. They instead seek to transcend time altogether, thus equipping their artistry to endure well into the future. László is an imperfect but never inconsistent protagonist, which is part of why his jagged edges mesh so well with the airtight construction of the film. Corbet builds on celluloid what László does with concrete: an unvarnished monument to the authentic American character. Shaffer

By the Stream (Hong Sang-soo)

Hong Sang-soo’s By the Stream opens on a pastoral autumn landscape of Seoul, with a stream running toward a bridge. Wide landscape shots are unusual for Hong, and this image introduces this stream as the first of several refrains that will run through the film as, well, currents. Amid a vast narrative, especially for Hong, one that’s rich in scandals and disappointments and broken promises, there’s the relief for the characters of the stream, the foliage, and the moon. So many of Hong’s films, but especially By the Stream , derive their volatility from his interest in the pitfalls of individuals making and consuming art, namely selfishness and isolation, which exist irreconcilably with the potential of art as a vehicle of personal expression and social unity. Art is a mode of potential connection built in large part on narcissism, then, and Hong is without peer these days in wrestling that irony onto the screen. Chuck Bowen

Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhang-ke)

Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides attests to the fact that making art under the most adverse conditions can prove to be serendipitous. If shooting a film from scratch wasn’t feasible under China’s restrictive Covid lockdowns, Jia viewed the situation as a formal constraint, in the same way a poet might approach the rules of a sestina. Turning to his existing body of work, he recycled earlier material, editing together unused footage with what could be shot under the circumstances. The result is a bricolage of documentary, minimalist drama, and experimental remake. As Jia’s filmography is inseparable from the career of his spouse and longtime collaborator, actress Zhao Tao, the film also operates as a dual retrospective. William Repass

Dahomey (Mati Diop)

Throughout its 69 minutes, Mati Diop’s captivating, fabulistic documentary Dahomey focuses on the return of 26 artifacts that France had stolen from the historical Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin) when, after centuries of occupation and colonial meddling, it was finally conquered and ransacked in the 1890s. The film confronts the reality of how modernity has been shaped by the West’s theft of cultural heritage. Its narrator, such as it is, is the spirit embodied by the statue of a Dahomey king, represented by a reverberating, multitracked voice that periodically dominates the soundtrack. The effect is haunting and powerful, a vivid reminder that in their original context, these figures had a presence and a personality suppressed but not erased by the distanced, anthropological gaze of the museum. Pat Brown

The Damned (Robert Minervini)

Recalling Roberto Minervini’s past docufiction work ( Low Tide , Stop the Pounding Heart , The Other Side ), The Damned is a show of impressionistic portraiture. Here, the regimented tasks of nomadic living are given the treatment that Gustave Caillebotte gave The Floor Scrapers . Shadows play on faces at night, and not a single scene is shot in the flatness of noon light. But while Minervini’s camera—its vintage lenses dropping off focus everywhere outside the immediate center of the frame—floridly beautifies the soldiers’ quotidian tasks, these men don’t see their lives as beautiful. “Does God approve of war?” asks a soldier at one point. Such fragments of dialogue heard throughout The Damned give the impression that every soldier in the film has been cut from the brooding cloth of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. Zach Lewis

Eephus (Carson Lund)

Carson Lund’s Eephus subtly tasks us with thinking of its characters as extensions of the titular pitch: weapons of deception and surprise, not least of which for how they increasingly reveal their passion for the sport and each other as the final game between their teams at an intramural field due to be paved over unfurls. Though set in the 1990s, Eephus feels keyed to the current anxiety over the erosion of public gathering spaces and America’s so-called loneliness epidemic. While the characters care deeply for baseball, their desperate efforts to prolong the game, in lieu of making far simpler plans for future meet-ups, make it obvious that their reasons for doing so go well beyond sport. It’s an irony that hangs over the final stretch of the film, and it’s one that Lund treats with elegiac empathy for the power of a shared interest. Jake Cole

Happyend (Neo Sora)

Neo Sora’s Happyend uses a Tokyo high school as a synecdoche for Japan when a principal (Sano Shirô) desperate to preserve his power over the subjects in his charge installs a cutting-edge surveillance system across campus. Named Panopty, the cheeky repacking of Foucauldian concepts gamifies the control of the student population. Of course, no demographic group is less likely to submit to mechanized discipline and punishment than teenagers. While the film is alternately impressive as teen drama and political commentary, Sora struggles to balance the immediacy of adolescent angst with the long-range outlook of using the students’ experience as a canary in the coal mine for society at large. It’s a confident narrative feature debut, with plenty of insight into the direction of a nation and generation, but it wants for more connective tissue between the small details and Sora’s bigger-picture views. Shaffer

Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari)

An eventful week in the waning days of a medieval English village provides the narrative backbone for Harvest , Athina Rachel Tsangari’s adaptation of Jim Crace’s novel. Tsangari finds her own way into the story’s setting—a lord-of-the-manor-ruled agricultural collective—by accentuating the grit and the grime. This is evident in everything from Sean Price Williams’s grainy 16mm cinematography to the casting of Caleb Landry Jones, who often seems like he’s just emerged dazed and confused from primordial sludge. But a good deal of Harvest tends to the sluggish, recreating the basic incidents of Crace’s story without adeptly communicating the main character’s peculiarities of perspective. What we’re left with is a handsomely mounted production in which much of the filth feels stage-managed. The muck that the film requires, both spiritual and psychological, shouldn’t have its own dressing room. Keith Uhlich

It’s Not Me (Leos Carax)

It’s Not Me began as a question posed by the Centre Pompidou in Paris: “Where are you at, Leos Carax?” The film begins with a modest “I don’t know” as a riposte to the proposed riddle, uttered through Carax’s hoarse and disaffected voice. This not knowing becomes the empty space to be filled with the philosophical speculations that are so central to the essay film as a genre. Here we have, then, a self-portrait that performs doubt as the purveyor of an unstable, and always preliminary, truth. For in the world of the essay, which Carax mimics with text-book precision, the filmmaker shares his vulnerability, not a ready-made argument. The one who’s supposed to know is exposed, perhaps sacrificed, as the one who’s simply supposed to wonder. And the forging of the oeuvre, ever so tentative, becomes the oeuvre itself. Diego Semerene

Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie)

Fans of Alain Guiraudie’s work may take the opening sequence of Misericordia as a sign that they’re in familiar terrain. A view from behind the windshield of a car winding its way through back roads to a small hillside village, it announces the premiere chronicler of lust and violence in the French countryside’s return to the milieu in which he made his name. Indeed, Misericordia finds Guiraudie revisiting old standbys—a linking of queer desire and mortality, a distanced but lighthearted absurdism, and a refusal to get moralistic about transgressive behavior—under a relatively conventional set of aesthetic strategies. Fortunately, the ideas roiling under the former wildman’s newly placid surfaces are as potent as ever. Brad Hanford

No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor)

Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor’s documentary No Other Land embeds the viewer within the dry hills and craggy caves of Masafer Yatta, in the wake of a court decision rejecting its denizens’ decades-long suit against the illegal Israeli seizure of their land and destruction of their homes. What becomes most evident as we see homes, schools, and playgrounds fall to heavy machinery cordoned off by armed guards is the patience of the Palestinians at No Other Land ’s center. Instead of meeting destruction in kind, Basel, an activist with a camera and a law degree who’s lived in the area his whole life, and his friends argue with the troops and organize marches on the desolate road that runs through the territory. With exceptional lucidity, No Other Land reminds us of the human stakes of Israel’s resettlement of the West Bank, and that fighting for justice starts from the ground up. Brown

Oh, Canada (Paul Schrader)

A free-associational portrait of Richard Gere’s Leonard as he slips in and out of consciousness while a film crew interviews him about his career as a celebrated political documentarian, Oh, Canada is also in conversation with Paul Schrader’s life as an aging filmmaker with an ailing wife and regrets over his treatment of his brother , also named Leonard. The result is a project that’s spring-loaded with tensions both explicit and implicit. Leonard is an avatar for haunted artists, one of whom has already joined him in the hereafter. There’s a sense in this adaptation of Russell Banks’s 2021 novel Foregone of Schrader wanting to pare back his customary aesthetic even further than it’s already been parred over the last several films and speak plainly, with as little scrim between the audience and himself as possible. Bowen

Pepe (Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias)

With Pepe , Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias uses the strange story of a murdered hippopotamus to tie together themes and ideas around eco-capitalism, the prosecution of Pablo Escobar, the relationship between countries in the global south, European racism, and ecological disaster. But while the film is clearly ambitious, its patchwork approach, a consistently dizzying game of reorientation meant to mirror Pepe’s plight, only winds its way to a point of inconclusiveness that will prove frustrating for most. As an anguished cry against colonialism, Pepe works best when illustrating the micro ways in which culture is erased by capital interests. In an especially astute way, it demonstrates how even knowledge and intellectualism can be colonial invaders, though it’s a shame that this demonstration comes at the expense of the film itself striking an overly intellectual pose. Greg Nussen

A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)

A Real Pain , Jesse Eisenberg’s follow-up to When You Get Done Saving the World , is a cavalcade of angst and agony, from the familial to the historical, with an occasionally quite bleak assessment of the human condition. But it’s also levitated by a joyful sense of humor that puts up a good fight against the story’s darker moments without trying to joke them into irrelevance. A Real Pain isn’t a film that embraces easy answers or platitudes. Even after David (Eisenberg), a digital ad salesman, reveals so much of his and his cousin Benjy’s (Kieran Culkin) past in a monologue to the other members of their tour group in Poland, it doesn’t seem clear how they’ll move forward. You sense that, after their trip, the two may have a better understanding of the pain they carry but that they still won’t know how to escape it. Chris Barsanti

The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar)

Strange events precipitate the bonds of sisterhood in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door . While staring down death, Martha (Tilda Swinton) makes a request of her friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore). She procures a euthanasia pill and intends to slip peacefully into death. The intention isn’t to implicate Ingrid in her euthanasia by having her administer the pill or witness the passage. Martha simply wishes for the comfort of knowing that she has a loving presence in an adjacent room. As the women attempt to communicate across a divide, Almodóvar’s gaze lingers on pointed silences and unexplained gestures. Given the tremendous nuances that Moore and Swinton can pack into a single facial contortion, the camera has no problem picking up those grace notes. Together, the actresses’ harmonizing illuminates the film’s subversive observation that only death can help mend a frayed friendship. Shaffer

Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson)

Eschewing the primitive style for which Guy Maddin developed a following, Rumours stages its genre-inflected political satire in a surprisingly straightforward fashion. Co-directed with frequent collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, the film is set at a G7 summit hosted by a fictional German chancellor, Hilda Orlmann (Cate Blanchett), at a woodsy estate, where the participants are set to draft a provisional statement regarding an unnamed world crisis. The film’s skewering of the uselessness of politicians in our turbulent modern world goes into full comic overdrive once an explicitly apocalyptic event occurs. The apocalyptic endpoint may be a farcical fantasy on the surface, but the way the world’s leaders are prone to getting lost in the wilderness while the rest of us are annihilated by transparently immediate concerns is something that the film traces with chillingly droll precision. Hanson

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohamed Rasolouf)

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is another one of Mohammed Rasolouf’s clear-eyed accounts of the sacrifices and moral compromises forced on ordinary people by Iran’s oppressive regime. The state’s affinity for capital punishment is again a target of Rasolouf’s ire, but he also has in his sights bourgeois complacency, the tyranny of traditional values, and, above all, the cruel machinations of Iran’s patriarchal culture. Bringing implicit violence and a family’s simmering psychological warfare to the surface, the gradual mental deterioration of its put-upon patriarch sees the film’s final hour not only enter conventional action-thriller terrain but careen right through it, and it ends up somewhere not too far away from Overlook Hotel, in spirit at least. As much as this epic’s sermonizing approach might want for more subtlety, sometimes recalling a PSA, it’s refreshingly balanced and open in its inclusion of differing perspectives. David Robb

Stranger Eyes (Yeo Siew Hua)

Between Stranger Eyes and A Land Imagined , Yeo Siew Hua has a tendency to stage elaborate setups around comparatively straightforward concepts. This film in particular feels as though it wants to go much further—on governmental overreach, punitive justice, fractured identities, sex by way of screens—but it can’t seem to conceive of many uses for these ideas beyond suggestion. The notes it ultimately hits, even with an unexpected and emotional final sting, are frustratingly predictable. Still, the road there is windy and dense with intrigue, especially in moments contextualized as character studies of Lee Kang-sheng’s Wu. It’s a testament to the tremendous subtlety of Lee’s acting that it only becomes obvious in retrospect how much of Stranger Eyes is about him, and how much its world bends and refracts around his presence. Cole Kronman

Transamazonia (Pia Marais)

Pia Marais’s fourth feature centers around American faith healer Lawrence (Jeremy Xido), who preaches the Gospel to an impoverished Brazilian village in the heart of the Amazon, aided by his daughter, Rebecca (Helena Zengel), the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed her mother. Their role in the community is troubled when a conflict arises between a local Indigenous tribe and a violent gang in the employ of the logging industry laying waste to their homeland. Plunging headlong into the murk of exploitative missionary work and environmentally destructive capitalism, Transamazonia is a film with undeniable import and sociopolitical urgency, which its muddled narrative can’t completely dampen. Robb

A Traveler’s Needs (Hong Sang-soo)

In A Traveler’s Needs , though, Hong’s sleight of hand with narrative is less consistent than usual. For a long stretch of the film’s running time, Hong appears to have built the wrong concept around the wrong actor, giving Isabelle Huppert a conceptual role that leans hard on her brand of curt whimsicality. Kim Min-hee, a veteran of similar roles in Hong’s films, as well as his partner and a key collaborator behind the scenes, might’ve made a meal of this part, suffusing it with a customary sense of gravity and turmoil. But Huppert stays outside of the character, leaving a hole at the center of A Traveler’s Needs that’s atypical for Hong’s films. The variableness of this movie is the risk of a working method as rapid and intuitive as Hong’s, but even in this unusually uneven film fruit is eventually born. Bowen

A Universal Language (Matthew Rankin)

Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language , which is set in a parallel-universe Canada that recalls 1980s Iran as envisioned by one of the auteurs of the Iranian New Wave, takes an irreverent approach to depicting his country’s geography and socio-political environment. Though juxtaposing Canada’s drabness and relative lack of heritage with Iran’s millennia of unbroken tradition brings out the former aspects particularly clearly, Universal Language is aiming beyond mere satire or culture-clash playfulness. Throughout the film, Rankin succeeds in finding an effective tonal balance between deadpan irony and heartfelt sincerity, allowing for something like a sign for a Tim Hortons restaurant written in Farsi to be not only a solid sight gag and a gentle provocation, but also an illustration of how people are shaped by the social practices, visual symbols, and built environment that surround them. Robb

Viet and Nam (Truong Minh Quy)

Deliberately paced and prone to indulge in poetic intermezzos, at once earthy and otherworldly, Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam has earned comparisons to the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, among others. But if the film is conversant with many of the prevailing trends in international art cinema, Quy doesn’t shy away from staring down the incensing specificities of current events. Quy has said in interviews that his film was at least partially a response to the deaths of 39 Vietnamese refugees, discovered in a refrigerated trailer outside of London in 2019. And interestingly enough, the further Viet and Nam progresses into its increasingly symbolic and fragmented second half—forget Weerasethakul, Quy at times seems to be channeling Muriel -era Alain Resnais—the more direct and polemical it also becomes. Eric Henderson

Youth (Hard Times) (Wang Bing)

Youth (Spring) , the first in Wang Bing’s trilogy of documentaries about garment workers in Zhejiang province in eastern China, eschewed incident to stress the numbing quality of the manual labor and economic stagnation of its young migrant workers. The second installment in the trilogy, Youth (Hard Times) , similarly leans into durational extremes but eventually and sneakily reveals a broadened scope. There’s a fascinating tension here between the length of individual scenes and their documentation of the arduous process of worker organization, as well as the external and internal struggle with ingrained power dynamics between the average joe and the powers that be. Rarely has one of Wang’s films so nakedly called out the collusion between state and commerce to ensure the powerlessness of average citizens. Cole

You might be interested in

New York Film Festival 2023

New York Film Festival 2022

New York Film Festival 2021

Slant Staff

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Montana Film Festival returns for 10th year at Roxy Theater

by NBC Montana Staff

MISSOULA, Mont. — The Montana Film Festival is returning for its 10th year at the Roxy Theater Oct. 3-6.

This year's lineup will feature 25 short films and 10 feature-length films.

All-access passes cost $60, and single-screening tickets cost $10. Discounts apply for Roxy members, seniors and students.

For a full rundown of the film lineup or to buy tickets, click here .

The Roxy Theater sent out the following:

The Montana Film Festival (MTFF) invites you to ring in ten years in Big Screen Country with a celebration of independent filmmaking, October 3 - 6. This year’s lineup, hosted at the Roxy Theater, features ten feature-length and 25 short films as well as an animation retrospective, a live script reading, a Big Sky Grant workshop, and a two-day intensive production assistant course, plus numerous Q&A sessions and talkbacks with filmmakers.

The Montana Film Festival promotes bold independent films from around the world, engaging its community with remarkable shared cinematic experiences. This year’s festival hosts numerous Montana-made films, including the long-awaited second film from writer/director Vera Brunner-Sung, Bitterroot (10/4 & 5) which won a major award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and tells the story of a Hmong man concealing the loss of both his marriage and job from his traditionalist mother. Other Montana-made shorts include the Western Bleach Bone, the dark comedy $55 Private Room in a Safe Quiet Neighborhood, and an adaptation of Jack London’s classic story To Build a Fire.

Filmmaker and animator Emily Hubley joins the festival on October 5 & 6 for retrospectives of both her work and her parents’ - Faith and John Hubley - work. Often nicknamed “The First Family of American Independent Animation,” the Hubleys’ visionary work has entertained and inspired generations, with their films showcased by the Museum of Modern Art and the Criterion Collection.

MTFF has always been committed to showing films representing many different genres, and this year is no exception. Montana actor Everett Blunck will be in-house for his new comedy Griffin in Summer, about the titular 14-year-old playwright (Blunck) who becomes obsessed with his mom’s handyman (10/5 & 6). Animated musical Boys Go to Jupiter features an all-star cast (Janeane Garofalo, Julio Torres, Elsie Fisher) and follows the adventures of a teenage gig worker whose quest to make $5,000 is derailed by the appearance of a gelatinous little creature from outer space (10/4). Lily Gladstone appears in Jazzy (10/3 & 5), the sequel to 2022 Montana Film Festival Selection The Unknown Country. Years in the making, Jazzy is a portrait of a young Oglala Lakota girl as she leaves the dreamlike world of childhood behind. Other films screening include Rap World (10/4 & 6), the feature directorial debut of comedian Conner O’Malley, a 2009-set period piece about aspiring rappers in suburbia; Eephus (10/6), a baseball comedy about the last face-off between rec-league teams before their field is destroyed; National Anthem (10/3 & 4), an exhilarating cinematic reinvention of the coming-of-age story set at a queer ranch in the west; Tendaberry (10/3 & 4) a lyrical glimpse of young, urban adulthood in New York City; the shocking and off-kilter drama Vulcanizadora (10/3 & 5) and moving Sundance winner In the Summers (10/3 & 5) a poignant exploitation of redemption and family dynamics. The additional short films curated by MTFF run the gamut from experimental animation to horror to meta-comedy, with six different countries represented.

To continue to grow and train Montana’s local film workforce, MTFF partners with the Media Training Center to offer a two-day production assistant rapid training course run by Lynn-Wood Fields on October 5 - 6. The PA course focuses on film terminology and lingo, paperwork, and walkie-talkie protocol. Upon completion of the course, participants will receive a course-completion certificate and should be able to walk onto film sets with all the knowledge they need to get started on a career in film production. Additionally, the Montana Department of Commerce will be offering a workshop on the best practices for applying for the Big Sky Film Grant at the Roxy on October 5.

As always, MTFF will include parties, where festival attendees can meet and mingle with the artists behind their favorite new films. On Thursday, October 3, the festival hosts an opening night gathering at the MIssoula Art Museum from 5:30 - 7:00 pm. The annual Hip Strip Soiree at Clyde Coffee will follow the Saturday night screenings on October 6.

Montana Film Festival passes are on sale now. All-Access Passes are $60. Single screening tickets are $10 and Roxy member, senior, and student discounts apply. Festival parties are free and open to the public. Visit montanafilmfestival.org for event listings and program access. The Montana Film Festival is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

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The 26th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival

Posted by Lori Zimmer on Monday, November 11, 2013 · Leave a Comment  

As its getting colder outside, its the perfect time to hunker down inside for a film festival. The New York Experimental Film Festival has something for everyone- whether you’re gay, straight or whatever, so long as you like innovative creativity, then you’ll find a film or event to inspire. Tickets for films are just $13 while many performances and installations are FREE!

November 12-17, MIX NYC presents the  26th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival,  with over 225 short films, features, art installations and live performances—made by or for lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, and queer people—along with galleries and gathering spaces  open free to the public . This year’s MIX Festival promises to be an interactive and experiential wonderland—yours for the making—filled with mind-bending art and friendly crowds in a  20,000 sf warehouse  transformed by local artists.

This year we’ve turned our venue into a living organism, complete a monumental pair of breathing lungs, neuron lattices, fleshy openings and veiny interiors. You’ll easily loose a few hours exploring the fleshy nooks and crannies of the site. It’s the opposite antiseptic atmosphere you’d find at a gallery or museum screening – it’s not about looking at art in silence, then going home.

The  26th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival  makes it easy to open up to the warmth of our crowd and the outlaw energies of our screens. And after the screenings are over, MIX NYC gives the colorful and comfy lounge space to mingle with artists, meet new folks from all walks of life, plot the downfall of oppression everywhere.  You may just feel the call to make an experiment of yourself.

It’s the after-hours that makes the festival. If you’re out of sick days, call in queer—the MIX celebration goes late every night.

Complete program information and schedule available online at  www.mixnyc.org

Filed under What's Up · Tagged with MIX festival , The 26th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival

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2024 New York Film Festival Preview: The Best Movies & Biggest Events

From exclusive q&as and events to some of this year's most prestigious films, nyff has plenty to offer for cinephiles of all kinds..

Every year at the turn of the season, New Yorkers get the chance to see some of the most notable movies of the year at the New York Film Festival. As always, the 2024 edition of the Lincoln Center-centric fest has plenty of eclectic picks, ranging from early awards favorites to the more actively abstract. Plus, unlike last year’s, the 62nd edition of NYFF will be unencumbered by the actor’s strike and promises to have lots of talent on hand for Q&As, special introductions, and more.

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Can’t miss movies

The festival’s lineup is divided into a few different sections, with the Main Slate and the Spotlight films being the flashiest. Nickel Boys serves as the opening night film, having already set the Telluride Film Festival on fire with its unique point of view and its portrayal of an abusive reform school. Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, it’s a must-see movie and a great way to kick things off this Friday, September 27th. Plus, the opening night showings at the glorious Alice Tully Hall will feature appearances from cast members like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Daveed Diggs .

NYFF62 closes things out with the exclusive North American premiere of Blitz , the newest narrative feature from director Steve McQueen . The film unfolds during the London Blitz of WWII, starring Saoirse Ronan as a single mother who gets separated from her son during the mayhem.

Of course, there’s lots to see in between the opening and closing nights too. Luca Guadagnino ’s second movie of the year, Queer , is stopping at NYFF, featuring an inspired performance by Daniel Craig . The buzzy Maria Callas biopic Maria is also on the schedule, allowing cinephiles and opera fans alike to get a look at Angelina Jolie ’s rich portrayal of the legendary soprano. Other exciting titles include Mike Leigh ’s Hard Truths , David Cronenburg’s The Shrouds , Guy Maddin ’s Cate Blanchett -starring Rumours , and The Friend , starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray —all of whom will be on hand for Q&As throughout the fest. A few major movies have already sold out festival screenings (e.g., Cannes winners Anora , All We Imagine as Light , and Emilia Pérez ), but the most dedicated film fans still have the chance to snag day-of rush tickets.

For those who might want to delve a little deeper in the offerings, the Currents and Revivals sections of the festival’s slate provide a look at where cinema is going—and where it’s come from. This year’s Revivals include restored and visually enriched copies of films like Hellraiser and Robert Bresson ’s unsung Four Nights a Dreamer . NYFF also does the admirable work of bringing in older films from countries with less of a cinematic infrastructure, including the Senegalese Camp de Thiaroye and The Sealed Soil , the earliest surviving Iranian film directed by a woman. Meanwhile, the Currents offer several short film series, Canada’s Oscar submission for Best International Film, and an intriguing documentary about James Baldwin’s time in Paris. Truly, there’s something for everyone.

Get the VIP experience

NYFF has numerous exclusive offers for anyone who wants to be a patron of the cinematic arts. The highlight? Orchestra seats to the US premiere of the documentary Elton John : Never Too Late and an invitation to the post-premiere private reception for the cast and crew (Elton John is confirmed to make an appearance after the screening, though not the reception). A similar screening and reception package is available for Queer , and the Closing Night presentation for Blitz boasts the same combined with premium seating reservations, a dedicated NYFF host, and chances for photo-ops. Special VIP passes are still available too, giving patrons the opportunity to sit in on the invitation-only Opening Night, Centerpiece, and Closing Night screenings—and providing dozens of tickets that can be used throughout the festival.

Fun for film fans

One of the most exciting announcements out of NYFF is that the beloved Criterion Closet is city-bound. The miniature shopping venue has been made mobile, and lovers of foreign films, black and white classics, and impressive box sets can make their DVD selections a la Willem Dafoe or the Daniels . There’s sure to be a line around the block to get into New York Film Festival’s hottest commodity.

The fest is also putting on a NYFF62 version of Cinephile Game Night, a fun, free event for anyone with a brain geared towards movie trivia. Prizes include tickets to sold-out screenings, but there’s plenty to play for (likely including some festival merch, such as this year’s poster designed by David Byrne ).

The 62nd New York Film Festival runs from Friday, September 27th to Monday, October 14th and tickets are on sale now. Additional screenings will be announced as the festival goes on (the last few days are reserved for “encore” showings of the fest’s most popular titles), so be sure to keep track of your most anticipated movies.

• SEE ALSO : Review: Forbidden Broadway Mercilessly Mauls the Hits

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Mel gibson on if he’ll direct ‘lethal weapon 5’ or ‘the passion of the christ’ sequel first: “it’s really a crapshoot at this point”, breaking news.

Journalists From Outlawed Russian TV Rain Gather As Documentary ‘My Undesirable Friends’ Screens Ahead Of NYFF World Premiere

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Anna Nemzer, former journalist at exiled Russian news network TV Rain, offered a word of warning today — don’t ignore “unpleasant” political signs. That comes from someone with firsthand knowledge of the aftershocks.

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Loktev said she was drawn to the story as “a lot of media had started to be named foreign agents. TV Rain had already been named a foreign agent. And I remember, we said, ‘Let’s make a film about this. People are starting to be singled out. For me, the idea of a society starting to force people to mark themselves, obviously, there’s, you know, historic precedent of this … not belonging, not one of us.”

“Obviously, we didn’t know what this would lead to,” she said. “I think when I was filming it, everybody had a sense that things were going to get worse. Everyone was trying to figure out, how long can I keep working here in this country? How long can I stay and fight here? What they didn’t expect is that the monster would invade the neighboring country, Ukraine.”

Rain’s young staff stay until authorities are almost upon them to the doc’s last scene, where they are making plans to quickly flee the country. One million people have left Russia since then.

Nemzer appeared with former colleagues Olga Churakova, one of the first to be named a foreign agent, and Ksenia Mironova, whose fiancee was arrested for treason and sentenced to 22 years in prison, at the Q&A with Loktev after the documentary, which is told in chapters – about five hours with a break between Chapters 1-3 and Chapters 4-5.

Nemzer, who now lives in New York “saving and preserving” the archives of Russian media, Russian NGOs and human rights organizations, said that what shocked her back in Russia wasn’t just Putin but the support he enjoyed from a segment of the population.

Here also, she said “part of your country knows that and supports Ukraine, and I don’t need to persuade them, and I don’t need to, like present them something. We are already on the same page. And here we go with the situation of polarization of the country, of dividing it in two parts. And we are familiar with the situation, and we are familiar with the feeling that you don’t know part of your country and your country can, like, attack you from your backyard all of a sudden, and you don’t know these people, and you don’t understand how it’s possible. And even if you try … to feel for them, you still you don’t succeed, and it is dangerous.”

“You know, we probably all know, people who cavalierly say, ‘If Trump gets elected again, I’m leaving the country.’ And what does that mean? Do you just like leave the country and leave it to them? What are you supposed to do, at what point? … You know, we speak about leaving the country as something like … like a great thing to do. It’s not.”

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Tokyo international film festival unveils lineup.

Japan's leading cinema event will open with the world premiere of samurai thriller '11 Rebels,' while featuring a main competition judged by Hong Kong legends Tony Leung and Johnnie To, among others.

By Patrick Brzeski

Patrick Brzeski

Asia Bureau Chief

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The Tokyo International Film Festival revealed its full 2024 lineup on Wednesday, including its main competition program and the Asian Future section for emerging regional filmmakers, as well as the all-new Women’s Empowerment section, which highlights nine films directed by women or involving female-focussed stories. 

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As previously announced, the competition titles will be assessed by a jury led by Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai. The other jurors include Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To, Italian actress Chiara Mastroianni, Hungarian filmmaker Enyedi Ildikó, and Japanese actress Ai Hashimoto.

All films in the Asia Future Section will be world premieres. They include Sima’s Song from Afghan director Roya Sadat, Malaysian filmmaker Chong Keat Aun’s  Pavane for an Infant , Turkish director Emine Yildirim’s  Apollon By Day Athena By Night , The Bora by Iran’s Mohammad Esmaeilie and Three Castrated Goats by Chinese filmmaker Ye Xingyu.

Tokyo previously revealed that samurai thriller 11 Rebels , directed by Kazuya Shiraishi, would make its world premiere as the festival’s opening title this year, while French director Christophe Honoré’s Marcello Mio , starring jury member Mastroianni, will close the event. 

The Nippon Cinema Now section, which focuses on emerging trends in Japanese cinema, will screen 12 titles, including a mini-retrospective of five films directed by Yu Irie, who is Tokyo’s director in focus this year. 

The festival’s gala screenings, which tend to highlight previously shown festival hits, include Marielle Heller’s Toronto favorite Nightbitch , Hong Kong action blockbuster Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In , Audrey Diwan’s  Emmanuelle , Guan Hu’s Cannes Un Certain Regard winner  Black Dog , Marc Foster’s  White Bird , the world premiere of Indonesian filmmaker Mike Wiluan’s  Orang Ikan , and Eric Khoo’s Tokyo-set, Catherine Deneuve-starring Spirit World.

Always a strong suit, Tokyo’s animation section includes: Kuno Yoko and Yamashita Nobuhiro’s Ghost Cat Anzu , Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot , Yakuwa Shinnosuke’s Toto Chan: The Little Girl at the Window , Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow , Adam Elliot’s  Memoir of a Snail , Make a Girl by Yasuda Gensho, and the 4K restoration of Masuda Toshio’s 1977 classic Space Battleship Yamato.

MAIN COMPETITION: 

Adios Amigo (Colombia) AP Dir: Iván David Gaona             Big World (China) WP Dir: Yang Lina   Bury Your Dead (Brazil) AP Dir: Marco Dutra          Cadet (Kazakhstan) WP         Dir: Adilkhan Yerzhanov          Daughter’s Daughter (Taiwan) AP     Dir: Huang Xi   The Englishman’s Papers (Portugal) WP        Dir: Sérgio Graciano   In His Own Image (France) AP Dir: Thierry de Peretti   Lust In The Rain (Japan, Taiwan) WP Dir: Katayama Shinzo   My Friend An Delie (China) WP Dir: Dong Zijian           Papa (Hong Kong) WP Dir: Philip Yung            Promise, I’ll Be Fine (Slovakia, Czech) WP Dir: Katarína Gramatová          She Taught Me Serendipity (Japan) WP Dir: Ohku Akiko           Teki Cometh (Japan) WP Dir: Yoshida Daihachi   Traffic (Romania, Belgium, Netherlands) AP Dir: Teodora Ana Mihai   The Unseen Sister (China) IP Dir: Midi Z    

ASIAN FUTURE (All World Premieres) Apollon by Day Athena by Night (Turkey) Dir: Emine Yildirim Black Ox (Japan, Taiwan, US) Dir: Tsuta Tetsuichiro

Missing Child Videotape (Japan) Dir: Kondo Ryota

Pavane for an Infant (Malaysia) Dir: Chong Keat Aun Sima’s Song (Spain, Netherlands, France, Taiwan, Greece, Afghanistan) Dir: Roya Sadat Three Castrated Goats (US) Dir: Ye Xingyu Valley of the Shadow of Death (Hong Kong) Dir: Jeffery Lam Sen, Antonio Tam The Vessel’s Isle (US) Dir: Wang Di

Wait Until Spring (Iran)

Dir: Ashkan Ashkani

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Running for its 11th year, the Video Art & Experimental Film Festival (VAEFF) showcases to New York City audiences some of the most innovative, provocative, and exciting works of film and video from around the world. The festival embraces a boundary-pushing spectrum of work that includes animation, music video, fashion film, documentary, visual narrative, and more.

This year’s screenings will take place november 19-20, and will include the official selections of vaeff 2021 as well as vaeff 2020..

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Top 26 Things To Do In Tomsk, Russia

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Located in western Siberia, Tomsk is a small city but a well-known academic and cultural center in Russia. Set against a backdrop of gorgeous taiga landscapes, the city is a delightful blend of engrossing history and breathtaking natural beauty. Tomsk is one of the oldest cities of the region, and its history spans over 400 years. Warm and friendly, it offers a great introduction to Siberian heritage and way of life. You will have much to admire here as the city has retained its historical charm - characteristic ‘gingerbread’-style elaborate wooden houses, monuments, verdant parks and of course numerous museums. But it’s not all history! Called ‘Siberian Athens’, Tomsk has a strong student population, and this guarantees a lively atmosphere and an exciting nightlife. Read on to find out the best things to do in Tomsk, Russia and make the most of your Siberian visit.

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Top 10 Muslim-Friendly Hotels In Moscow, Russia

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Table Of Contents

• 1. Go stargazing at the Tomsk Planetarium
• 2. Browse through absorbing exhibits at the Tomsk History Museum and check out the observation deck
• 3. Visit the interactive Monument to Happiness
• 4. Soak in the breathtaking panoramic view of the city from the top of the Voskresenskaya Mountain
• 5. Spend a day in the Camp Garden on the edge of the Tom River
• 6. Rub the nose of the Chekhov Monument for good luck
• 7. Walk down the tragic path of Stalin's dictatorship at the NKVD Memorial Museum
• 8. Wonder at the intricate wood carvings of the House with Firebirds
• 9. Explore the cool Slavic mythology paintings at the First Museum of Slavic Mythology
• 10. Witness beer-making process at the Tomskoye Pivo brewery
• 11. Get insights into the life of the Siberian people at the Tomsk Regional Museum
• 12. Enjoy the warm hospitality by interacting with Tomichi, the citizens of Tomsk
• 13. Make the most of the summer days by shopping at the local markets
• 14. Soak in the sombre atmosphere at the Tomsk State University
• 15. Discover the historic Aleksiyevskiy Monastery of the Mother of God
• 16. Soak in some culture at the Tomsk Drama Theater
• 17. Visit the Monument 400 Years Tomsk
• 18. Explore underwater depths of Siberia under professional guidance
• 19. Explore Russia's rich artistic heritage at the Tomsk Regional Art Museum
• 20. Visit the House with Dragons for a unique example of early Russian architecture
• 21. Head to Statue of Pushkin to pay tribute to the Russian author, Alexander Pushkin
• 22. Pamper your taste buds at the famous Reka 827 restaurant
• 23. Listen to some brilliant acoustics at the Organ Hall in Atashev Palace
• 24. Visit Tomsk’s recreated Spasskaya Tower at the dimple-sized Resurrection Hill
• 25. Witness a spectacular match of football at the Trud Stadium
• 26. Enjoy some electrifying performances at the Aelita Theatre

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Writing and travelling both bring joy to Sowmya's life. Her favourite destination so far is Bhutan - a land of incredible beauty! And her favourite style of travelling is solo backpacking!... Read more

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THE 10 BEST Things to Do in Tomsk (2024) - Must-See Attractions

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