Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

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#506 - The Craft of Editing All of Us Strangers and Hit Man Jan 05, 2024

Show notes

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 61st New York Film Festival between American Cinema Editor members Sandra Adair (Hit Man) and Jonathan Alberts (All of Us Strangers). Across genres, styles, and modes of production, the work of the film editor remains one of the least visible but most essential elements of cinematic storytelling. In last year’s NYFF lineup, Main Slate selection All of Us Strangers and Spotlight selection Hit Man were exemplary showcases for the range of expressive effects made possible by the film editor’s contributions, demonstrating how pacing, rhythm, and punctuation can amplify or obscure meaning, accentuate performances, and synthesize precise interactions between comedy, drama, suspense, and eroticism. This talk was organized in collaboration with American Cinema Editors and was moderated by American Cinema Editor member Jeffrey Wolf. All NYFF61 Talks are sponsored by HBO.

#505 - Wim Wenders on Anselm Dec 23, 2023

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This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Anselm director Wim Wenders moderated by filmmaker Michèle Stephenson. Anselm is now playing at Film at Lincoln Center, in stunning 3D! Get tickets at filmlinc.org/anselm Oscar-nominated director Wim Wenders traces the life of Anselm Kiefer, one of the most innovative and influential fine artists working today. For more than five decades, Kiefer’s paintings and sculptures have confronted his native Germany’s dark past through a vast network of cultural references in a dazzling mixture of 35mm and 16mm film stocks, with a distinctive focus on physical elements: from lead, glass, and textiles to found and incinerated organic matter. As he did for his sublime portrait of Pina Bausch in 2011, Wenders employs groundbreaking stereoscopic cinematography to transport us to key chapters of Kiefer’s early life in post-Nazi Germany and throughout his 100-acre studio in France. Anselm, which debuted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a portrait of an artist at work like you’ve never seen before—an indelible visual experience and a vivid tour of Kiefer’s imposing yet intricately textured works. A Sideshow/Janus Films release.

#504 - Jonathan Glazer, Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller and More on The Zone of Interest Dec 14, 2023

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Director Jonathan Glazer, stars Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel, sound designer Johnnie Burn, and producer James Wilson joined us at NYFF61 to discuss sound design, physicality, and the morality of portraying the Holocaust in The Zone of Interest, a Main Slate selection in this year’s festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. The Zone of Interest is now playing in select theaters. In his chilling, oblique study of evil, British director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) situates the viewer at the center of frighteningly familiar banality: the domestic routine of a Nazi Commandant, his wife, and their kids, while death and violence occur against those imprisoned in Auschwitz over the wall from their idyllic house. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

#503 - Yorgos Lanthimos, Tony McNamara, and the Creative Team of Poor Things Dec 08, 2023

Show notes

This week we’re excited to present a panel discussion with the creative team of Poor Things, an NYFF61 Main Slate selection. The discussion features director Yorgos Lanthimos, screenwriter Tony McNamara, production designers James Price & Shona Heath, composer Jerskin Fendrix, costume designer Holly Waddington, and sound designer Johnnie Burn in conversation with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Poor Things is now playing in select theaters and will open nationwide on December 22nd. In his boldest vision yet, iconoclast auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, previously featured in NYFF with The Lobster (NYFF57) and The Favourite (NYFF56), creates an outlandish alternate 19th century on the cusp of technological breakthrough, in which a peculiar, childlike woman named Bella (Emma Stone) lives with her mysterious caretaker, the scientist and surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). At once poignant and grotesque, Poor Things, based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is a punkish update of the Frankenstein story that becomes a deeply feminist fairy tale about women taking back control of their own bodies and minds. A Searchlight Pictures release.

#502 - The Sweet East Creative Team & a Preview of The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida Nov 30, 2023

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This week we’re excited to present two conversations, the first a panel discussion centered around the films of the late Japanese filmmaker Kijū Yoshida, whose films we will be screening beginning this Friday in the new series, The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida, through December 8, followed by a Q&A with The Sweet East director Sean Price Williams, screenwriter Nick Pinkerton, and cast members Talia Ryder, Simon Rex, Jeremy O. Harris, Rish Shah, and Earl Cave from the 61st New York Film Festival. Get tickets to The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida at filmlinc.org/yoshida

#501 - Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen on Fallen Leaves Nov 26, 2023

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This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen, the two lead actors of the NYFF61 Main Slate selection Fallen Leaves from director Aki Kaurismäki. Sweet-souled in story, scalpel-sharp in filmmaking precision, this enchanting love story from Finnish virtuoso Aki Kaurismäki circles around two financially strapped Helsinkians who keep finding and losing one another in a world that seems to be falling apart. Evoking dark-comic romances from his early career such as Shadows in Paradise and Ariel (NYFF27), the sardonic yet exquisitely melancholic Fallen Leaves devotes its wry, humane gaze to grocery clerk Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and construction laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), who commence an on-again, off-again relationship of extreme tentativeness, while seeking employment and stability. As with the greatest of Kaurismäki’s films, everyday details register as grand, meaningful cinematic gestures. This filmmaker has scrupulously carved another fictive universe out of a handful of specific, vivid locations, yet Fallen Leaves very much takes place in the world we’re living in, which makes its surrender to hope all the more affecting. Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Finland’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards. A MUBI release. This conversation was moderated by The Wrap's Tomris Laffly.

#500 - Wang Bing and Eduardo Williams on Youth (Spring) and The Human Surge 3 Nov 20, 2023

Show notes

This week we’re excited to present an NYFF61 Crosscuts conversation between Wang Bing, the director of the NYFF61 Main Slate selection Youth (Spring), and Eduardo Williams, director of the NYFF61 Currents selection, The Human Surge 3. If there are two films from 2023 that might be remembered in the years to come as time capsules of life as we live it today, they are Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring), an NYFF61 Main Slate selection, and Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3, which opens this year’s NYFF Currents lineup. Williams follows up on The Human Surge with a playfully misnumbered sequel that captures the ambulations of a group of young people in three countries—Peru, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka—using a 360-degree camera, giving resonant form to the virtual, cacophonous, and borderless (yet bounded) texture of our contemporary existence. In Youth (Spring), Bing returns to his project of documenting a China transformed by the vagaries of industrialization: Shot across five years within privately run textile workshops in Zhili, which employ swathes of underpaid twentysomethings, Youth (Spring) accumulates a monumental portrait of life shaped by the temporality of ruthless, relentless production. This talk will bring together these two masterful chroniclers of the present for a conversation about their inspirations and influences, their form-bending play with the cinematic medium, and their radical approaches to time and space. All NYFF61 Talks are sponsored by HBO.

#499 - Todd Haynes on May December Nov 12, 2023

Show notes

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Todd Haynes, the director of the NYFF61 Opening Night selection May December, which will be opening at Film at Lincoln Center this Friday exclusively on 35mm film. The conversation was moderated by playwright and actor Jeremy O. Harris. Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a popular television star, has arrived in a tight-knit island community in Savannah. Here, she will be doing intimate research for a new part, ingratiating herself into the lives of Gracie (Julianne Moore), whom she’ll be playing on-screen, and her much younger husband, Joe (Charles Melton), to better understand the psychology and circumstances that more than 20 years ago made them notorious tabloid figures. As Elizabeth attempts to get closer to the family, the uncomfortable facts of their scandal unfurl, causing difficult, long-dormant emotions to resurface. From the sensational premise born from first time screenwriter Samy Burch’s brilliant script, director Todd Haynes (Safe, Carol) has constructed an American tale of astonishing richness and depth, which touches the pressure and pleasure points of a culture obsessed equally with celebrity and trauma. It’s a feat of storytelling and pinpoint-precise tone that is shrewd in its wicked embrace of melodrama while also genuinely moving in its humane treatment of tricky subject matter. Boasting a trio of bravura, mercurial performances by Moore, Portman, and Melton, May December is a film about human exploitation, the elusive nature of performance, and the slipperiness of truth that confirms Todd Haynes’s status as one of our consummate movie artists. A Netflix release. All NYFF61 Talks are sponsored by HBO.

#498 - Annie Baker and Raven Jackson on Janet Planet and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt Nov 05, 2023

Show notes

This week we’re excited to present an NYFF61 Crosscut conversation between Annie Baker and Raven Jackson, the directors of two of the most self-assured debut films of the year (Janet Planet and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, respectively). Covering traits of the coming-of-age genre, writing practices, and non-traditional scripts, Baker and Jackson’s conversation was moderated by NYFF Main Slate Committee member Kameron Austin Collins. Breaking onto the scene with two of the most original and assured feature debuts in recent memory, Baker and Jackson have each crafted tone poems of breathtaking delicacy. With stories that weave together themes of motherhood and coming-of-age with a lush, exquisitely detailed sense of place, Baker and Jackson distill and transpose the singular qualities of their literary work to the cinematic medium. All NYFF61 Talks are sponsored by HBO.

#497 - Martin Scorsese on Mean Streets Oct 29, 2023

Show notes

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation with director Martin Scorsese, whose new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, is currently playing in theaters worldwide courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Apple Original Films. In this conversation with Scorsese, the director discusses his early '70s masterpiece, Mean Streets, co-starring his Killers of the Flower Moon supporting actor Robert De Niro. De Niro’s lasting partnership with Scorsese began with the filmmaker’s breakthrough third feature, an electrifying and unforgettable depiction of small-time thugs in Little Italy that established much of what was to come in both artists’ careers. Harvey Keitel, an alum of Scorsese’s student feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, is Charlie, an aspirant gangster seeking a middle ground between his profession and his efforts to lead a morally upright life. But his irrepressible friend Johnny Boy (De Niro) complicates matters with his anarchic behavior and debts to loan sharks. Raising hell as soon as he arrives on screen, De Niro is entirely at home as Scorsese’s young id of Mulberry Street—equal parts funny, ferocious, and frightening. This conversation was moderated by former NYFF Associate Director of Programming, Scott Foundas.

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