Representing both newcomers and acclaimed filmmakers, Hollywood features and independent visions from all over the globe, the 46th New York Film Festival opens on September 26th with The Class, from festival veteran Laurent Cantet. Clint Eastwood’s highly anticipated Changeling will screen as the NYFF Centerpiece, while Darren Aronofsky provides the Closing Night film with The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke in “the performance of a lifetime” says the Film Society’s Kent Jones.
Main Slate: With 28 films from 18 countries, the festival’s diverse Main Slate marks the return of many filmmakers familiar to festival-goers. With 24 City, Jia Zhangke explores the seamy side of China’s rapid development in the tale of the impact of a factory's conversion into luxury apartments. Wong Kar-wai restores his 1994 exercise in swordplay pyrotechnics and melancholy temps perdu with Ashes of Time Redux. Mike Leigh, the British master of ensemble dysfunction, offers Happy-Go-Lucky. Steven Soderbergh also marks his return with a much talked-about entry: Che, a controversial, two-part biography whose star, Benicio Del Toro, won the Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
New faces at the festival include young American independent filmmaker Antonio Campos with Afterschool, a hypnotically focused first feature set in the insulated world of a New England prep school. Celebrated Kazakh documentarian Sergey Dvortsevoy provides as his first fictional feature a comic and awe-inspiring drama-cum-wildlife movie, Tulpan. Visual artist Steve McQueen debuts as a filmmaker with Hunger, the story of IRA member Bobby Sands and his 1981 hunger strike and turns it into an intensely lyrical reverie on human suffering. Read more...
Special Events: Several special panels complement the NYFF Main Slate including Film Criticism in Crisis?, presented by Film Comment magazine, and a discussion centered around the documentary It's Hard Being Loved By Jerks which tackles the 2006 controversy over a cartoon satirizing Islamic fundamentalism. The festival will also present restored versions of such classic films as Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (presented by Martin Scorsese in a new Technicolor print) and The Day Shall Dawn, a little known Pakistani masterwork now celebrating its 50th anniversary. Read more...
HBO Films Dialogues: With the HBO Films Dialogues, festival-goers can sit in on conversations with some of the festival’s most celebrated directors: Jia Zhangke (24 City), Wong Kar-wai (Ashes of Time Redux), Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler), and Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale). Read more...
Views from the Avant-Garde: Situationist International founder Guy Debord’s 1978 In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni kicks off this three-day celebration of experimental and avant-garde filmmaking. Read more...
In the Realm of Oshima: From the 40 shots of Night and Fog in Japan to the over 1,000 shots of Violence at Noon, from avant-garde theater in Diary of a Shinjuku Thief to diary-like travelogue in Dear Summer Sister, the sidebar to the 46th New York Film Festival celebrates one of the essential figures of modern cinema with a near-complete retrospective. Read more...
NYFF Selection Committee: Richard Peña, chairman and program director at the Film Society; Kent Jones, associate director of programming at the Film Society; Scott Foundas, film editor and chief film critic for L.A. Weekly; J. Hoberman, senior film critic at The Village Voice; and Lisa Schwarzbaum, film critic at Entertainment Weekly.
