This week we’re excited to present two conversations: the first with Stress Positions director Theda Hammel, co-writer Faheem Ali, & lead actor John Early from Closing Night of the 2024 edition of New Director/New Films, and the second with The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed director Joanna Arnow & her cast from the 61st New York Film Festival. The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed will open at Film at Lincoln Center on Friday, April 26 with Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/feeling Our Stress Positions conversation was moderated by ND/NF selection committee member Madeline Whittle. Our The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed conversation was moderated by NYFF61 Currents programmer Tyler Wilson.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Omen director Baloji from the 2024 edition of New Directors/New Films. The sense of dread that often accompanies being around blood relatives with whom you share no real connection is brought into vivid focus in songwriter and rapper Baloji’s debut feature, Omen. Having been banished to Europe as a baby after a birthmark convinced his mother that he must be a sorcerer, Koffi (Marc Zinga) and his white Belgian fiancée Alice (Lucie Debay) embark on a family reconciliation trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The kinetic chaos of the return—missed airport transfers and traffic, bloody noses, family gatherings and judgments––sets the stage for a visceral reimmersion tale. Winner of the New Voice Prize at Cannes and selected as Belgium’s entry for the 96th Academy Awards, Omen melds the modern and the mystical in mesmerizing fashion. A Utopia release. This conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films committee member Tyler Wilson.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with A Different Man director Aaron Schimberg and lead actor Sebastian Stan from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films. Learn more: newdirectors.org With the hotly anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed sophomore feature, 2018’s Chained for Life, New York-based director Aaron Schimberg boldly announces himself as one of the most fearless and socially incisive new voices in American independent cinema wth the 2024 New Directors New Films Opening Night selection A Different Man. Sebastian Stan, winner of this year’s Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the Berlin Film Festival, delivers an ingeniously embodied performance as Edward, an aspiring actor with severe facial disfigurement, to whom we’re introduced as he navigates a dreary daily existence marked by discouragement and resignation. When a winsome playwright moves in next door, and an experimental medical procedure becomes available to change his face, Edward’s outlook brightens, and he jumps at the chance for a new lease on life—until the arrival of Oswald, an outgoing and warmly charismatic stranger puts his newfound “normalcy” into perspective, and his artistic aspirations in jeopardy. Schimberg’s latest is a discomfiting tour de force, a social satire that wrangles thorny questions of identity and authenticity with unflinching honesty and slyly virtuosic storytelling flair. ork pushes the envelope in unexpected, striking ways. This conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films co-chair Dan Sullivan.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Léa Seydoux, lead actress of the 61t New York Film Festival Main Slate selection The Beast, which will open in our theaters on April 5. The Beast opens at FLC next Friday, April 5 View showtimes and get tickets at filmlinc.org/beast A filmmaker consistently unafraid to wade through the weird miasma of contemporary life, Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama; Coma, NYFF60) works from the outside in, dramatizing the psychological toll of the political and cultural world around us. Here he has created a dynamic and disturbing parable that jumps between three different time periods (1910, 2014, and 2044) to diagnose our acute—and perhaps eternal—feelings of estrangement and alienation. Using Henry James’s haunting 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle” as his film’s provocative inspiration, Bonello tells the story of a young woman (Léa Seydoux) who undergoes a surgical process to have her DNA—and therefore memories of all her past lives—removed. In so doing, she realizes her fate has long been intertwined, for better and worse, with a young man (George MacKay). Touching on modern anxieties of AI and incel culture, which may recur throughout history as commonly as love and hate, The Beast, like all good science-fiction, asks essential questions about the ever-shifting status of humanity itself. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. A Sideshow and Janus Films release. This conversation was moderated by FLC's Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini.

This week we’re excited to present two conversations. First up, with our retrospective celebrating the films of the late Polish director Wojciech Jerzy Has currently running through March 31, listen to Digital Marketing Manager Erik Luers discuss the career of the filmmaker with Annette Insdorf, a celebrated scholar and author of the book Intimations: The Films of Wojech Has. Get tickets to The Long Strange Trips of Wojciech Jerzy Has retrospective at filmlinc.org/has Following that conversation, we’re happy to share a Q&A from the 61st New York Film Festival with La Chimera director Alice Rohrwacher and actors Josh O’Connor & Isabella Rossellini, moderated by NYFF Advisor Michelle Carey. With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and magical realism, Alice Rohrwacher conjures a marvelous entertainment set in a rural Italy eternally caught between the ancient and the modern. La Chimera opens at FLC next Friday, March 29. View showtimes and get tickets now at filmlinc.org/chimera

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with The Animal Kingdom director Thomas Cailley and The Pod Generation director Sophie Barthes as they discuss their playful, up-to-the-minute experiments with genre and the use of speculative fiction to examine political realities and probe timeless emotional truths. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle with interpretation by Nicholas Elliott. Thomas Cailley, whose 2014 breakout feature Love at First Fight charmed audiences with its invigorating fusion of the rom-com and coming-of-age genres, returned to Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with this year’s Opening Night selection, The Animal Kingdom, in which a darkly imaginative sci-fi premise gives way to a thoughtful study of fatherhood. When mankind is plagued with a mysterious infection that selectively mutates the bodies of ordinary people into animal hybrids, a widower and his teenage son must fight to survive in Cailley’s darkly imaginative exploration of a human ecosystem undergoing inexplicable—but potentially liberating—transformation. The Animal Kingdsom is in select theaters now, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Little Girl Blue director Mona Achache, producer Laetitia Gonzalez, and lead actress Marion Cotillard as they discuss the 2024 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema selection with FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. The lives and legacies of three generations of extraordinary women artists are unpacked in Mona Achache’s César-nominated hybrid documentary. Achache, herself an accomplished writer and filmmaker, turns her gaze on her mother, Carole—a writer, photographer, and actress, and the daughter of novelist and screenwriter Monique Lange (goddaughter of William Faulkner). Carole’s myriad professional achievements notwithstanding, her private life was indelibly marked by predatory behavior she experienced at the hands of those close to her, including family friend Jean Genet. Marion Cotillard brilliantly embodies Carole across a series of hauntingly resonant reconstructions that, alongside a generous archive of video, photography, and personal writing, create a rounded portrait of a troubled but outstandingly creative mind. Achache blurs the line between truth and fiction, producing a work as fittingly unsettling and unforgettable as her mother’s own story.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Denis Villeneuve, the subject of a recent retrospective presented by FLC and who’s new highly anticipated sci fi-epic, Dune: Part Two, is now in theaters worldwide courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures. The saga continues as award-winning filmmaker Denis Villeneuve embarks on Dune: Part Two, the next chapter of Frank Herbert’s celebrated novel Dune, with an expanded all-star international ensemble cast. The big-screen epic continues the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s acclaimed bestseller Dune with returning and new stars, including Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, and Austin Butler. Dune: Part Two explores the mythic journey of Paul Atreides as he unites with Chani and the Fremen while on a path of revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family. Facing a choice between the love of his life and the fate of the known universe, he endeavors to prevent a terrible future only he can foresee. This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Lulu Wang, who’s new Prime Video series Expats is now streaming. Lulu Wang casts her penetrating gaze on the intersection of race and class in Hong Kong’s milieu of expats, and the migrant domestic workers employed by them, in this vivid adaptation of Janice Y. K. Lee’s widely acclaimed novel, The Expatriates (1998). Across six episodes, Expats shuttles back and forth between the prelude and aftermath of a tragedy that has dramatically reshaped the lives of three women—Margaret (Nicole Kidman), a mother left shattered as she navigates her way through an inconceivable loss; her neighbor Hilary (Sarayu Blue), herself struggling to regain control of her marriage in the face of infidelity; and the twentysomething, free-spirited Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), who finds herself caught in the center of Margaret and Hilary’s anguish. But for the limited series’ feature-length fifth episode, the three women recede into the background with Wang shifting her focus in an entirely different direction, and transforming this rich tapestry of stories into something altogether more complex. In this penultimate episode, “Central,” Margaret and Hilary’s Filipina caretakers, Essie (Ruby Ruiz) and Puri (Amelyn Pardenilla), come to the fore as we follow them on their day off—socializing, corresponding with family abroad, and carving out time to pursue their own dreams, but who nevertheless remain entangled in their employers’ quandaries, and whose own future hangs in the balance of their every decision. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with About Dry Grasses director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection, About Dry Grasses opens at FLC next Friday, February 23rd. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/grasses. In a village nestled within the wintry landscape of the East Anatolia region of Turkey, an art teacher named Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) is struggling through what he hopes to be his final year at an elementary school. Already tiring of the unforgiving environment, where he has been assigned by the government’s public education system, Samet is further disillusioned and frustrated after a young girl in his class, Sevim, appears to accuse him of inappropriate behavior. The only light on the horizon for Samet is his growing friendship with—and clear attraction to—a teacher from a nearby school, Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a sharp, politically engaged woman unafraid to put the self-involved Samet in his place for his general apathy and narcissism. Turkey’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards, the latest deeply philosophical drama from Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, NYFF49) is a work of elegant, novelistic filmmaking, rigorously unpacking questions of belief versus action, the tangible versus the enigmatic, and who we wish to be versus how we live. A centerpiece conversation between Samet and Nuray—capped off by a provocative metacinematic flourish—ranks with Ceylan’s greatest sequences, and Dizdar, who won the Best Actress prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, commands every second she’s on screen. A Sideshow/Janus Films release. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Advisor Violeta Bava.

This week we’re excited to present a panel of critics and programmers to discuss the significance of the late French film critic Serge Daney (1944–1992)'s thought today, with a particular emphasis on how his politically driven analysis and radical enthusiasms of the 1970s might speak to our contemporary moment. Film at Lincoln Center was proud to recently present Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s, a series that celebrated French film critic Serge Daney and the films he championed in his book La Rampe, occasioned by its long-awaited English translation under the title Footlights. Complementing this program was a panel that featured The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, translator of Footlights and series co-programmer Nicholas Elliott, and moderator FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. This discussion considered the relation between mise-en-scène and moral perspective, the cinema as an antidote to advertising, and the critic’s role as an ally to filmmakers. Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970 was sponsored by MUBI.