Episodes
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This week we’re excited to present a conversation with writer/director Robert Eggers who recently joined us for a Q&A following a screening of his highly anticipated new feature Nosferatu.
Across four intensely stylish, powerfully atmospheric and richly detailed feature films, Robert Eggers has established himself as one of contemporary cinema’s most singular auteurs. His work looks to different historical periods, folkloric traditions, and the abject and the arcane alike to craft enigmatic and utterly gripping parables about madness, the antagonism between man and nature, and desire as all-consuming compulsion. But his films, while deeply researched and steeped in worlds that themselves predate the advent of cinema, are nevertheless plainly the output of a passionate cinephile, an artist both in conversation with film history and in conversation with the the history of the occult. This is particularly evident in his latest, Nosferatu, which takes up the challenge of reinventing the story of Dracula after the seminal treatments by F.W. Murnau, Tod Browning, Werner Herzog, and Francis Ford Coppola, to name a few.
This February, Film at Lincoln Center is excited to present Conjuring Nosferatu: Robert Eggers Presents, a special series made up of the films that inspired Eggers’s spellbinding new take on fiction’s most famous monster, an eclectic can’t-miss array of gothic Hollywood deep cuts, rare works of Eastern European folk horror, and captivating evocations of 18th-century England, as well as a special screening on 35mm of his own Nosferatu. Stay tuned to filmlinc.org for more information.
This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. -
This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with author Sigrid Nunez.
With her novels The Friend (winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction) and What Are You Going Through, New York–based author Sigrid Nunez has supplied the extraordinarily rich source material for not one, but two films in the NYFF62 lineup: Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Spotlight standout The Friend, starring Naomi Watts as a writer mourning the complicated loss of a beloved mentor; and Pedro Almodóvar’s Centerpiece selection The Room Next Door, which follows another writer (Julianne Moore) as she reconnects with a friend from her past (Tilda Swinton) who approaches her with an unusual request.
We were honored to welcome Nunez for a special conversation about her prismatic literary meditations on grief, friendship, and the passage of time; the experience of seeing her creative work adapted into other mediums; and cinema’s alchemical capacity to both translate and transform a novel’s meaning. This conversation was moderated by A.O. Scott, critic at large for The New York Times Book Review.
A New York Times Critic’s Pick, Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door is now playing at FLC. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/room
NYFF Free Talks are presented by HBO. -
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This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross and Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk director Barry Jenkins.
The Opening Night selection of NYFF62, Nickel Boys is now playing in select theaters, courtesy of Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios.
Director RaMell Ross has crafted something of a new American masterpiece with the NYFF62 Opening Night selection Nickel Boys. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Black teens at a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida (inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys), Nickel Boys brings Ross’s extraordinary felicity and radical sense of perspective as a photographer of Black life in the South to a historical fiction that is as much about the trauma of racism in the U.S. as about the politics of subjectivity and spectatorship. We were thrilled to welcome RaMell Ross for a wide-ranging conversation with Barry Jenkins—another masterful filmmaker known for his visionary and lyrical approach to depicting Blackness and the American South onscreen, including in his own Colson Whitehead adaptation, 2020’s The Underground Railroad series.
NYFF Free Talks are presented by HBO.
This Free Talk between RaMell Ross and Barry Jenkins was sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter. -
This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Oh, Canada director Paul Schrader.
Oh, Canada is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Kino Lorber.
In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a celebrated political documentarian who has reached the end of his life. Wracked with cancer, Leonard has agreed to appear in a film by a former protégé (Michael Imperioli) in the hopes of setting the record straight about himself. Cinema becomes a confessional space as Leonard, accompanied by his stalwart wife and former student, Emma (Uma Thurman), excavates his own past, facing down regrets and guilt, and interrogating his own career, personal life, and political courage. Constructed with nonlinear flashbacks featuring Jacob Elordi as a young Leonard, the film passes in and out of different time periods, back to the 1960s, matching the slippery consciousness of its storyteller. Adapted from the book Foregone by Russell Banks, Paul Schrader’s emotionally naked drama feels like a direct address to the viewer, a filmmaker’s reckoning with his formidable status and persona.
This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini. -
This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with The Room Next Door director Pedro Almodóvar and cast members Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, and John Turturro.
The Room Next Door opens at Film at Lincoln Center on December 20th. Get tickets a filmlinc.org/room
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. The two women immerse themselves in their pasts, sharing memories, anecdotes, art, movies—yet Martha has a request that will test their newly strengthened bond. Pedro Almodóvar’s finely sculpted drama, his first English-language feature, is the unmistakable work of a master filmmaker, a hushed and humane portrayal of the beauty of life and the inevitability of death, graced with incandescent performances by Moore and Swinton that tap the very essence of being. Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s treasure of a novel, What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar has exquisitely reframed his career-long fascination with the lives of women for an American vernacular, capturing Manhattan and upstate New York with enraptured affection.
This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. -
This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Hard Truths director Mike Leigh and cast members Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Tuwaine Barrett.
Hard Truths opens at Film at Lincoln Center for an exclusive one-week running beginning December 6. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/truths
Mike Leigh returns to a contemporary milieu for the first time since Another Year for this raw, uncompromising domestic drama that continues the great British filmmaker’s inquiries into the possibility for happiness and the limits of human connection. In a gutsy, excoriating performance, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies) absorbs herself completely into the role of Pansy, a middle-aged, working-class woman whose emotional and physical health problems have metastasized into a profound and relentless anger that’s become toxic for everyone around her, including her husband, grown son, doctors, and even strangers on the street. Raging against every aspect of her domestic life and fearful of the world beyond, Pansy only finds potential solace in the unwavering love of her sister. Bringing his customary, thrilling eye for the details of human behavior and the complexities of social interaction, Leigh has created in close collaboration with his extraordinary cast a rigorous and unflinching look at a life in freefall.
This conversation was moderated by NYFF programmer K. Austin Collins. -
This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with The Seed of the Sacred Fig director Mohammad Rasoulof.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig opens at FLC on November 27. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/fig
A target of Iran’s hardline conservative government for his films’ criticism of the state, director Mohammad Rasoulof fled his home country to avoid an eight-year prison sentence, though he hadn’t finished editing his latest film yet. His searing drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig won a Special Prize from the jury and three other awards on its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is every bit as urgent and gripping as its real-life backstory would portend: longtime government worker Iman (Missagh Zareh) has just received a major promotion to the role of judge’s investigator, to the hopeful delight of his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani); at the same moment, a series of student protests against the government have exploded in the streets, stoking the sympathies of their independent-minded daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). The growing wedge between progressive children and traditional parents intensifies through a series of unsettling events that put Iman’s future in jeopardy. Both paranoia thriller and domestic drama, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is above all an epic of anti-patriarchal political conviction. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection. A NEON release.
This conversation was moderated by NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen. -
This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with A Traveler’s Needs lead actress Isabelle Huppert.
A Traveler’s Needs opens at Film at Lincoln Center beginning Friday, November 22nd. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/traveler
Isabelle Huppert reunites with Hong Sangsoo for their third delightful outing, this time starring as a nomadic Frenchwoman named Iris who drifts into the lives of a disconnected group of people in a Seoul suburb. In need of money, she has taken up giving French lessons, although she has no teaching experience to speak of. Cutting an ethereal figure in a straw hat, flowered sundress, and green cardigan, Iris puzzles the locals with her unorthodox methods and unyielding love for a Korean rice wine. Iris’s effect on those around her is at once familial, romantic, and pedagogical, leading to a succession of gently amusing moments of cultural confusion and curiosity. Hong’s endearing, enigmatic observational comedy is a gentle exploration of human motivation and the surprising connections between people despite—or because of—language barriers. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Berlinale.
This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. -
This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Payal Kapadia and producer Thomas Hakim of the NYFF62 Main Slate selection All We Imagine as Light.
All We Imagine as Light opens at Film at Lincoln Center on November 15 with Payal Kapadia in person! Get tickets at filmlinc.org/light
The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated with a vivid, humane richness by Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)—and a newly retired coworker Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on prosaic moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is pursued by a courtly doctor; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside resort with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actors with an unforced expressivity and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence.
This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. -
This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, co-directors of No Other Land, a Main Slate selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival.
No Other Land opens at FLC on November 1. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/land
This eye-opening, vérité-style documentary, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors over the course of five years, provides a harrowing account of the systematic onslaught of destruction experienced by Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli military. Headed by Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham (also two of the film’s directors), the collective commits itself to filming and protesting the demolitions of homes and schools and the resulting displacement of their inhabitants, which were carried out to make way for Israeli military training ground. In addition to the indelible footage of destruction and expulsion captured by its undaunted witnesses, No Other Land serves as a moving portrait of friendship between Adra and Abraham, who form a philosophical and political alliance despite the drastic differences in their abilities to exist freely in this world. Winner of multiple awards including the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film at the 2024 Berlinale.
All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO.
This conversation was moderated by NYFF Main Slate selection committee member Justin Chang. -
This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Mati Diop on Dahomey, a Main Slate selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival.
Dahomey opens at FLC on October 25, with Q&As opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/dahomey
The African kingdom of Dahomey, which ruled over its region at the west of the continent until the turn of the 20th century, saw hundreds of its splendid royal artifacts plundered by French colonial troops in its waning days. Now, as 26 of these treasures are set to return to their homeland—now within the Republic of Benin—Diop documents their voyage back, transforming this rich subject matter into a multifaceted examination of ownership and exhibition. Alternating images of nocturnal melancholy and debates among students at Benin’s University of Abomey-Calavi about what should be done with the objects, Dahomey brilliantly negotiates a lost past and an unsure present.
All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO.
This conversation was moderated by NYFF Main Slate selection committee member Justin Chang. -
Director Robinson Devor and co-writers Jason Reid, Bob Fink, and Charles Mudede joined NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim for the world premiere of Suburban Fury at the 62nd New York Film Festival.
In September 1975, Sara Jane Moore fired two shots at President Gerald Ford on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco’s Union Square. Moore holds the center of this fleet and compelling nonfiction drama from protean filmmaker Robinson Devor, who lends it the feel of a 1970s thriller.
All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO. -
Director Carson Lund and actor Keith William Richards joined NYFF selection committee member Justin Chang for the North American premiere of Eephus at the 62nd New York Film Festival.
Set in autumnal Massachusetts, sometime in the 1990s, Carson Lund’s poignant and gracefully accomplished debut feature lovingly nestles in with a pair of amateur recreation league baseball teams as they play one last game at their beloved Soldiers Field before it’s torn down for the construction of a middle school.
Eephus opens on March 7, 2025 at Film at Lincoln Center. -
Director Steve McQueen joins NYFF62 Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Blitz, the Closing Night selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival.
Blitz opens at Film at Lincoln Center on November 1st. Tickets are now on sale: filmlinc.org/blitz
An authentic and astonishing recreation of London during its blitzkrieg, Blitz pushes the artistry of Steve McQueen to ever more impressive levels. Working on a vast scale, McQueen sets things at human eye level, telling his original tale from the parallel perspectives of working-class single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her 9-year-old son, George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), as they become separated within the labyrinth of a city under siege. Alternately overwhelming and tender, McQueen’s dazzling film offers a multicultural portrait of 1940s London too infrequently seen on screens. -
Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, author Sigrid Nunez, and cast members Naomi Watts, Sarah Pidgeon, Carla Gugino, Noma Dumezweni, Constance Wu, Owen Teague, and Bing join NYFF62 programmer Florence Almozini to discuss The Friend, a Spotlight selection at the 62nd New York Film Festival.
This deeply fulfilling adaptation of Nunez’s beloved, slyly shape-shifting National Book Award winner features Naomi Watts as a novelist who finds her comfortable, solitary New York life thrown into disarray after her closest friend and mentor (Bill Murray) commits suicide and bequeaths his beloved Great Dane to her. -
On today’s NYFF62 edition of our podcast, director Jesse Eisenberg, cast members Kieran Culkin and Jennifer Grey, and producers Emma Stone and Dave McCary discuss A Real Pain, a Spotlight selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.
In A Real Pain, cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), having drifted apart over the years, attempt to reconnect on a pilgrimage to the Polish hometown of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Eisenberg’s work of compassion and maturity alternates nimbly between anxious comedy and meditative drama.
Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix. -
On today’s NYFF62 edition of our podcast, director David Cronenberg discusses The Shrouds with NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim at its U.S. Premiere.
In David Cronenberg’s sly and thought-provoking latest, techno-entrepreneur Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger), Karsh uncovers a potentially vast conspiracy.
Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix. -
On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we welcome director Luca Guadagnino, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, costume designer Jonathan Anderson, and cast members Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey to discuss Queer, the Spotlight Gala of the 62nd New York Film Festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.
Written in the early 1950s yet not published until 1985, William S. Burroughs’s Queer has come to be considered a canonical work in the career of the Beat Generation author and a cornerstone of transgressive gay literature. In his wildly ambitious adaptation, Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, NYFF55) expertly evokes the book’s post–World War II time period and cinematically translates Burroughs’s iconoclasm with panache. In a transformative role, Daniel Craig immerses himself into Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee, a habitual heroin user luxuriating in freedom and desiccation among a disconnected group of gay American expatriates in Mexico City in the late 1940s. When enigmatic, preppy ex-military kid Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) catches Lee’s eye, he swoons into a headlong love affair, commencing an odyssey that will take them all the way to the Ecuadorian jungle in pursuit of the ultimate high. Buoyed by go-for-broke performances from Craig and Starkey, and rollicking, unexpected supporting turns from Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman, Queer is a dazzling showcase for many in Guadagnino’s stable of collaborators, including Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and music composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It’s a film that finds Guadagnino in his most formidable, gutsiest mode yet, a universal love story featuring expressionistic flights of fancy, gratifying moments of psychedelic surrealism, and surprising tenderness.
Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.
Queer opens in theaters on November 27, courtesy of A24. -
On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we welcome director Paul Schrader and cast members Uma Thurman and Michael Imperioli to discuss their film Oh, Canada, which made its U.S. Premiere in the Main Slate of this year's festival. The discussion was moderated by NYFF programmer K. Austin Collins.
In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a celebrated political documentarian who has reached the end of his life. Constructed with nonlinear flashbacks featuring Jacob Elordi as a young Leonard, the film passes in and out of different time periods, back to the 1960s, matching the slippery consciousness of its storyteller. Adapted from the book Foregone by Russell Banks, Paul Schrader’s emotionally naked drama feels like a direct address to the viewer, a filmmaker’s reckoning with his formidable status and persona.
Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.
Oh, Canada will be released in theaters on December 6, courtesy of Kino Lorber. -
On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we welcome director Leos Carax to discuss his film It’s Not Me, in an extended conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and director Annie Baker.
In his new film, the French cinema firebrand lovingly evokes the aesthetics of Jean-Luc Godard, paying aptly cheeky respect to the late New Wave master, his own career, and cinema itself, rummaging through a century of movies to situate his work within a continuum of the medium.
To learn more and get tickets for this year's New York Film Festival, visit filmlinc.org. Enjoy this conversation with Leos Carax and Annie Baker. - Show more
