Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcastm we’re featuring a Q&A from the 60th New York Film Festival with Stonewalling (opens March 10!) filmmakers Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka, moderated by FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini and interpreted by Vincent Cheng. Before that, listen to a special programmer’s preview of the 28th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema from FLC Assistant Programmer Maddie Whittle. Our annual festival celebrating the best works in contemporary French film is now taking place through March 12 with filmmaker Q&As, Free Talks, and more. Explore the lineup and get tickets at filmlinc.org/rdvFor more than a decade, Beijing-based wife-and-husband team Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka have been making films about the lives of young people in China—in many cases “left-behind children,” or those whose parents are forced to leave their families to find jobs in cities. Expanding their project, their gripping, humane yet uncompromising latest, shot with a precise formal economy by Otsuka (who also serves as cinematographer), focuses on a year in the life of Lynn, a flight-attendant-in-training whose plans to finish college are thrown into doubt when she discovers she’s pregnant. Not wanting an abortion (a decision she hides from her callow, absent boyfriend, away on modeling and party hosting gigs), she hopes to give the child away after carrying it to term, while staying afloat amidst a series of dead-end jobs. As incarnated by the filmmakers’ quietly potent recurring star Yao Honggui, Lynn—whose story continues after being the center of the filmmakers’ acclaimed The Foolish Bird (2017)—is both a fully rounded character and the vessel for an urgent critique of a modern-day social structure that has few options for women in need of care. Stonewalling opens on March 10 in our theaters, with in-person Q&As with directors  Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka during opening weekend, and special screenings of Egg and Stone and The Foolish Bird. Get showtimes and tickets at filmlinc.org/stonewalling

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we're featuring a conversation with Davy Chou and Park Ji-Min, discussing Return to Seoul at the 60th New York Film Festival with Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Freddie (Park Ji-Min), a young French woman, finds herself spontaneously tracking down the South Korean birth parents she has never met while on vacation in Seoul. From this seemingly simple premise, Cambodian-French filmmaker Davy Chou spins an unpredictable, careering narrative that takes place over the course of several years, always staying close on the roving heels of its impetuous protagonist, who moves to her own turbulent rhythms (as does the galvanizing Park, a singular new screen presence). Chou elegantly creates probing psychological portraiture from a character whose feelings of unbelonging have kept her at an emotional distance from nearly everyone in her life; it’s an enormously moving film made with verve, sensitivity, and boundless energy. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special Everything Everywhere All at Once Q&A from our recent series ‘Verse Jumping with Daniels with directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and producer Jonathan Wang, moderated by FLC Programmer Tyler Wilson. In their second feature-film collaboration, Daniels evoke everyone from Wong Kar Wai, Harmony Korine, and Stephen Chow and everything from video games, YouTube algorithms, wire fu, Japanese anime, late 1990s Hollywood nihilism, and more: Golden Globe® Winner Michelle Yeoh delivers a career-defining performance as Evelyn Wang, a first-generation Chinese-American living above her laundromat business with her aging father (James Hong), her teenage daughter (Stephanie Hsu), and her kind but painfully naive husband (Golden Globe® Winner Ke Huy Quan). Amid an IRS audit (spearheaded by a nearly unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis) that reveals the cracks of her family and livelihood, Evelyn plunges into a multiversal war of “’verse jumpers” that puts the fate of every universe in her hands… This hardly describes the gag-a-minute, gleefully maximalist feature, whose high-wire achievement here is precisely in balancing the unwieldy tone promised by its title with a cinematically legible sense of infinity, all while issuing a profoundly emotional warning to our overstimulated present. An A24 release.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 60th New York Film Festival with director Albert Serra on Pacifiction, moderated by FLC’s Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini, and a special programmers preview with the curators behind the 51st Dance on Camera Festival, taking place through Monday and featuring 30 new films from 35 countries. Get tickets to the longest-running dance film festival in the world at filmlinc.org/dance. Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra reconfirms his centrality in the contemporary cinematic landscape with this mesmerizing portrait of a French bureaucrat (a monumental Benoît Magimel) drifting through a fateful trip to a French Polynesian island with increasing anxiety. Pacifiction charts the various uneasy relationships that develop between Magimel’s autocratic yet avuncular High Commissioner, De Roller, and the Indigenous locals (including nonprofessional actor Pahoa Mahagafanau in a hypnotic breakthrough as De Roller’s trusted right hand and maybe lover) who operate essentially under his faux-benevolent thumb, many of whom we meet at a resort that caters to the prurient exoticism of foreign tourists. Serra’s gripping, atmospheric thriller is a slow-building fever dream that lulls before catching us by surprise with the depths of its darkness, a film that allows its incisive social commentary about the remnants of colonialism to surface through quiet observation and aesthetic audacity. Pacifiction opens February 17th in our theaters with in-person intros and Q&As with Serra on Feb. 17, 18 & 19. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/pacifiction.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast we’re featuring a special Q&A that followed the recent U.S. Premiere of The Birthday during our Jordan Peele curated series, The Lost Rider: A Chronicle of Hollywood Sacrifice, with director Eugenio Mira and lead Corey Feldman. Moderated by FLC Programmer Tyler Wilson. Part comedy of manners by way of Jerry Lewis, part phantasmagorical head trip, Eugenio Mira’s debut has garnered cult status in the years since its premiere at Sitges in 2004, in part for never getting an official home video release or U.S. theatrical premiere—that is, until this January at Film at Lincoln Center. Set in a ruby-red Art Deco hotel in 1987, The Birthday follows hapless protagonist Norman Forrester (Corey Feldman)—whose accent might suggest Brooklyn, New York, but is actually Brooklyn, Baltimore—as he navigates an inhospitable birthday celebration for his scolding girlfriend’s wealthy father (cult icon Jack Taylor) and struggles with the anxieties of his deteriorating romance. The atmosphere turns from tensely awkward to downright sinister as the party wears on, leading Norman to uncover an unimaginable conspiracy implicating the partygoers and staff. With its painstakingly fabricated set design, kinetic camerawork, and bonkers performances, The Birthday is weirdo-horror of the highest order and peers straight into a traumatized headspace of relationship neuroses.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a recent conversation with filmmaker Lukas Dhont on his latest film Close, which was recently nominated for Best International Feature at the 95th Academy Awards, and moderator and critic Thelma Adams. This talk was first exclusive for FLC Patrons.  If you're interested in supporting FLC by becoming a member and exploring member benefits, visit filmlinc.org/members for more information.  Leo and Remi are two thirteen-year-old best friends, whose seemingly unbreakable bond is suddenly, tragically torn apart. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Lukas Dhont's second film is an emotionally transformative and unforgettable portrait of the intersection of friendship and love, identity and independence, and heartbreak and healing. Close is now playing in theaters.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re revisiting a conversation from the 60th New York Film Festival with Mia Hansen-Løve on One Fine Morning, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim, followed by our recent conversation with Jordan Peele, Keke Palmer, and more on the making of NOPE. Few filmmakers are as adept at exploring the contours of modern love and grief as Mia Hansen-Løve, whose intensely poignant and deeply personal latest drama stars Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a professional translator and single mother at a crossroads. Her father, rapidly deteriorating from a neurological illness, will soon require facility care, and her new lover is a married dad whose unavailability only seems to draw her nearer to him, despite—or because of—the fact that she’s going through an overwhelming time in her life. Hansen-Løve, so finely observant of the small nuances of human interaction, creates, in harmonious concert with a magnificent Seydoux, a complicated portrait of a woman torn between romantic desire and familial tragedy that is a marvel of emotional and formal economy. One Fine Morning opens Friday, January 27, in our theaters. Get showtimes and tickets: filmlinc.org/morning Following a special 70mm screening of NOPE during our Jordan Peele curated series, The Lost Rider: A Chronicle of Hollywood Sacrifice, NOPE director Jordan Peele, lead Keke Palmer, producer Ian Cooper, editor Nicholas Monsour & composer Michael Abels joined FLC Programmer Tyler Wilson to discuss the making of the sci-fi-horror.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re sharing a talk from the 60th New York Film Festival with Alice Diop & Frederick Wiseman, whose films Saint Omer (opening Friday at FLC with Q&As!) and A Couple, respectively, were both NYFF60 Main Slate selections. The conversation was moderated by Dessane Lopez Cassell, editor-in-chief of SEEN journal with translation by Nicholas Elliott. French filmmaker Alice Diop has said that it was the work of Frederick Wiseman that inspired her to become a documentarian. It is fitting, then, that NYFF60's Main Slate featured new films by Wiseman and Diop that speak to each other in extraordinary ways—including in their deviation from documentary into the more delicate terrain between fiction and nonfiction. Both A Couple (Wiseman) and Saint Omer (Diop) take true stories of extraordinary and fraught women as their bases, probing the formal possibilities and limits of cinema in revealing the inner lives of real people. The two directors convened for a conversation about the turn to narrative cinema, the cultural and generational distinctions of filmmaking in France and the United States, their respective approaches to cinema as a mode of systemic critique, and more. NYFF Talks were presented by HBO. Saint Omer, France’s Oscar entry, opens this Friday in our theaters with Q&As on Friday and Saturday. Get showtimes and tickets at filmlinc.org/saint

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring two conversations from the 60th New York Film Festival. The first is with Carla Simón, director of Alcarràs, an NYFF60 Main Slate selection about a family in present-day Catalonia, moderated by former NYFF Executive Director Eugene Hernandez. The second conversation is a deep dive on liberating lost movies with various Missing Movies board members and advisors. Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale Festival, Carla Simón’s follow-up to her acclaimed childhood drama Summer 1993 is a ruminative, lived-in portrait of a rural family in present-day Catalonia whose way of life is rapidly changing. The Solé clan live in a small village, annually harvesting peaches for local business and export. However, their livelihood is put in jeopardy by the looming threat of the construction of solar panels, which would necessitate the destruction of their orchard. From this simple narrative, pitting agricultural tradition against the onrushing train of modern progress, Simón weaves a marvelously textured film that moves to the unpredictable rhythms and caprices of nature and family life. Alcarràs, Spain’s official Oscar entry, is now playing in our theaters. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/alcarras Movies go “missing” all the time, whether due to lapses in preservation and archiving, complexities of copyright and distribution, or technological obsolescence. To address these issues—which can powerfully shape what we know and regard as the cinematic canon— a group of filmmakers, distributors, archivists, and lawyers founded the organization Missing Movies.  We were pleased to welcome Missing Movies board members and advisors Amy Heller, Dennis Doros, Nancy Savoca, Rich Guay, Ira Deutchman, and Maya Cade to NYFF60 for a special conversation aimed at empowering the filmmaking community with the tools to liberate lost films and to ensure that the cinema of the present avoids the same fate. All NYFF60 Talks were presented by HBO.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special conversation from our recent sneak preview screening of Corsage with director Marie Kreutzer and lead Vicky Krieps.  In a perceptive, nuanced performance, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) quietly dominates the screen as Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who begins to see her life of royal privilege as a prison as she reaches her fortieth birthday. Marie Kreutzer boldly imagines Elizabeth’s cloistered, late-19th-century world within the Austro-Hungarian Empire with both austere realism and fanciful anachronism, while staying true and intensely close to the woman’s private melancholy and political struggle amidst a crumbling, combative marriage and escalating scrutiny. Star and director have together created a remarkable vision of a strong-willed political figure whose emergence from a veiled, corseted existence stands for a Europe on the cusp of major, irrevocable transformation. Corsage, an official selection of the 60th New York Film Festival, is now playing in our theaters. Get showtimes and tickets at filmlinc.org/corsage