Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Mati Diop on Dahomey, a Main Slate selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival.  Dahomey opens at FLC on October 25, with Q&As opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/dahomey The African kingdom of Dahomey, which ruled over its region at the west of the continent until the turn of the 20th century, saw hundreds of its splendid royal artifacts plundered by French colonial troops in its waning days. Now, as 26 of these treasures are set to return to their homeland—now within the Republic of Benin—Diop documents their voyage back, transforming this rich subject matter into a multifaceted examination of ownership and exhibition. Alternating images of nocturnal melancholy and debates among students at Benin’s University of Abomey-Calavi about what should be done with the objects, Dahomey brilliantly negotiates a lost past and an unsure present. All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Main Slate selection committee member Justin Chang.

Director Robinson Devor and co-writers Jason Reid, Bob Fink, and Charles Mudede joined NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim for the world premiere of Suburban Fury at the 62nd New York Film Festival. In September 1975, Sara Jane Moore fired two shots at President Gerald Ford on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco’s Union Square. Moore holds the center of this fleet and compelling nonfiction drama from protean filmmaker Robinson Devor, who lends it the feel of a 1970s thriller. All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO.

Director Carson Lund and actor Keith William Richards joined NYFF selection committee member Justin Chang for the North American premiere of Eephus at the 62nd New York Film Festival.  Set in autumnal Massachusetts, sometime in the 1990s, Carson Lund’s poignant and gracefully accomplished debut feature lovingly nestles in with a pair of amateur recreation league baseball teams as they play one last game at their beloved Soldiers Field before it’s torn down for the construction of a middle school. Eephus opens on March 7, 2025 at Film at Lincoln Center.

Director Steve McQueen joins NYFF62 Artistic Director Dennis Lim to discuss Blitz, the Closing Night selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival. Blitz opens at Film at Lincoln Center on November 1st. Tickets are now on sale: filmlinc.org/blitz An authentic and astonishing recreation of London during its blitzkrieg, Blitz pushes the artistry of Steve McQueen to ever more impressive levels. Working on a vast scale, McQueen sets things at human eye level, telling his original tale from the parallel perspectives of working-class single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her 9-year-old son, George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), as they become separated within the labyrinth of a city under siege. Alternately overwhelming and tender, McQueen’s dazzling film offers a multicultural portrait of 1940s London too infrequently seen on screens.

Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, author Sigrid Nunez, and cast members Naomi Watts, Sarah Pidgeon, Carla Gugino, Noma Dumezweni, Constance Wu, Owen Teague, and Bing join NYFF62 programmer Florence Almozini to discuss The Friend, a Spotlight selection at the 62nd New York Film Festival. This deeply fulfilling adaptation of Nunez’s beloved, slyly shape-shifting National Book Award winner features Naomi Watts as a novelist who finds her comfortable, solitary New York life thrown into disarray after her closest friend and mentor (Bill Murray) commits suicide and bequeaths his beloved Great Dane to her.

On today’s NYFF62 edition of our podcast, director Jesse Eisenberg, cast members Kieran Culkin and Jennifer Grey, and producers Emma Stone and Dave McCary discuss A Real Pain, a Spotlight selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In A Real Pain, cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), having drifted apart over the years, attempt to reconnect on a pilgrimage to the Polish hometown of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Eisenberg’s work of compassion and maturity alternates nimbly between anxious comedy and meditative drama. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

On today’s NYFF62 edition of our podcast, director David Cronenberg discusses The Shrouds with NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim at its U.S. Premiere. In David Cronenberg’s sly and thought-provoking latest, techno-entrepreneur Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger), Karsh uncovers a potentially vast conspiracy. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we welcome director Luca Guadagnino, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, costume designer Jonathan Anderson, and cast members Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey to discuss Queer, the Spotlight Gala of the 62nd New York Film Festival, with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Written in the early 1950s yet not published until 1985, William S. Burroughs’s Queer has come to be considered a canonical work in the career of the Beat Generation author and a cornerstone of transgressive gay literature. In his wildly ambitious adaptation, Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, NYFF55) expertly evokes the book’s post–World War II time period and cinematically translates Burroughs’s iconoclasm with panache. In a transformative role, Daniel Craig immerses himself into Burroughs’s alter ego William Lee, a habitual heroin user luxuriating in freedom and desiccation among a disconnected group of gay American expatriates in Mexico City in the late 1940s. When enigmatic, preppy ex-military kid Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) catches Lee’s eye, he swoons into a headlong love affair, commencing an odyssey that will take them all the way to the Ecuadorian jungle in pursuit of the ultimate high. Buoyed by go-for-broke performances from Craig and Starkey, and rollicking, unexpected supporting turns from Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman, Queer is a dazzling showcase for many in Guadagnino’s stable of collaborators, including Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and music composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It’s a film that finds Guadagnino in his most formidable, gutsiest mode yet, a universal love story featuring expressionistic flights of fancy, gratifying moments of psychedelic surrealism, and surprising tenderness. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix. Queer opens in theaters on November 27, courtesy of A24.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we welcome director Paul Schrader and cast members Uma Thurman and Michael Imperioli to discuss their film Oh, Canada, which made its U.S. Premiere in the Main Slate of this year's festival. The discussion was moderated by NYFF programmer K. Austin Collins. In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a celebrated political documentarian who has reached the end of his life. Constructed with nonlinear flashbacks featuring Jacob Elordi as a young Leonard, the film passes in and out of different time periods, back to the 1960s, matching the slippery consciousness of its storyteller. Adapted from the book Foregone by Russell Banks, Paul Schrader’s emotionally naked drama feels like a direct address to the viewer, a filmmaker’s reckoning with his formidable status and persona. Tickets to the New York Film Festival are moving fast! Get up-to-date information on all available tickets on a daily basis by visiting filmlinc.org/tix. Oh, Canada will be released in theaters on December 6, courtesy of Kino Lorber.

On today’s NYFF62 podcast, we welcome director Leos Carax to discuss his film It’s Not Me, in an extended conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and director Annie Baker. In his new film, the French cinema firebrand lovingly evokes the aesthetics of Jean-Luc Godard, paying aptly cheeky respect to the late New Wave master, his own career, and cinema itself, rummaging through a century of movies to situate his work within a continuum of the medium. To learn more and get tickets for this year's New York Film Festival, visit filmlinc.org. Enjoy this conversation with Leos Carax and Annie Baker.