#389 - Kinuyo Tanaka Preview & Nadav Lapid on Ahed's Knee

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a programmer’s preview on our Kinuyo Tanaka Retrospective, and a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with director Nadav Lapid on Ahed’s Knee,  moderated by NYFF Programmer Rachel Rosen. As an actress in over 250 films, Kinuyo Tanaka was one of the most celebrated and wildly popular artists of her time, regularly collaborating with consummate masters like Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Mikio Naruse. Between 1953 and 1962, Tanaka directed half a dozen films with a determined sense of freedom and touches of provocation, placing women at the forefront of her movies as mistresses, prostitutes, poets, heroines, and victims of social injustice. The Kinuyo Tanaka Retrospective, featuring brand new 4K restorations of her directorial work and 35mm screenings of her collaborations as an actor, takes place March 18 - 27! Listen to an introduction to the filmmaker from Assistant Programmer Tyler Wilson and rediscover the groundbreaking auteur at filmlinc.org/tanaka. Also opening this Friday, Ahed’s Knee is Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid’s shattering follow-up to his bat-out-of-hell Synonyms (NYFF57). A film of radical style and splenetic anger, Ahed’s Knee accompanies a celebrated but increasingly dissociated director to a small town in the desert region of Arava for a screening of his latest film. Already anguished by the news of his mother’s fatal illness (Lapid’s film was made soon after the death of his own mother, who had worked as his editor for many years), he grows frustrated with a speech-restricting form he is encouraged to sign by a local Ministry of Culture worker. The confrontation ultimately sends him into a spiral of rage aimed at what he perceives as the censorship, hypocrisy, and violence of the Israeli government. This boldly shot and conceived work, which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, feels as though it has welled up from the depths of its maker’s soul. Ahed’s Knee opens this Friday with filmmaker Q&As at the 6pm screenings on Friday and Saturday, and a special Film Comment Free Talk with Lapid at 8:30pm on Friday. Get showtimes and tickets at filmlinc.org/ahed.