New York Film Festival 2020 - what's going to happen?

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FRANCES MCDORMAND IN CHLOE (THE RIDER) ZHAO'S NOMADLAND; IT OPENS @ VENICE AND IS THE ANNOUNCED CENTERPIECE @ NYFF

New York Film Festival 2020 - What's going to happen?

FESTIVAL COVERAGE THREAD

I thought there would not be one, a "not" one, like Telluride.. But they seem to be planning some kind of pandemic compromise, as with Venice and Toronto. I don't know how much of an actual festival there will be, frankly. The announcement is, that it will take a "hybrid shape with a 'focus on outdoor and virtual screenings with indoor screenings as possible and directed by state and health officials" (-IndieWire).

The Centeriece film was announced last week: Chloe (The Rider)'s Nomadland starring Frances McDormond.

Now "The 2020 edition of the New York Film Festival will open with the world premiere of Steve McQueen's 'Lovers Rock,' it was announced today." This is part of a sequence entitled "Small Axe" about Black West Indians in England and their struggle against racism, which will be shown later on BBC One and Amazon Prime. Two other films in the "Small Axe" series will also be shown as part of the 20200 NYFF Main Slate.

NYFF 2020 calendar. Opening night film.

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STILL FROM MCQUEEN'S LOVER'S ROCK

NYFF calendar: Friday, September 25, 2020 to Sunday, October 11, 2020.

OPENING NIGHT FILM.
Film at Lincoln Center has announced NYFF 58's opening night film. It will be the first segment of Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" anthology, Lover's Rock. In fact this is not a feature film but one piece of an anthology-style mini-series of different-length films made for television.

McQueen’s "Small Axe" anthology is set to premiere on BBC One later this year and air on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S. According to series' official summary, it's set between the late 1960's and mid-1980's, with each film following a different story involving London’s West Indian community, whose lives have been "shaped by their own force of will despite rampant racism and discrimination." As mentioned, two other films in the "Small Axe" series, the 124-minute Mangrove and 80-minute Red, White and Blue, will play later in the 2020 NYFF Main Slate.

"Small Axe" consists of five different films, Mangrove, Lovers Rock, Alex Wheatle, Education, and Red, White and Blue. Film at Lincoln Center expects to debut the full series later in the year. It focuses on stories of Black pride and resilience in London's West Indian population, cases where ordinary people in the community stood up to police brutality and racial injustice effectively.

NYFF 2020 Closing Night Film:
Azazel Jacobs’s French Exit.

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MICHELLE PFEIFFER AND LUCAS HEDGES AND A BLACK CAT IN FRENCH EXIT

Azazel Jacobs’s French Exit has been chosen to close the festival. It stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges.

Four of his five previous features have won festival awards, Terri, a lot of them. He is one of those New York directors who grew up with treasured viewings at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater . "NYFF is the film festival I grew up attending," Jacobs says. "I remember seeing Night On Earth for the first time, and waiting afterwards to hand Jim Jarmusch a fan letter. I remember that same year seeing Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho and having my aim to become a filmmaker only more solidified. I'm grateful to the NYFF for allowing French Exit to premiere in the city I was raised in, and love, and to all who are undoubtedly working tirelessly to make this event happen."

In French Exit Michelle Pfeiffer plays widowed, formerly uber-rich NYC socialite Frances Price. Now in diminished circumstances, she escapes to a friend's empty Paris flat via cruise ship with her dyspeptic son Malcolm (Hedges) and their temperamental black feline Small Frank (who speaks, voiced by Tracy Letts). In Paris Frances and Malcolm confront dubious pasts and uncertain futures while experiencing an enriched social life. Adapted from a novel by Patrick deWitt. To be released by Sony Pictures Classics.

NYFF 2020 Main Slate has been announced.
Film at Lincoln Center has made public the selected films for the New York Film Festival 2020 Main Slate. On their website here.
New York Film Festival 2020
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The 58th New York Film Festival Main Slate

Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen 2020) Opening Night
Nomadland (Chloé Zhao 2020) Centerpiece
French Exit (Azazel Jacobs 2020) Closing Night
Atarrabi and Mikelats (Eugène Green 2020)
Beginning (Dea Kulumbegashvili 2020)
The Calming (Song Fang 2020)
City Hall (Frederick Wiseman 2020) doc
Days 日子 (Tsai Ming-liang 2020)
The Disciple (Chaitanya Tamhane 2020)
Gunda (Victor Kossakovsky 2020)
I Carry You with Me/Te Llevo Conmigo (Heidi Ewing 2020)
Isabella (Matías Piñeiro 2020)
Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu 2020)
Mangrove (Steve McQueen 2020
MLK/FBI (Sam Pollard 2020
Night of the Kings/La Nuit des rois (Philippe Lacôte 2020)
Notturno (Gianfranco Rosi 2020) doc
Red, White and Blue (Steve McQueen 2020
The Salt of Tears/Le sel des larmes(Philippe Garrel 2020
Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue/一直游到海水变蓝(Jia Zhangke 2020) doc
Time (Garrett Bradley 2020
Tragic Jungle/Selva Trágica (Yulene Olaizola 2020
The Truffle Hunters (Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw 2020) doc
Undine (Christian Petzold 2020)
The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sangsoo 2020

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NYFF Main Slate - descriptions of the films (from Film at Lincoln Center)
From Filmlinc
"an especially strong slate of documentary films"
Opening Night
Lovers Rock
Steve McQueen, 2020, UK, 68m
A movie of tactile sensuality and levitating joy, Lovers Rock finds the always daring Steve McQueen (Hunger, 12 Years a Slave) in an ecstatic yet no less formally bold mode. Produced as part of McQueen’s ambitious, multifaceted Small Axe, an anthology of decades-spanning films that alights on various lives in London’s West Indian community, the intoxicating, 1980-set Lovers Rock takes place largely over one night at a house party. While McQueen and co-screenwriter Courttia Newland have constructed their ethereal narrative around the growing attraction between Martha (newcomer Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and a brooding stranger (Micheal Ward), the film is equally about the rapture of music, specifically the reggae genre of the title—typified in the film’s swooning centerpiece set to Janet Kay’s euphoric 1979 single “Silly Games”—and the thrill and liberation of bodies in motion, miraculously photographed by Shabier Kirchner. An Amazon Studios release.

Centerpiece
Nomadland
Chloé Zhao, 2020, U.S., 108m
Frances McDormand delivers a beautiful performance of understated grace and sensitivity in this richly textured third feature from director Chloé Zhao (The Rider, NYFF55), adapted from Jessica Bruder’s acclaimed 2017 nonfiction book about itinerant older Americans. Set against the grand backdrop of the American West, Nomadland recounts a year in the life of Fern (McDormand), a stoic, stubbornly independent widow who, having spent her adult life in a now-defunct company town, repurposes an old van and sets off in search of seasonal work. Alongside McDormand, the film features deeply affecting turns from David Strathairn and a supporting cast of nonactors, all real-life “nomads” playing versions of themselves. With this road movie for our precarious times, Zhao establishes herself as one of contemporary cinema’s most clear-eyed and humane chroniclers of lives on the American margins. A Searchlight Pictures release.

Closing Night
French Exit
Azazel Jacobs, 2020, U.S., 110m
Michelle Pfeiffer is entirely bewitching as Frances Price, an imperious, widowed New York socialite whose once-extreme wealth has dwindled down to a nub. Facing insolvency, she makes the decision to escape the city by cruise ship and relocate to her friend’s empty Paris apartment with her dyspeptic son, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges), and their mercurial cat, Small Frank (voiced by Tracy Letts). There, Frances and Malcolm reckon with their pasts and plan for an impossible future, all while their social circle expands in unexpected and increasingly absurdist ways. This adaptation of the best-selling novel by Patrick deWitt is a rare American film of genuine eccentricity, elegantly directed by Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers), and featuring a brilliant performance of stylish severity by Pfeiffer, whose every intonation is a wonder to behold. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Atarrabi and Mikelats
Eugène Green, 2020, France/Belgium, 123m
Eugène Green (last seen at NYFF with 2016’s The Son of Joseph) fashions an original modern-dress fable in his inimitable style, perched on the line between earnest spirituality and sly satire. Atarrabi and Mikelats are brothers born minutes apart, the children of the powerful goddess Mari. After their mother hands them over to the Devil, making him their teacher and caretaker—he’s a scholar and the “height of hipness,” after all — the boys grow up to be polar opposites. The curious, saintly Atarrabi (Saia Hiriart) wants to see the world beyond their lair; the wicked, diabolical Mikelats (Lukas Hiriart) prefers to stay and pledge his soul to his master. Green’s entertaining, episodic, and surpassingly beautiful film is a strikingly original vision of good and evil and the importance of humility and humanity in a fearful world.

Beginning
Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2020, Georgia, 125m
In her striking feature debut, Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili uses rigorous, compositionally complex frames to tell the devastating story of a persecuted family of Jehovah’s Witness missionaries from the perspective of a wife and mother. Following a shocking act of arson on the place of worship she and her husband have established in a remote village outside of Tbilisi, Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili) finds herself descending into a spiral of confusion and doubt, her suffering only exacerbated by her debased treatment at the hands of the local police. An occasionally harrowing depiction of women’s roles in both religious and secular society, Beginning announces a major new arrival on the world cinema scene.

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The Calming
Song Fang, 2020, China, 93m
A film of arresting beauty and tranquility, the second feature from Song Fang—whose Memories Look at Me (NYFF50) was a work of graceful autobiography—follows a young film director as she makes her way around Japan, China, and Hong Kong after a relationship breakup: presenting her work, engaging with friends and artists, and dealing with the realities of aging parents. Amidst all of this, Lin (an effortlessly inquisitive Qi Xi) takes in both lush nature and imposing cityscapes, a woman both alone and constantly engaged in the ever-shifting environment around her. Song’s film refuses to impose psychological motivation on Lin’s perambulations or her art, instead allowing the viewer to experience the world’s disappointments and felicities along with her, and perhaps bear witness to creative rejuvenation.

City Hall
Frederick Wiseman, 2020, U.S., 272m documentary
Nonagenarian national treasure Frederick Wiseman returns with another kaleidoscopic look at the function and practice of community, policy, and civic engagement in shaping Americans’ everyday lives. This time, Wiseman trains his gaze on the inner workings of the city of Boston, taking viewers into the public and backroom discussions that can either inspire or stall municipal action. As in such recent works of penetrative institutional analysis as At Berkeley and In Jackson Heights, Wiseman shows—without editorializing or casting broadsides—a country’s steps toward inclusivity and social reform, as well as the entrenched systems that keep progress in relative check. Wiseman’s top-down approach to representing governmental function speaks to the multicultural and immigrant communities and businesses of Boston’s neighborhoods and suburbs, while also standing in for the whole of a nation constantly wrestling with its legacy and debating its future. A Zipporah Films release.

Days
Tsai Ming-liang, 2020, Taiwan/France, 127m
The great Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang has been directing exquisite examinations of alienation, isolation, and the fleeting beauty of human connection featuring his muse Lee Kang-sheng for decades. His latest film, Days—his first feature-length fiction since 2013’s magnificent Stray Dogs (NYFF51)—will undoubtedly stand as one of his best, sparest, and most intimate works. Lee once again stars as a variation on himself, wandering through a lonely urban landscape and seeking treatment in Hong Kong for a chronic illness; at the same time, a young Laotian immigrant working in Bangkok, played by Anong Houngheuangsy, goes about his daily routine. These two solitary men eventually come together in a moment of healing, tenderness, and sexual release. Among the most cathartic entries in Tsai’s filmography, Days is a work of longing, constructed with the director’s customary brilliance at visual composition and shot through with profound empathy. A Grasshopper Film release.

The Disciple
Chaitanya Tamhane, 2020, India, 128m
Indian filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane became a sensation after the runaway international success of his 2014 feature debut Court. His much-anticipated follow-up, The Disciple, is a finely crafted labor of love set in the world of Indian traditional music. Hindustani classical singer—and remarkable first-time actor—Aditya Modak stars as Sharad, a man living in Mumbai who makes it his life’s goal to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a practitioner of the centuries-old Khayal music tradition. As the years wear on, Sharad grows increasingly disillusioned as he strives for divine purity in a world tipping over into bland commercialization. The Disciple is a refined yet uncompromising portrait of a young artist’s journey, his dreams, and his loneliness, featuring some extraordinary musical performances.

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Gunda
Victor Kossakovsky, 2020, Norway, 93m documentary
Gunda is a sow who lives on a farm in Norway. When documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky first visits her, she has just given birth to a litter of piglets, and his patient camera watches as they grasp for her milk and take their tentative, teetering steps into a new world. This remarkable intimacy extends and evolves, building into an unprecedented portrait of animal life—encompassing herds of cows and curious, uncooped chickens—that brings us uncommonly close to these creatures, and manages to express their consciousness without overtly anthropomorphizing them. Entirely wordless, Gunda boasts immersive natural sound design and crisp, pastoral black-and-white cinematography to tell its compassionate tale; like all of Kossakovsky’s work (¡Vivan las Antípodas!, Aquarela), it’s visionary in its simplicity, wonder, and urgency. A NEON release.

I Carry You With Me (Te llevo conmigo)
Heidi Ewing, 2020, U.S./Mexico, 111m
Among the most emotionally resonant and innovatively conceived cinematic love stories in years, I Carry You With Me (Te llevo conmigo) charts the burgeoning romance between Iván (Armando Espitia), a semi-closeted young father and restaurant worker, and Gerardo (Christian Vázquez), a high school teacher who has come to terms more fully with his sexuality. When Iván makes the decision to leave Mexico and find new life and work opportunities across the U.S. border, the two men must make difficult decisions about their future. In her narrative feature debut, Heidi Ewing (Oscar-nominated for Jesus Camp) unexpectedly and brilliantly incorporates documentary elements into a beguiling, humane tale in which everyday struggle is inextricable from transcendent romance. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Isabella
Matías Piñeiro, 2020, Argentina, 80m
Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro continues to explore the porous line between performance and daily ritual in his most visually striking film yet. As in such subtly magical dramas of the everyday as The Princess of France (NYFF52) and Hermia & Helena (NYFF54), Piñeiro uses a Shakespeare text to anchor a loose yet intellectually rigorous examination of life’s loves, labors, and futile pursuits, all played out with the minutest of gestures. Isabella uses Measure for Measure as inspiration, with regular Piñeiro players María Villar and Agustina Muñoz as Mariel, a teacher with stage aspirations, and Luciana, a more established actress. The filmmaker jumps around in time, from the days leading up to a crucial audition to years later, after the women have moved on to other dreams; meanwhile we keep returning to their collaboration on an entrancing, James Turrell–like light installation. Piñeiro’s art has never been more graceful or structurally complex as in this work of solace amid anxiety and doubt. A Cinema Guild Release.

Malmkrog
Cristi Puiu, 2020, Romania, 200m
A turn-of-the-20th-century Christmas Eve gathering among five members of the European elite at an elegant Transylvanian estate becomes the setting for an increasingly intense series of conversations. These philosophical elaborations on good and evil, Jesus and the Devil, and war and peace take place in an array of well-appointed rooms with the utmost gentility, but the simmering violence beneath their veneer of politesse, and the occasional shocking nature of the subject matter at hand, come to reveal nothing less than the invasive horrors of the colonialist mindset. Romanian director Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, NYFF43) has created a pristine, sometimes terrifying vision, a portrait of the damned that would only seem absurdist if it didn’t feel so utterly up-to-date.

Mangrove
Steve McQueen, 2020, UK, 126m
In the late ’60s, Frank Crichlow, the Trinidad-born owner of a café in Notting Hill, London, increasingly found himself and his establishment the targets of white police intimidation and brutality. A meeting place for the local West Indian community as well as the area’s Black activists and intellectuals, the Mangrove restaurant was raided numerous times without any evidence of illegal activity; finally, the fed-up community took to the streets in protest, resulting in the arrests and violent treatment of several demonstrators. An epic piece of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, this vivid and gripping dramatization of these events and the resulting landmark 1970 trial of the defendants—who came to be known as the Mangrove Nine, and some of whom acted as their own counsel—is a stinging indictment of a system rotted by racism and a powerful portrait of resistance, passionately performed by a remarkable cast led by Shaun Parkes as Crichlow, Letitia Wright as Altheia Jones-LaCointe, and Malachi Kirby as Darcus Howe. An Amazon Studios release.

MLK/FBI
Sam Pollard, 2020, U.S., 104m documentary
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered today as an American hero: a bridge-builder, a shrewd political tactician, and a moral leader. Yet throughout his history-altering political career, he was often treated by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies like an enemy of the state. In this virtuosic documentary, veteran editor and director Sam Pollard (Two Trains Runnin’, NYFF54) lays out a detailed account of the FBI surveillance that dogged King’s activism throughout the ’50s and ’60s, fueled by the racist and red-baiting paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover. In crafting a rich archival tapestry, featuring some revelatory restored footage of King, Pollard urges us to remember that true American progress is always hard-won.

Night of the Kings
Philippe Lacôte, 2020, France/Ivory Coast/Canada/Senegal, 93m
At the Maca correctional facility in the Ivorian capital of Abidjan, the inmates run the prison, a place all but ruled by superstitions. Tonight, upon the rising of a red moon, a newly arrived prisoner (Koné Bakary), jailed for pickpocketing, has been selected by the autocratic Lord Black Beard to assume the position of “Roman” (storyteller): he must keep his fellow inmates entertained with wild tales or risk his own life. As this Scheherazade-like scenario unfolds, he tells the story of Zama, his childhood friend who became a legendary crime boss. Paying homage to the tradition of the griot in West African culture, Night of the Kings is a work of Shakespearean fabulism and gripping, energetic cinema, an altogether original vision from breakout Ivory Coast filmmaker Philippe Lacôte.

Notturno
Gianfranco Rosi, 2020, Italy/France/Germany, 100m documentary
Gianfranco Rosi, whose last film, the Oscar-nominated documentary Fire at Sea (NYFF54), won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, returns with an immersive work of nonfiction. Shot over the course of three years along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon, Notturno (Nocturne) is a nighttime ramble through a region of the world rocked and shattered by catastrophe and violence. With spellbinding visual compositions and heartrending attention paid to the plight of those who have been living through the rise of ISIS in the vacuum created by the U.S. invasion, Rosi leads the viewer through a play rehearsal in a psychiatric ward; on the quiet journeys of snipers, soldiers, and fishermen; and to a classroom where children relate harrowing testimonies of atrocities they’ve witnessed. In these border worlds, people go about their lives while constantly haunted by a pervasive existential threat; Rosi’s extraordinary film is a reminder that people carry on, every day, even under the darkest circumstances.

Red, White and Blue
Steve McQueen, 2020, UK
John Boyega plays real-life figure Leroy Logan, a member of the London Metropolitan Police Force who both witnessed and experienced firsthand the organization’s fundamental racism. Set in the ’80s, McQueen’s film captures Logan’s growing awareness of a system that he would one day try to dismantle from the inside, while also centering on his relationship with his father, a victim of white police brutality who initially refuses to accept his son’s decision to enter law enforcement. An entry in McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, charting various lives over the course of three decades in the city’s West Indian community, Red, White and Blue is richly evocative and politically charged, with an impassioned yet nuanced performance from Boyega. An Amazon Studios release.

The Salt of Tears
Philippe Garrel, 2020, France, 100m
Veteran filmmaker Philippe Garrel once again fashions a pinpoint-precise and economical study of young love and its prevarications, which ever so gradually blossoms into an emotionally resonant moral tale. Handsome Luc (Logann Antuofermo), following in his aging father’s footsteps to study the craft of furniture joining, doesn’t appear to have any trouble meeting and dating women; as the film opens he’s aggressively courting Djemila (Oulaya Amamra) at a Paris bus stop. Skeptical yet ultimately trusting, Djemila will not be Luc’s one and only. Constructed and composed with crystalline austerity, and co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière and Arlette Langmann—who collaborated on Garrel’s last two films, In the Shadow of Women (NYFF53) and Lover for a Day (NYFF55)—The Salt of Tears is a pocket portrait that demonstrates the persistent vitality of one of French cinema’s great observers of the callowness of youth. A Distrib Films release.

Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
Jia Zhangke, 2020, China, 112m documentary
The preeminent cinematic chronicler of 21st-century China, Jia Zhangke (last seen at NYFF two years ago with his masterful Ash Is Purest White) turns his sights to the more distant past in his surprising, complexly wrought new documentary. In Shanxi province, where Jia grew up, the filmmaker gathers three prominent authors—Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong—and evokes the legacy of the late writer Ma Feng, to create a tapestry of testimonies about the drastic changes in Chinese life and culture that began with the social revolution of the ’50s. In 18 chapters, interspersed with evocative, impressionistic interludes, Jia tells a wide-ranging, discursive story that touches upon movements in literature, the experiences of farmers and intellectuals, and urban versus rural living, and functions as a reminder of the essential power of verbally passing down history to future generations.

Time
Garrett Bradley, 2020, U.S., 81m documentary
The tireless 21-year campaign of Louisiana woman Fox Rich to secure her husband’s release from prison after he received a 60-year sentence for robbery becomes a work of nonfiction cinematic alchemy in the hands of filmmaker Garrett Bradley. She has made a film composed of both newly shot material and archival footage from decades of home movies that Rich recorded to document her days, months, years of waiting. Delicate yet forceful, it’s an exquisitely stitched-together narrative of the strength and resilience of one mother of six that also functions as a personal perspective on the crisis of Black mass incarceration in America. Featuring evocative black-and-white cinematography that creates a sense of timelessness even as we feel time passing inexorably, Bradley’s film is a rarity: a work of both aesthetic nerve and social import. An Amazon Studios release.

Tragic Jungle
Yulene Olaizola, 2020, Mexico, 96m
In her accomplished fifth feature, Mexican filmmaker Yulene Olaizola immerses the viewer in a richly drawn, tactile experience that works as both a gripping adventure and a contemplative rumination on the brutality and splendor of nature. Set in the 1920s in the deep thickets of a Mayan tropical rainforest along the Rio Hondo—then the border between Mexico and British Honduras, now Belize—Tragic Jungle follows Agnes (Indira Andrewin), a young woman trying desperately to escape with her sister from the white British landowner she doesn’t want to marry. With the man armed and on her trail, she barely gets away, and is discovered by a troupe of chicleros—gum tree workers—who become both her rescuers and captors. Vibrantly shot by cinematographer Sofia Oggioni, Olaizola’s film becomes an entirely unexpected story of myth and superstition, in which the jungle itself seems like a living being, taking natural revenge on the men whose petty inhumanities bloody its trunks and vines.

The Truffle Hunters
Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, 2020, Italy/U.S./Greece, 84m documentary
This engaging and beautifully filmed documentary immerses the viewer in the forests of Northern Italy, where dogs, accompanied by their elderly, often irascible human owners, scraping by on modest means, seek the precious white Alba truffle. Among the most coveted delicacies in the culinary world, this pricey fungus only makes its way to the plates of wealthy restaurant patrons thanks to the olfactory skills of these heroic canines. A depiction of both a ritualistic, outmoded way of life and the wild economic disparity of a situation that can lead to acts of greed and cruelty, The Truffle Hunters is revelatory, earthy, and altogether humane. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

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Undine
Christian Petzold, 2020, Germany, 90m
At first blush, the new film from Christian Petzold might seem a departure for the German director, especially to those only acquainted with him from his recent triumvirate of masterful films about the romantic and identity crises of refugees at different points in German history: Barbara (NYFF50), Phoenix, and Transit (NYFF56). Yet Petzold has long been toying with established genres, and with Undine he injects a supernatural element into a melodrama of star-crossed lovers—the title character (Paula Beer), a historian and tour guide at the Berlin City Museum specializing in urban development, and industrial diver Christoph (Franz Rogowski, Beer’s co-star in Transit). Linked by a love of the water, Undine and Christoph form an intense bond, which can only do so much to help her overcome the considerable baggage of her former affair. The story of a contemporary relationship guided by age-old cosmic fate, Petzold’s film contains indelible images of lush romanticism while remaining scrupulously enigmatic. An IFC Films release.

The Woman Who Ran
Hong Sangsoo, 2020, South Korea, 77m
Men are mostly, amusingly sidelined in Hong Sangsoo’s latest delight, which is anchored by the director’s regular collaborator—and real-life partner—Kim Minhee as the peripatetic Gamhee. Divided into three casually threaded yet distinct sections, the film follows Gamhee as she travels without her husband for the first time in years, visiting a succession of friends: two on purpose, one by chance. As usual, Hong allows the most minimal interactions to carry surprising weight, and uses subtle and sly narrative repetition to evoke a world of circular motion. The Woman Who Ran also features one of Hong’s most expert comic setpieces, a neighborly argument about stray cats that gets to the heart of the filmmaker’s lovingly crafted world of thwarted connections and everyday dysfunction. A Cinema Guild release.

New expanded NYFF dates: September 17–October 11.

An interview with a Film at Licoln Center longtme member offers these odd streaming picks:

Quote:

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Streaming Picks
Member Spotlight: Stuart Fischer

What is the last film you watched and where was it streaming?
The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone., available on iTunes.

What is the best film you've watched so far and where was it streaming?
New Jack City, also on iTunes.

What's a film you love that you were able to revisit recently?
The Warriors (a masterpiece).

What is your fondest Film at Lincoln Center memory?
Sitting right behind François Truffaut at The Wild Child when he took a bow at the end and getting his autograph.

Why did you become a member of the organization?
I joined about 25 years ago. My first movie with FLC was Heat with Joe Dallesandro. NYFF is the most exciting event of the year, and after The Irishman and Parasite (NYFF57), it’s never been better.

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Really, NEW JACK CITY? HEAT? Didn't anybody notice they asked him "Why?" and he answered "When?"?

LOVERS ROCK (Steve McQueen 2020)

New York Film Festival's unique hybrid pandemic Virtual/drive-in 2020 version's Opening Night Film is a 68 minute mostly dance party event from "Small Aze," a 5-pert anthology TV series for BBC for Steve McQueen and the NYFF's Opening Night Film. The most sexy and intense dance party ever staged and watched. Ugh! then Wow! Can't hate Steve McQueen any more after this.

MALMKROG (Cristi Puiu 2020)

Five Russian aristocrats in a splendid mansion in Transylvania in 1900 discuss philosophy and religion in stilted French from before lunch through dinner, 200 minutes of our time. He who spearheaded the Romanian New Wave with his THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (2005) (reviewed at my first NYFF) has now made a sterile exercise. It's exquisitely crafted and acted with great discipline and stamina, but for what?

GUNDA (Victor Kossakovsky (2020)

From Norway, with additional footage from Spain and Britain. this is a wordless portrait in gorgeous black and white of a large sow who has just given birth to a brood of piglets; plus some fascinatingly tentative chickens; and some curious cattle. But mainly the sow and the piglets. I don't understand barnyard animals. But this becomes a striking festival art film about animals with a message Joaquin Phoenix, the world's most famous vegan, could get behind, since he's the executive producer. . After five films, this is my favorite so far.

THE CALMING 平静 (Song Fang 2020)

A Chinese woman documentary filmmaker (Qi Xi) has broken up with her boyfriend. This film follows her as she quietly copes, and perhaps learns to appreciate being alone, while visiting Japan, admiring the snow in Niigata, returning home, spending time with friends, and takes comfort in a beautiful aria from Handel. A poetic, meditational sophomore film by the director whose first one, Memories Look at Me, was reviewed on Filmleaf as part of the 2012 NYFF.

TIME (Garrett Bradley 2020)

A woman waits eighteen years for her husband to get out of prison. Striking amalgam of home footage and doc. This becomes a cry against institutional racism and mass incarceration couched in movingly intimate terms.

FAUNA (Nicolás Pereda 2020)

From the Currents series (not Main Slate), an avant-garde Mexican filmmaker. This 70-minuter feature plays with narrative, absurdity, acting, disguise, Narcos, and family interactions in a poor little mining town. Unique.

NIGHT OF THE KINGS/LA NUIT DES ROIS (Philippe Lacôte 2020)

A Prophet meets Sheherezade by way of City of God. An exuberant French language amalgam of elements focused on a young storyteller talking to save his life in the most crowded prison in Ivory Coast while the prison leader is losing his grip and both may not be around when the night of the red moon is over. Already many good English language reviews: Metascore 82%. Africa!

CITY HALL (Frederick Wiseman 2020)

The city is Boston, one of the country's biggest and oldest. "City Hall" includes all the city government's wide reach, and it encompasses the far-ranging sympathies of its liberal Irish-American Mayor, Marty Walsh, son of immigrants, in his second term, and an impressive illustration of everything the man in Washington is not. This is partly a love letter to Marty Walsh. It shows what it's like to be called upon to speak at every kind of meeting and never get bored, never fail to rise to the occasion. An impressive man. Four and a half hours.

MLK/FBI (Sam Pollard 2020)

How the FBI hounded MLK (1963-1968) and let him die.

DAYS 日子 (Tsai Ming-liang 2020)

Long slow looks at a lonely, ailing rich man in Taiwan and a youth in Bangkok. Then they briefly come together for a massage in a hotel room. It's much more moving than you would expect. Tsai's aging muse Lee Kang-sheng is joined by Thai newcomer Anong Houngheuangsy for this film.

NOMADLAND(Chloé Zhao 2020) Centerpiece

Big role for Frances McDormand as a widow forced off the grid who chooses to stay there, with a lot of real characters met on the road. Have to say I still much prefer Zhao's debut feature THE RIDER. This is already a festival darling and spoken of as Oscar material.

ISABELLA (Matías Piñeiro 2020)

Another graceful, many-layered and pretty opaque riff off Shakespeare (this time Measure for Measure) by the long-haired young Argentinian wunderkind, who now lives in New York but went back to Buenos Aires and Argentina's Córdoba Province for this one. The second time he has been included in the NYFF Main Slate.

HOPPER/WELLES (Orson Welles 2020)

Footage shot for Welles' last unfinished film OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND but never used, in which he questions and provokes Hopper, unseen. It's raw, jerky footage and hard to watch, but I admire Hopper for how well he keeps his cool.

THE SALT OF TEARS/LE SEL DES LARMES (Philippe Garrel 2020)

The distance between Philippe Garrel and his son Louis, now also a director, seems vaster than just one generation, but both have collaborated with the prolific screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, now 89, on their latest films. A tale of an attractive and irresponsible young cabinetmaking apprentice who flits from one woman to another. His one serious relationship is with his aging carpenter father.

THE DISCIPLE (Chaitanya Tamhane 2020)

Second film by the very talented, smart Indian director of Court is a fantastic, complex and unexpected film, full of sharp truths and ironies, about now threatened Indian classical music and the challenge of a severe tradition for a young acolyte. He seeks to be a Khayal singer of Hindustani music but is challenged all around, by his guru and the impossible standards of his guru's guru, and by the debasement of the music today, or lack of interest and appreciation. Is India collapsing and losing its age-old culture? Tamhane is a brilliant new figure on the world scene.

SWIMMING OUT TILL THE SEA TURNS BLUE/一直游到海水变蓝(Jia Zhangke 2020)

A rather draggy documentary by Jia Zhang-ke about four well known Chinese contemporary writers, one dead, and one woman, all of whom came from villages and lived through the Cultural Revolution or its aftermath. Mostly talking heads, and likely more interesting to locals, but with some touching moments.

I CARRY YOU WITH ME/TE LLEVO CONMIGO (Heidi Ewing 2020)

A gay immigration movie about a Mexican couple that makes its points forcefully. The timely themes and a radical modulation from actors to the real people at the end may explain inclusion in the NYFF Main Slate.

MANGROVE (Steve McQueen 2020)

Another stunning segment from McQueen's "Small Axe" BBC mini-series, also to be on US's Amazon Prime in November. This is about the "Mangrove Nine" trial that led to "the first judicial acknowledgment of behavior motivated by racial hatred within the Metropolitan Police." Keen BLM relevance, and a great watch.

RED, WHITE AND BLUE (STEVE MCQUEEN 2020)

John Boyega of Star Wars is excellent as real English person Leroy Logan, who joined the London police in the eighties to combat institutional racism from the inside. Arguably a harsher watch than either of the two other films in the five-film "Small Axe" BBC (and Amazon Prime) series films by McQueen included in the Main Slate and perhaps even more relevant than Mangrove.

You may like to watch this virtual Q&A for David Byrne's American Utopia (2020) between Dennis Lim of FLC, Spike Lee and David Byrne. Lee's film based on Byrne's Broadway show growing out of his album was included in the NYFF's Spotlight series.

THE Q&A

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THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS (Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw 2020)

It's the white truffles of Italy, and the cranky old men of Piedmont who hunt for them with their very specially trained and beloved dogs, an activity impinged upon by greedy capitalists, for these are rare tubers of great price, a very special delicacy. An artful, meandering documentary that will appeal to devotees of sophistication and oddity. And with its opera arias, very Italian, though from the American makers of 2018's The Last Race.

ATARRABI & MIKELATS (Eugène Green 2020)

A Basque fable of good and evil brothers, and recreated in modern dress by eccentric expatriate Eugène Green in teh Basque language. So, strange. But beautiful. From the maker of previous NYFF film Le Fils de Joseph.

NOTTURNO (Gianfranco Rosi 2020)

Turning from the refugee issue of his FIRE AT SEA (NYFF 2016) Rosi, one of the world's great documentary filmmakers, take long, haunting looks at life during and after wartime as seen in a three-year period on the borders between Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. A masterpiece.

TRAGIC JUNGLE/SELVA TRAGICA (Yulene Olaizola 2020)

Set in the 1920's on the border between Mexico and British Honduras, men cheating each other over rubber and and updating of the myth of the seductress Xtabay. But the wandering ardond and around in the jungle turns into a mess.

UNDINE (Christian Petzold 2020)

Turning from the wartime intensity of his great trilogy completed with the 2018 Transit to an intense romance hung on the water nymph myth. Swift storytelling and high romance.

FRENCH EXIT (Aazel Jacobs 2020)

An eccentric bauble for the NYFF's Closing Night Film. A once very rich widow now out of money cashes out all her baubles in euros and goes to a friend's apartment with her son, taking the money and a black cat possessed by the spirit of her late husband.

Maybe Oscar material for Michelle Pfeiffer as Frances Price, ably backed up by Lucas Hedges as her son, Malcolm.

The 58th New York Film Festival Main Slate

Links to reviews:
Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen 2020) Opening Night
Nomadland (Chloé Zhao 2020) Centerpiece
French Exit (Azazel Jacobs 2020) Closing Night
Atarrabi & Mikelats (Eugène Green 2020)
Beginning (Dea Kulumbegashvili 2020)
The Calming 平静 (Song Fang 2020)
City Hall (Frederick Wiseman 2020) doc
Days 日子 (Tsai Ming-liang 2020)
The Disciple (Chaitanya Tamhane 2020)
Fauna (Nicolás Pereda 2020)
Gunda (Victor Kossakovsky 2020) doc
Hopper/Welles (Orson Welles 2020) (Spotlight series) doc
I Carry You with Me/Te Llevo Conmigo (Heidi Ewing 2020)
Isabella (Matías Piñeiro 2020)
Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu 2020)
Mangrove (Steve McQueen 2020)
MLK/FBI (Sam Pollard 2020) doc
Night of the Kings/La Nuit des rois (Philippe Lacôte 2020)
Notturno (Gianfranco Rosi 2020) doc
On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola 2020) - sold out
Red, White and Blue (Steve McQueen 2020)
The Salt of Tears/Le sel des larmes(Philippe Garrel 2020
Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue/一直游到海水变蓝 (Jia Zhangke 2020) doc
Time (Garrett Bradley 202) doc
Tragic Jungle/Selva Trágica (Yulene Olaizola 2020
The Truffle Hunters (Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw 2020) doc
Undine (Christian Petzold 2020)
The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sangsoo (2020) - sold out

NYFF 2020: BEST OF

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Docs rock

This is a year unlike any other any of us have known. But New York doesn't quit. Film at Lincoln Center surmounted all obstacles to provide a real festival, in hybrid form, virtual (open to the whole country) combined with local drive-in presentations. They did their best with what they had. And it was good.

The Main Slate was packed with documentaries - more than any other year: why on earth so much factual stuff at a time when we need cheering up? Have we grown intolerant of frivolity, of charm? Nonetheless non-fiction films did provide more of the festival's real satisfactions. Gunda (Victor Kossakovsky 2020) and Notturno (Gianfranco Rosi 2020) manage to combine the greatest artistry and the greatest meaning. The Truffle Hunters (Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw 2020) has charm and perfection even if it may be far down on the scale of "relevance." Time (Garrett Bradley 202) and MLK/FBI (Sam Pollard 2020) are more workmanlike productions with important messages on the timely subjects of police brutality and racism. In City Hall, about Boston, Frederick Wiseman reliably provides a rich story in impeccable non-fiction style. So there are six documentaries in the Main Slate - unprecedented, all of them really good, even if it wasn't essential to include every one of them in this elite list.

That may bespeak a thinner feature list this year and perhaps that was true. The way the Centerpiece film Nomadland (Chloé Zhao 2020) mixes a famous actress with authentic, found people felt false, yet it'll probably be the Main Slate's most talked-about American film ; there were hardly any, anyway. (I missed Sofia Coppola's On the Rocks but it sounds like a minor effort, as is the closing night French Exit (Azazel Jacobs 2020), a mere bauble, albeit a notable showcase for Michelle Pfeiffer.)

Three favorite features

Three that impressed are: The Disciple (Chaitanya Tamhane 2020), Days (Tsai Ming-liang 2020), and Undine (Christian Petzold 2020). The first two won't be for everyone, and Undine is less substantial than the trilogy from Petzold that proceeded it. The Disciple is a complex drama about entering the demanding world of classical Indian music. Days is a slow cinema study of an older man encountering a younger man and briefly connecting. Undine is a witty, sexy riff on the water nymph legend set in contemporary Berlin.

And Steve McQUeen

A surprise was the three from Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" series scheduled for TV release. I wrote them off as more filler, not real movies, and more stuff where McQueen browbeats us, all very wrong on my part. McQueen is a lot better than I realized and is working in top form, and these films - they are films - about the struggles and triumphs in different historical moments in the life of the London West Indian community, are passionately acted and filmed and breathlessly intense and exciting films. Put "Small Axe" on your to-do list.

There are three other titles that, however flawed, matter or show great promise: Beginning (Dea Kulumbegashvili 2020), I Carry You with Me/Te Llevo Conmigo (Heidi Ewing 2020) and Night of the Kings/La Nuit des rois (Philippe Lacôte 2020).

But there was no great or universally acclaimed feature film this year. No Marriage Story, no Pain and Glory, no Parasite. No Ash Is Purest White, no Burning, no Shoplifters. No Call Me by Your Name, no Lady Bird, no Zama. No Manchester by the Sea, no Moonlight, no Toni Erdmann. And that is just to review the past four years in reverse: the Main Slates of 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2016.

John Waters' poster for the 2020 (58th) NYFF

Neglected to show John Water's (typically) deliciously cheap and tasteless and funny NYFF 2020 poster.

Quote:

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Waters said of the poster design, "Since none of my films were ever chosen to be in the New York Film Festival, I was thrilled to be asked to design this year’s poster. I always knew I’d get my ass in there somehow! What better way to show my respect and irreverence for this prestigious event than to bring along Globe Poster, Baltimore’s famous press that promoted the best rock-and-roll shows all over America for decades? Trashy? Classic? Maybe it’s all the same in 2020 when we have to reinvent moviegoing itself."
-The Gothamist.

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Quote:

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The posters, which will be for sale, are being both silkscreen-printed and letter-pressed on Cougar 130lb paper.
Waters also was involved in a pesonal appearance at a notorious drive-in double feature he chose and introduced in person of Pasolini's SALO and Noë's CLIMAX.

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CITY HALL (Frederick Wiseman 2020)

Opens Friday, November 13, 2020
in the Roxie Virtual Cinema.

This means all in the US will be able to watch it, for a fee.

NOTTURNO (Gianfranco Rosi 2020)


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NOTTURNO Opens Today, Friday, Jan. 22, 2021, in Virtual Theaters & Jan. 29, 2021 On Demand

Of all the year's documentaries, this one is the most universal and the most haunting. It's wide-ranging content focuses on the longtime violence that has wracked the Arab Middle East. With extraordinary access it takes us to Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon and shows us intimately how as the director says, "greed and ambition" have led to "military coups, corrupt regimes, authoritarian leaders and foreign interference" and then to "tyranny, invasions and terrorism" in a "vicious circle" - feeding off each other and leading to endless suffering. And yet amid all this horror there is beauty. A great and underappreciated film.