Ny Film Festival 2006

[Chris Knipp]

Fiimleaf's coverage of the 44th New York Film Festival

INDEX OF LINKS TO REVIEWS:
40 Years of Janus Films: a NYFF Sidebar
49 Up (Michael Apted 2006)
August Days (Marc Recha 2006)
Bamako (Abderahmane Sissako 2006)
Belle Toujours (Manoel de Oliveira 2006)
Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2006)
Falling (Barbara Albert 2006)
Gardens in Autumn (Otar Iosseliani 2006)
Go Master, The (Tian Zhuangzhuang 2006)
Host, The (Bong Joon-ho 2006)
Inland Empire (David Lynch 2006)
Insiang (Lino Brocka 1976)
Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Zacharias Kunuk, Norman Cohn 2006)
Little Children (Todd Field 2006)
Mafioso (Alberto Latuado 1962)
Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola 2006)
Offside (Jaafar Panahi 2006)
Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter 2006)
Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro 2006)
Paprika (Satoshi Kon 2006)
Poison Friends (Emmanuel Bourdieu 2006)
Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais 2006)
Queen, The (Stephen Frears 2006)
Reds (Warren Beatty 1981)
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2006)
These Girls (Tahani Rached 2006)
Triad Election (Johnnie To 2006)
Volver (Pedro Almodóvar 2006)
Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo 2006)
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NYFF 2006L: SOME RECOMMENDATIONS


NYFF 2006: An introduction


Helen Mirren in NYFF 2006 opener, Frears' The Queen

Press screenings of the 44th New York Film Festival presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center begin September 18, 2006 and continue through October 12th. I'll be watching the press screenings and reviewing the films in the order they appear there. The festival public screenings will run from September 29 through October 15.

For the nature of the unique festival and my coverage of the films, see last year’s introdction and individual links on the site. Nothing has changed in the essential game plan except that this year there are twenty-eight official selections instead of twenty-five. Again the aim is to represent the very best and only the very best of the year in cinema internationally.No jury or prizes, no theme or categories. If I am not mistaken the selection committee, headed by Film Society program director Richard Peña, is the same as last year's. There are slightly more films in English than in other languages, but there’s a panoply of international directors represented including, among others:

Sofia Coppola
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Alain Resnais
Pedro Almodóvar
Manoel de Oliveira
Michael Apted
Tian Zhuangzhuang
Stephen Frears
Guillermo del Toro
Todd Field
Hong Sang-soo
David Lynch
Jafar Panahi

There is also Japanese animé and a very few documentaries. Frears’ The Queen, a fictional depiction of the aftermath of the death of Lady Di in the British royal family, with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II, is the opening night film. There are also three retrospective showings of older films, Lino Brocka’s Insiang (Filipino, 1976), Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso (Italian, 1962), and the twenty-fifth anniversary screening of Warren Beatty’s Reds. Peña says he thinks as usual there will be “something for just about everybody.” A number of films deal with the topic of “popular cinema” using traditional genres such as melodrama or the gangster flick, and a unifying theme that has emerged in some of the selections is stories that “depict characters who are finally forced to confront realities they’ve long ignored or avoided.”

The standard set by last year's NYFF is a hard one to live up to, but since the same people are running the show, there's hope for another round of exceptional films.