Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special conversation from the 27th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with Claire Denis and Jim Jarmusch. Claire Denis, the singular cinematic visionary behind Beau Travail (NYFF37), Let the Sunshine In (NYFF55), and High Life (NYFF56), returned to Film at Lincoln Center with this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Opening Night selection Both Sides of the Blade, a searing and unsparing romantic drama. Denis sat down with longtime friend and fellow filmmaker Jim Jarmusch—an icon of the American independent filmmaking landscape, and the official Guest of Honor at the 2022 edition of the festival—for an extended conversation about their decades-spanning careers. Claire Denis’s Both Sides of the Blade opens this Friday in our theaters. Go to filmlinc.org/blade for showtimes and tickets. Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, a boozy and beautiful pilgrimage to Memphis, plays for free outdoors in Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza on July 14. Go to filmlinc.org/free for more details.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A on Secrets & Lies with director Mike Leigh from our recent retrospective on the British filmmaker. Moderated by FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. They discussed the making and trajectory of Leigh's "most commercially successful" film, working with actors, and more. The acclaimed winner of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Mike Leigh’s mid-’90s masterpiece cemented his status as the poet laureate of modern family life. The story concerns Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, awarded Best Actress at Cannes), a working-class white woman whose personal and interpersonal lives are transformed when she learns that a Black optometrist is the child she gave up for adoption 27 years prior. Created, like Leigh’s other films, after long months of intensely collaborative improvisation, Secrets & Lies is remarkable for its lived-in warmth and humor, and above all for its unflinching honesty in capturing the everyday evasions and deceptions that can define our lives.  MUBI is offering a 30-day free trial for all FLC listeners. Get access to the special offer at mubi.com/promos/flc, and be sure to learn more about how you can get a free ticket to a theater each week with MUBI GO, included with your subscription, at mubi.com/go/us.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A with Dario Argento on Deep Red following the world premiere of the new restoration at our retrospective, underway through June 29. The conversation was moderated by Maddie Whittle with interpretation by Michael Moore. Get tickets for our retrospective at www.filmlinc.org/argento Blow–Up’s David Hemmings takes the lead in Argento’s most sophisticated giallo, playing a jazz pianist who struggles to remember a vital piece of evidence after witnessing the murder of Macha Méril’s German psychic. Joined by Argento’s real-life partner Daria Nicolodi in the role of a plucky journalist, Hemmings embarks on a dizzying tour of Rome (with shooting locations in Turin standing in for the capital city) which, through Argento’s roving, suprahuman lens, appears just as haunted and hyper-compartmentalized as the movie’s tortured human protagonists. Ranked among the director’s masterworks, Deep Red is supplemented by Argento’s first score with Italian prog-rock band Goblin and astonishing production design by Giuseppe Bassan.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special programmers preview of Beware of Dario Argento, our 20-film retrospective taking place Friday through June 29. Join FLC Programmers Maddie Whittle and Tyler Wilson in an overview of the Master of Giallo’s oeuvre. Explore the lineup, featuring 17 world premieres of new restorations, the North American Premiere of Dark Glasses, 3D and 35mm screenings, and in-person appearances from Argento himself at filmlinc.org/argento. After the preview, listen to a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and actress Tilda Swinton on their Main Slate selection Memoria, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Collective and personal ghosts hover over every frame of Memoria, somehow the grandest yet most becalmed of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s works. Inspired by the Thai director’s own memories and those of people he encountered while traveling across Colombia, the film follows Jessica (a wholly immersed Tilda Swinton), an expat botanist visiting her hospitalized sister in Bogotá; while there, she becomes ever more disturbed by an abyssal sound that haunts her sleepless nights and bleary-eyed days, compelling her to seek help in identifying its origins. Thus begins a personal journey that’s also a historical excavation, in a film of profound serenity that, like Jessica’s sound, lodges itself in the viewer’s brain as it traverses city and country, climaxing in an extraordinary extended encounter with a rural farmer that exists on a precipice between life and death. Join our special engagement with Memoria, playing for one week only through June 23! Get tickets at filmlinc.org/memoria.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special programmer's preview of the 21st Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, our annual series featuring a diverse and extensive lineup of contemporary Italian films. Join FLC Assitant Programmer Dan Sullivan in an overview of the hidden gems in this year’s festival, taking place June 9 - 15. Explore the lineup and filmmaker Q&As, and get tickets at filmlinc.org/openroads. After the preview, listen to a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman on their Main Slate selection Neptune Frost, moderated by NYFF Director Eugene Hernandez. Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with his partner, the Rwandan-born artist Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place amidst the hilltops of Burundi, where a collective of computer hackers emerges from within a coltan mining community, a result of the romance between a miner and an intersex runaway. Set between states of being—past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience—Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends. Neptune Frost is now playing in select theaters.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special Q&A on Hedwig and the Angry Inch with co-creator, director, and lead John Cameron Mitchell and makeup artist and hairstylist Mike Potter, moderated by FLC’s President Lesli Klainberg. After falling in love with a U.S. Army sergeant, an East Berlin boy named Hansel undergoes a sex-change operation so that he can legally marry his beloved. But the operation goes awry, leaving the boy less than a man, but not quite a woman. Deserted in a Kansas trailer park, now Hedwig reinvents themself as a rock star. Based on the hit off-Broadway musical.  Catch Hedwig and the Angry Inch for free this Friday on Governors Island, presented in association with Newfest, with a pre-show DJ set from John Cameron Mitchell and Michael Cavadia starting at 7pm, and an introduction from John Cameron Mitchell before the screening. Ferry ticket reservations are required before the event. Go to filmlinc.org/hedwig for more information.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with The Tsugua Diaries directors Maureen Fazendeiro, Miguel Gomes, moderated by FLC Programmer Tyler Wilson. The rigorous process of moviemaking meets the torpor of pandemic life in this beguiling new film co-directed by Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes (Arabian Nights, NYFF53). A daily journal that unfolds in revelatory reverse order, this playful rug-puller begins by surveying the mundane routines of three housemates (Carloto Cotta, Crista Alfaiate, and João Nunes Monteiro) living in rural peace during the COVID lockdown: impromptu dance parties, cleaning, building a backyard butterfly house. Soon, we discover that there’s more going on beyond the limits of the camera frame. Cockeyed, funny, and slyly meta-cinematic, The Tsugua Diaries, lovingly shot on 16mm, demonstrates the possibility of artistic creation out of sheer will. The Tsugua Diaries opens this Friday in our theaters. For showtimes and tickets, go to filmlinc.org/tsugua

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A with Hong Sangsoo on his new film In Front of Your Face, moderated by FLC’s Director of Programmer Dennis Lim, and a special programmers preview of Human Conditions: The Films of Mike Leigh. After years of living abroad, a middle-aged former actress has returned to South Korea to reconnect with her past and perhaps make amends. Over the course of one day in Seoul, via various encounters—including with her younger sister; a shopkeeper who lives in her converted childhood home; and, finally, a well-known film director with whom she would like to make a comeback—we discover her resentments and regrets, her financial difficulties, and the big secret that’s keeping her aloof from the world. Both beguiling and oddly cleansing in its mix of the spiritual and the cynical, In Front of Your Face finds the endlessly prolific Hong Sangsoo in a particularly contemplative mood; it’s a film that somehow finds that life is at once full of grace and a sick joke. Get showtimes and tickets at filmlinc.org/face. Before the Q&A, listen to a programmer’s preview of Human Conditions: The Films of Mike Leigh, our upcoming retrospective on the British filmmaker, with FLC programmers Dan Sullivan and Maddie Whittle. Taking place May 27 - June 8, Human Conditions: The Films of Mike Leigh, co-presented with Janus Films, will feature brand new restorations, 35mm print screenings, and in-person Q&As with Leigh himself. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/leigh.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 51st New Directors/New Films with Eskil Vogt, director of The Innocents, moderated by FLC’s Director of Programming Dennis Lim and a programmers preview of the 29th New York African Film Festival. Perhaps best known as the co-screenwriter of acclaimed Norwegian director Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World), Eskil Vogt proves himself to be a filmmaker of astonishing skill and elemental force in his own right with this daring supernatural thriller. Set during the summer at an apartment complex surrounded by an ominous, fairy-tale-like forest, The Innocents follows the sinister, increasingly alarming interactions of a group of prepubescent children: Ida, feeling ignored next to her autistic older sister Anna; the bullied Ben; and the angelic Aisha, who appears to communicate telepathically—and feel through—the nonverbal Anna. With unforgettable, dark images and fleet visual storytelling, Vogt’s film pushes the “evil children” subgenre into more philosophical territory, creating a morally askew universe controlled by a child’s primitive understanding of the world. The Innocents is now playing in our theaters. Go to filmlinc.org/innocents for showtimes and tickets. Before the Q&A, listen to a programmers preview of the 29th New York African Film Festival, now playing in our theaters and virtually nationwide through May 17. Explore the lineup, Q&As, info on a free digital art exhibition, a free masterclass, and more at filmlinc.org/african.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 51st New Directors/New Films with Happening director Audrey Diwan and lead Anamaria Vartolomei on their Opening Night selection. The conversation was moderated by The Museum of Modern Art programmer Josh Siegel. Winner of the Venice International Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Lion, Audrey Diwan’s exceptionally well-observed breakthrough is an unsparing, gripping portrait of a young woman’s attempts to secure an illegal abortion in 1960s France. A student of ambition and promise, hoping to leave her small town and embark on a professional life of the mind, Anne Duchesne (Anamaria Vartolomei in a brave, overwhelming performance) finds her entire future thrown into doubt upon discovering that she’s pregnant. Sure to be one of the most talked-about movies of the year, Happening, based on the semi-autobiographical novel by acclaimed author Annie Ernaux, is a drama that incrementally builds in power, showing the step-by-step process by which an ordinary young woman attempts to establish her freedom and ownership of her body. Happening opens in theaters on May 6th.