This fall’s New York Film Festival will feature celebrated prizewinners from Cannes and the Berlinale, organizers announced Tuesday, unveiling a main slate that will join new works from filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.
The festival, which runs Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, will screen films from 24 countries and include two world premieres, five North American premieres and 17 American premieres.
Ross’ film, “The Nickel Boys,” is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about two Black teenagers in a Jim Crow-era Florida reform school. It’s the opening-night selection. Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” about a rekindled friendship between women played by Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, will be the centerpiece. And the festival will close with McQueen’s “Blitz,” starring Saoirse Ronan as a working-class single mother in London who gets separated from her 9-year-old son during World War II.
Winners from Cannes and the Berlin Film Festival feature heavily in the festival’s main slate lineup.
Cannes imports include the Palme d’Or winner “Anora,” from Sean Baker; the Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light” from Payal Kapadia; best director winner Miguel Gomes’ “Grand Tour”; the two best-director winners from the Un Certain Regard section, Roberto Minervini with “The Damned” and Rungano Nyoni with “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”; and special prize winner “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” from Mohammad Rasoulof.
Berlinale veterans playing in New York include the Golden Bear prizewinner “Dahomey,” a documentary from Mati Diop about the complicated postcolonial legacy of artifacts from the former African kingdom; Philippe Lesage’s Quebecois coming-of-age drama, “Who by Fire”; and the documentary “No Other Land,” about the destruction of West Bank villages by the Israeli military, made over five years by a Palestinian-Israeli collective.
Two festival mainstays, filmmakers Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, will each have two films playing this fall.
Hong is bringing “By the Stream,” about a former film director, and “A Traveler’s Needs,” which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale and stars Isabelle Huppert as an inexperienced French teacher in a suburb in Seoul, South Korea. (Hong also showed two films last year.)
The second and third parts of Wang’s observational nonfiction “Youth” trilogy, titled “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming)” and focused on migrant textile workers in the Chinese district of Zhili, will also screen at the festival. The first part of the trilogy, “Youth (Spring),” was included in last year’s lineup.
“The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality,” the festival’s artistic director Dennis Lim said in a news release. “They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in and reimagine the world.” — AFP
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