Considering the esteemed level of curation at the New York Film Festival, which begins this Thursday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, a comprehensive preview could mostly consist of the schedule.
There’s the gala slots (Last Flag Flying, Wonderstruck, and Wonder Wheel), Main Slate selections (featuring Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, The Square, Mudbound), two films from Film Twitter phenom Hong Sang-soo, and much more, as well as a 24-film Robert Mitchum retrospective and a delectable line-up of restorations.
So rather than single all of these out for our yearly preview, we’re looking at a handful of under-the-radar highlights from across the festival. Check them out below and return for our coverage.
Before We Vanish (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
There are few directors who would choose to take a semi-sincere approach to a lengthy pseudo-philosophical science-fiction film — especially not one that lightly pries into our fundamental psychological foibles — but there are few directors quite like Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The prolific Japanese filmmaker behind such varied genre gems as Pulse and Tokyo Sonata has constructed a sort of skittish and overlong, albeit pleasantly existential oddity in Before We Vanish, an alien-invasion B-movie packed with A-grade ideas and craft. Nail down your windows. Lock your doors. It’s the invasion of the concept snatchers. – Rory O. (full review)
BOOM FOR REAL The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (Sara Driver)
It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, but I imagine the experience of seeing Sara Driver’s new documentary in New York will be a whole different thing –especially if one grew up in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Tracking artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and the performance world to which he was so integral, it promises to be an ode to a long-lost Lower East Side.
Cielo (Alison McAlpine)
While we await a proper release of Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time, another documentary that looks at the awe and wonder of our earth (and beyond) is world-premiering at the New York Film Festival. Cielo, the feature debut from Alison McAlpine (Second Sight), explores the heavens above the Andes and the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. The first trailer showed stunning skyscapes and introduces the astronomers, fishermen, miners, and cowboys that take us on this journey.
Convergence
We’ll concede that this is a bit of a cheat, as it’s an entire section of the festival, but if you’re in-between movies during NYFF’s first weekend, there’s no better place for cutting-edge virtual-reality exhibits and more boundary-pushing technology than these free events. Of perhaps the most interest is Lucasfilm and its visual-effects division, Industrial Light & Magic, publicly debuting a Virtual Production toolset, which allows “filmmakers to build and scout a virtual set, manipulate props, puppeteer characters and vehicles, even compose shots to create virtual storyboards.”
Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (Travis Wilkerson)
Earning acclaim since debuting his project at Sundance, Travis Wilkerson gets personal in his latest documentary. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? explores the story of his white-supremacist great-grandfather, S.E. Branch, who murdered an African-American man in his small town of Dothan, Alabama in 1946. Playing as both an investigation of this (uncharged) crime and a look into his own family, it looks to be an unfortunately essential documentary.
Félicité (Alain Gomis)
A wild and adventurous fourth feature from French-African director Alain Gomis, Félicité find ourselves in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the world’s most dangerous places and a hard place in the best of times to make a living. Gomis, alongside cinematographer Céline Bozon, photograph the city as a wild, confused metropolis, unspooling over new-money concrete blocks, dirt tracks and a make-shift hazardous slums. It’s where Félicité, played with style and jazz by Congolese theatre actor Vero Tshanda Beya, works hand-to-mouth as a singer in raucous night clubs. The opening scene shows Félicité in full voice in a dive bar, where men drunkenly brawl and wads of notes are sent her way in reckless abandon, shot with an explosive energy. – Ed F. (full review)
Filmworker (Tony Zierra)
There’s perhaps no filmmaker at the center of more documentaries than Stanley Kubrick, but a new one coming to NYFF proves that not every angle about his legendary filmography and life has been explored. Filmworker takes a look at the life of Leon Vitali, who first met Kubrick playing Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon and would go on to become a close assistant to the director, even overseeing restorations of his films after his passing. With interviews from Vitali himself and many others in Kubrick’s close circle, hopefully this brings more insight to a unique relationship.
Four Sisters (Claude Lanzmann)
Not one, not two, not three, but four new films from Claude Lanzmann will world-premiere at the New York Film Festival. While that sounds like a daunting undertaking from the director of the essential epic Shoah, these four films are, understandably, a bit shorter. Four Sisters consists of interviews from around the Shoah shoot featuring “four women from four different areas of Eastern Europe with four different destinies, each finding herself unexpectedly and improbably alive after war’s end.”
A Gentle Creature (Sergei Loznitsa)
“Man is a wolf to his fellow man,” quotes a character early in Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature. The ordeal suffered by its protagonist will indeed be solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish – it won’t be short, however. Powerful though bloated, A Gentle Creature is a companion to Loznitsa’s phenomenal first narrative feature, My Joy, once again following a person’s nightmarish odyssey through an allegorical rendition of post-Communist Russia. Though not as successful as its predecessor, Loznitsa’s latest nonetheless confirms the director’s place of honor amongst cinema’s most vociferous critics of Putin’s kingdom. – Giovanni M.C. (full review)
Good Luck (Ben Russell)
There is a symbol at the beginning, middle and end of Good Luck. It is a simple geometric circle with a horizontal line evenly separating top from bottom. Does it represent above ground and below; Northern and Southern Hemispheres; Ying and Yang; daylight and darkness? It could be any one of these or all of them at once. Shot in 2016, this visually stunning, obliquely political, and rather extensive ode to the hardest of graft is built to offer the viewer the otherworldly experience of first going down the shaft of a state-run copper mine in Serbia and, in the second half, that of illegally digging for gold under the Surinamese sun. – Rory O. (full review)
Ismael’s Ghosts: Director’s Cut (Arnaud Desplechin)
While we’ve only seen the Cannes version thus far, a director’s cut of Arnaud Desplechin’s latest is coming to NYFF. We said in our review of the previous version, “Pasolini included an ‘essential bibliography’ in the opening credits of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, proffering five philosophical titles by the likes of Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot to help viewers navigate his rich and daunting Sadean masterpiece. The closing credits of Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts also feature a reading list that could be called essential. Of the four authors listed therein, one in particular might hold the key to interpreting Desplechin’s exhilarating, overflowing mindfuck of a movie: Jacques Lacan.”
The Rider (Chloe Zhao)
What does a cowboy do when he can’t ride? Chloe Zhao’s absorbing South Dakota-set sophomore feature has its titular rider come to terms with such a fate, in a film that’s a beguiling mix of docudrama and fiction whose story echoes much of history of its actors’ own lives. Zhao’s combination of the visual palette of Terrence Malick, the social backbone of Kelly Reichardt, and the spontaneity of John Cassavetes creates cinema verité in the American plains. – Ed F. (full review)
Tonsler Park (Kevin Jerome Everson)
One of the highlights of Projections, a showcase of avant-garde and experimental films, is a new work from Kevin Jerome Everson, who also has a short in the line-up. Tonsler Park finds the director taking his 16mm camera to a polling precinct in Charlottesville, Virginia on election day 2016. With its unfortunate new relevance in mind, we’re looking forward to seeing this experimental look at one of the biggest turning points in American politics.
Voyeur (Myles Kane and Josh Koury)
While there are a number of premieres in the Spotlight on Documentary section at NYFF, this peculiar one has really caught our attention. Voyeur looks at the story of Gerald Foos, who used his Colorado motel in the 1960s to spy on his guests’ sexual activity, and much more. Based on Gay Talese’s New Yorker article, which was controversial in its own right, it promises to be a potentially disturbing look at the thin line between fact and fiction.
Western (Valeska Grisebach)
It is, undeniably, a bold decision to title one’s film Western: on the one hand, the word carries geopolitical weight and a cultural hegemony that the cinema is dominated by; this truth remains an important one at the Cannes Film Festival, where white men dominate the competition (Western opened in the sidebar program, Un Certain Regard). On the other hand, of course, Western implies a cinematic reference—a genre, in and of itself. A genre, to be clear, with tropes galore that are just as problematic as the industry that propagates them. In titling her film as such, however, Valeska Grisebach’s contemplative, brilliant film sparks a dialogue on all of these components, prompting us to think critically on their intersections. – Jake H. (full review)
The 55th New York Film Festival takes place from September 28-October 15. See more information on the official site.