Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

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#476 - Eduardo Williams on The Human Surge Sep 03, 2023

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This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation with The Human Surge director Eduardo Williams. Eduardo Williams’s latest film,The Human Surge 3, will make its U.S. Premiere as the Opening Night selection in the Currents section of the 61st New York Film Festival. A twenty-something in Argentina loses his warehouse job. Boys in Mozambique perform half-hearted sex acts in front of a webcam. A woman in the Philippines assembles electronics in a small factory. The Human Surge, a Projections selection of NYFF54, features Eduardo Williams’s inquisitive camera in constant motion in, as are his rootless characters, who wander aimlessly, make small talk, futz with their phones, and search for a working Internet connection. Unfolding within the unfree time between casual jobs, this wildly original rumination on labor and leisure in the global digital economy seems to take place in both the immediate present and the far horizon of the foreseeable future. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

#475 - Bertrand Bonello, Gaspard Ulliel, & Aymeline Valade on Saint Laurent Aug 27, 2023

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This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation with Saint Laurent director Bertrand Bonello and cast members Gaspard Ulliel & Aymeline Valade. Bertrand Bonello’s latest film, The Beast, will make its U.S. Premiere at the 61st New York Film Festival in this year’s Main Slate. Saint Laurent, which had its North American premiere at the 52nd New York Film Festival in 2014, is a different kind of biopic, focusing on a particularly hedonistic time in the life of legendary fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. The film playfully warps and obscures the passage of time, which results in a delirious viewing experience. Anchored by an enigmatic performance by Gaspard Ulliel, the fashion icon becomes a myth, a brand, and an avatar of his era. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

#474 - Ryûsuke Hamaguchi & Min Jin Lee on Drive My Car Aug 20, 2023

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This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation between journalist & author Min Jin Lee and Drive My Car director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, whose new film, Evil Does Not Exist, will make its U.S. premiere as a Main Slate selection of the 61st New York Film Festival. Inspired by a Haruki Murakami short story, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi spins an engrossing, rapturous epic about love and betrayal, grief and acceptance. With his characteristic emotional transparency, Hamaguchi charts the unexpected, complex relationships that theater actor-director Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) forges with a trio of people out of professional, physical, or psychological necessity: his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), with whom he shares an erotic bond forged in fantasy and storytelling; the mysterious actor Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), whom he’s drawn to by a sense of revenge as much as fascination; and, perhaps most mysteriously, Misaki (Tôko Miura), a plaintive young woman hired by a theater company, against his wishes, to be his chauffeur while he stages Uncle Vanya. Hamaguchi specializes in revelations of the heart, and Drive My Car—a beautiful melding of two distinct authorial sensibilities—consistently steers clear of the familiar in its characters’ journeys towards self-examination. Winner of Best Screenplay at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.

#473 - Ira Sachs on Passages Aug 13, 2023

Show notes

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Ira Sachs, whose new film, Passages, is currently playing in our theaters. A masterful work of psychosexual intensity, the newest film from Ira Sachs offers one of the director’s most cutting variations on desire and intimacy. Co-written by author and longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, Passages follows Tomas (Franz Rogowski), a mercurial German filmmaker living in Paris whose commitment to his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), falls short when he pursues a dalliance with a young schoolteacher, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Martin begins his own affair soon after, while Tomas swings between both relationships and unleashes a reckless succession of breakups and makeups. With fearless performances from Rogowski, Whishaw, and Exarchopoulos, Sachs crafts a cinematic rarity in which the white-hot pleasures and compulsions of a particularly dysfunctional amour fou are kept on par with ferocious honesty. This conversation was moderated by film critic, Esther Zuckerman.

#472 - Sofia Coppola on The Bling Ring Aug 05, 2023

Show notes

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Sofia Coppola, whose new film, Priscilla, will make its North American premiere as the Centerpiece selection of the 61st New York Film Festival on October 6th. In this archival conversation with Coppola, the director discusses her 2013 film, The Bling Ring. Co-starring Emma Watson and Leslie Mann, The Bling Ring tells the story of a group of teenagers obsessed with fashion and celebrity that burglarize celebrities' homes in Los Angeles. Tracking their targets' whereabouts online, they break-in and steal their designer clothes and possessions. Reflecting on the naiveté of youth and the mistakes we all make when young, amplified by today's culture of celebrity and luxury brand obsession, we see through the members of the Bling Ring temptations that almost any teenager would feel. What starts out as teenage fun spins out of control and leaves us with a sobering view of our culture today. This conversation was moderated by former Director of the New York Film Festival, Kent Jones. This conversation was sponsored by HBO.

#471 - Todd Haynes on Safe Jul 29, 2023

Show notes

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Todd Haynes. Haynes's new film, May December, will make its North American premiere as the Opening Night selection of the 61st New York Film Festival on September 29th. In this archival conversation with Haynes, the director discusses his mid-90s classic, Safe, starring his May December and Far From Heaven leading actress, Julianne Moore. While Haynes shot Safe in 1994, he set it at the height of the AIDS epidemic seven years earlier. The unnamed disease at the center of this indelible, shuddering movie—widely considered one of Haynes’s masterpieces—has taken on new, unexpected meanings since the film’s release, and yet much of what makes Safe revelatory to watch is the uncanny precision of its setting, look, and tone. Carol (Julianne Moore), whose mysterious breakdown from perfect housewife to cloistered invalid drives the movie’s plot, is a character couldn’t live anywhere but suburban L.A. in the late ’80s—a landscape Haynes captures in a strange, piercing, hyperreal light. Jonathan Rosenbaum called Safe “the most provocative American art film of the year” in 1995. It’s hard to imagine any movie topping it were it released now. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director, Dennis Lim.

#470 - Christian Petzold on Afire Jul 22, 2023

Show notes

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Christian Petzold about his new film, Afire, now playing in our theaters courtesy of Janus and Sideshow Films. Set against the backdrop of a seaside town threatened by encroaching wildfires, Christian Petzold’s latest is a breezy, often funny, yet emotionally layered melodrama of creative and romantic insecurities along the German Riviera. The film centers around Leon, a disgruntled novelist struggling to finish his manuscript while traveling with his photographer friend to a vacation home near the Baltic Sea, where they’re met by an unexpected third house guest, Nadja (Paula Beer;, whose presence distracts Leon as much as it cringingly exposes his self-obsessed bubble. Full of sunkissed tints and nocturnal blues, Afire finds the director operating with a deceptively light touch, but what starts as a hangout comedy gradually opens up into something entirely more surprising and psychologically complex. The film is the winner of the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival. This conversation was moderated by Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor, Devika Girish.

#469 - Paulina Urrutia on The Eternal Memory Jul 15, 2023

Show notes

This week we're excited to present a conversation with Paulina Urrutia, a film subject in Maite Alberdi's new documentary, The Eternal Memory. Augusto and Paulina have been together and in love for 25 years. Eight years ago, their lives were forever changed by Augusto’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. As one of Chile’s most prominent cultural commentators and television presenters, Augusto is no stranger to building an archive of memory. Now he turns that work to his own life, trying to hold on to his identity with the help of his beloved Paulina, whose own pre-eminence as a famous actress and Chilean Minister of Culture predates her ceaselessly inventive manner of engaging with her husband. Day by day, the couple face this challenge head-on, relying on the tender affection and sense of humor shared between them that remains, remarkably, fully intact. This conversation was moderated by Lucila Moctezuma.

#468 - Park Chan-wook on Decision to Leave Jul 08, 2023

Show notes

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with with cult-favorite director Park Chan-wook. Three decades into his feature filmmaking career, Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook—recipient of the Best Director award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival—made his New York Film Festival debut with Decision to Leave, an intricate Hitchcockian epic that both draws on familiar genres like the crime thriller and the melodrama and takes them in entirely new formal and psychological directions. We were thrilled to welcome Park to NYFF60 last October for a deep-dive conversation delving into his long and acclaimed career, his affinity for genre filmmaking, his artistic influences and inspirations, and the making of his latest feature. For our event, Deep Focus: Park Chan-wook, the filmmaker spoke with film critic Farran Smith Nehme.

#467 - Mark Cousins on The March on Rome Jul 01, 2023

Show notes

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with documentary filmmaker Mark Cousins, who recently joined us for a screening of his latest feature, The March on Rome. Filmmaking’s role in influencing the political landscape and popular consciousness has been a well-established subject in cinema, but few works have performed as deep an investigation into it as the latest from Mark Cousins, The March on Rome. Using a propagandistic documentary depicting Mussolini and the Black Shirts’ seizure of power as his point of departure, Cousins captivatingly delves into the film’s cinematographic particulars and political context to demonstrate that the rise of fascism in the first half of the 20th century had little to do with its supposed popularity—rather, its ascent was just another spellbinding illusion on the silver screen, albeit one with tragic real-life consequences. Alba Rohrwacher appears periodically in staged interludes as a woman whose initial enthusiasm for fascism tarnishes when she witnesses firsthand the fallout from Mussolini’s rise.

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