Established in 1963, The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual New York Film Festival has remained true to its dedicated mission of showcasing some of the finest films from around the world, while also drawing on the rich cultural offerings of New York City’s vibrant cinematic metropolis. Now in its 54th year, the NYFF continues to be one of the most anticipated events of the fall season for New Yorkers and visitors alike; and has since become not just a richly curated venue, but a premiere destination for cinephiles, as well as a mecca of cinematic ingenuity and talent.
While this year’s lineup in particular features some prizewinning favorites and critical darlings from the international festival circuit—including some top contenders from Cannes, Berlin, and Toronto—it will also unveil a number of Stateside and World Premiere titles. Kicking off the festivities is Ava DuVernay’s (“Selma”) The 13th; which will have its world premiere as the festival’s Opening Night gala selection. A penetrating, timely and urgent call for social reform, DuVernay’s eye-opening documentary (the title of which refers to the 13th Amendment of the Constitution)—and the first documentary to ever open the festival—provides a sweeping and intertwined historical tapestry of our nation’s sordid race relations; from the abolition of slavery all the way to our current climate of mass incarceration.
With submissions from veteran auteurs and newcomers alike, this year’s offerings also provide a generous breadth of works whose emphasis on diverse stories, inclusive representation, and the exploration of socially conscious subject matter celebrate the experiences of society’s most alienated, maligned or marginalized misfits. From Moonlight’s gorgeously rendered portrayal of the gay African American experience set amidst the gritty urban backdrop of Miami’s projects—a film of stunning artistry whose entirely nonwhite cast is something of a cultural feat in and of itself—to a documentary that captures the grim pulse of 1970s and 80s downtown New York during the AIDS epidemic, below is a compiled list of this year’s most anticipated films whose social significance, political conscientiousness, and humanistic approach to themes of individual freedom, sexuality, desire, and identity make them the standout titles to keep an eye out for, with descriptions courtesy of the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Opening Night: The 13th (World Premiere)
Directed by Ava DuVernay, USA
The title of Ava DuVernay’s extraordinary and galvanizing documentary refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” The progression from that second qualifying clause to the horrors of mass criminalization and the sprawling American prison industry is laid out by DuVernay with bracing lucidity.With a potent mixture of archival footage and testimony from a dazzling array of activists, politicians, historians, and formerly incarcerated women and men, DuVernay creates a work of grand historical synthesis. A Netflix original documentary.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V66F3WU2CKk&w=560&h=315]
Fire at Sea/ Fuocoammare
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi, Italy/France
Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary observes Europe’s migrant crisis from the vantage point of a Mediterranean island where hundreds of thousands of refugees, fleeing war and poverty, have landed in recent decades. Rosi shows the harrowing work of rescue operations but devotes most of the film to the daily rhythms of Lampedusa, seen through the eyes of a doctor who treats casualties and performs autopsies, and a feisty but anxious pre-teen from a family of fishermen for whom it is simply a peripheral fact of life. With its emphasis on the quotidian, the film reclaims an ongoing tragedy from the abstract sensationalism of media headlines.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Kc5wy0Rxg&w=560&h=315]
Julieta
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar, Spain
Pedro Almodóvar (Y Tu Mamá También) explores his favorite themes of love, sexuality, guilt, and destiny through the poignant story of Julieta, who has a chance encounter that stirs up sorrowful memories of the daughter who abandoned her.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH5_4osOZK8&w=560&h=315]
Moonlight
Directed by Barry Jenkins, USA
Barry Jenkins more than fulfills the promise of his 2008 romantic two-hander Medicine for Melancholy in this three-part narrative spanning the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of a gay African-American man who survives Miami’s drug-plagued inner city, finding love in unexpected places and the possibility of change within himself. Moonlight offers a powerful sense of place and a wealth of unpredictable characters, featuring a fantastic ensemble cast including André Holland, Trevante Rhodes, Naomie Harris, Janelle Monae, and Mahershala Ali—delivering performances filled with inner conflict and aching desires that cut straight to the heart.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22_OEvyqwcE&w=560&h=315]
My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea (U.S. Premiere)
Directed by Dash Shaw, USA
No matter your age, part of you never outgrows high school, for better or worse. Dash Shaw, known for such celebrated graphic novels as Bottomless Belly Button and New School, brings his subjective, dreamlike sense of narrative; his empathy for outsiders and their desire to connect; and his rich, expressive drawing style to his first animated feature. Packed with action but seen from the inside out, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea is about friends overcoming their differences and having each other’s backs in times of crisis, and its marvelously complex characters are voiced by Jason Schwartzman, Lena Dunham, Reggie Watts, Maya Rudolph, and John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch).
Gimme Danger
Directed by Jim Jarmusch, USA
“Music is life and life is not a business,” said Iggy Pop when he and his surviving bandmates from The Stooges were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. Jim Jarmusch’s cinematic offering to the androgynous, communist punk gods of Ann Arbor traces the always raucous and frequently calamitous history of the Stooges from inception to the present, including their collaboration with mentor David Bowie. With the help of animator James Kerr, plus glimpses of Lucille Ball and a shirtless Yul Brynner amidst a bonanza of archival performance footage, photos, and interviews,Gimme Danger has the feeling of a night at Max’s Kansas City. Iggy Pop and Jim Jarmusch to appear in person.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mypvKedIGT0]
Film Comment Presents: A Quiet Passion
Directed by Terence Davies, U.K./Belgium
Swiftly following his glorious Sunset Song, the great British director Terence Davies turns his attention to 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson and ends up with perhaps an even greater triumph. A revelatory Cynthia Nixon embodies Dickinson with a titanic intelligence always threatening to burst forth from behind a polite facade, while Davies creates a formally audacious rendering of her life, from teenage skepticism to her ‘passionate friendship’ with Susan Gilbert to lonely death, using her poems (and a touch of Charles Ives) as soundtrack accompaniment. Both sides of Davies’s enormous talent—his witty, Wildean sense of humor and his frightening vision of life’s grim realities—are on full display in this consuming depiction of a creative inner world.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKJpx8FYp54&w=560&h=315]
I Am Not Your Negro
Directed by Raoul Peck, USA/France/Belgium
Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has taken the 30 completed pages of James Baldwin’s final, unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, in which the author went about the painful task of remembering his three fallen friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, and crafted an elegantly precise and bracing film essay. Peck’s film, about the unholy agglomeration of myths, institutionalized practices both legal and illegal, and displaced white terror that have long perpetuated the tragic state of race in America, is anchored by the presence of Baldwin himself in images and words, read beautifully by Samuel L. Jackson in hushed, burning tones.
Uncle Howard
Directed by Aaron Brookner, USA
While Aaron Brookner was working on the restoration of Burroughs: The Movie, his uncle Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs, he discovered an archive that Howard left uncatalogued. It encompassed unused footage, and much more: film and video diaries capturing the downtown New York, post-Beat mosaic of writers, filmmakers, performers, and artists in the 1970s and 1980s and the devastation of that community by AIDS, which took Howard’s life in 1989. A work of love and scholarship, Uncle Howard weaves contemporary interviews with this rediscovered footage: of the legendary “Nova Convention”; Robert Wilson rehearsing the aborted L.A. production of The Civil Wars; a twentysomething Jim Jarmusch, Howard’s NYU classmate, recording sound on Burroughs; and Howard’s lyrical video self-portrait, made near the end of his life.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb4kDJR0Ygk&w=560&h=315]
The Ornithologist (U.S. Premiere)
Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues, Portugal/France/Brazil
In his most audacious film since his groundbreaking debut O Fantasma, João Pedro Rodrigues reimagines the myth of Saint Anthony of Padua as a modern-day parable of sexual and spiritual transcendence. On a bird-watching expedition in the remote wilderness of northern Portugal, Fernando (Paul Hamy) capsizes his canoe and loses his bearings. His ensuing odyssey, both intensely physical and wildly metaphysical, involves sadistic Chinese pilgrims, a deaf-mute shepherd named Jesus, pagan tribes, Amazons on horseback, and a glorious variety of feathered friends. Shot entirely outdoors and in magnificent ‘Scope by Rui Pocas, The Ornithologist is a bracing exercise in queer hagiography, a cheerfully blasphemous tale of a religious awakening.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec6RKsfpKEA&w=560&h=315]
The New York Film Festival will take place September 30th-October 16th . Visit The Film Society of Lincoln Center for more information.
