Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

For today’s daily NYFF62 podcast, My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow director Julia Loktev and film subjects Anna Nemzer, Ksenia Mironova, and Olga Churakova join NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen to discuss their documentary, world premiering at the 62nd New York Film Festival.  My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow screens on October 5, 6, 10, and 13. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/nyff American filmmaker Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet, NYFF49), born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent journalism in Putin’s Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. With her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist for TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, Loktev ends up immersing herself with a group of young women fighting to ensure the vocalization of dissent and outspoken criticism of the country—even as they are branded by the government as “foreign agents,” their careers and lives increasingly at risk as the country creeps toward war. Structured in five chapters, Loktev’s film, the climactic days of which were filmed in Moscow during the first week of the invasion, when most independent journalists fled the country, is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety, as well as a vital depiction of the eternal hope that so many in Russia hold for living in a democratic state. Screening in two parts: Chapters 1–3 (198m), Chapters 4–5 (124m). All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO. 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.

This week we’re excited to present a special preview of the 62nd New York Film Festival, beginning this Friday, September 27 and running through October 14. Tickets to this year’s festival are still available but going fast! NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim is joined by Jordan Raup, Associate Director of Marketing at Film at Lincoln Center, to break down the films and events you can’t miss throughout this year’s 17-day festival, including Nickel Boys, The Room Next Door, Blitz, Queer, April, My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, Transamazonia, Afternoons of Solitude, exergue – on documenta 14, Jimmy, The Sealed Soil, and more. Opening with RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, this year’s festival will feature screenings across New York City’s five boroughs, free talks with your favorite filmmakers, stimulating panel discussions, trivia nights, and much more. Don’t forget to subscribe here for more daily filmmaker conversations throughout the festival. Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with His Three Daughters director Azazel Jacobs and cast members Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, and Carrie Coon during a special advance screening at FLC. His Three Daughters is now streaming on Netflix. From writer-director Azazel Jacobs comes this bittersweet and often funny story of an elderly patriarch and the three grown daughters who come to be with him in his final days. Katie (Carrie Coon) is a controlling Brooklyn mother dealing with a wayward teenage daughter; free-spirited Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) is a different kind of mom, separated from her offspring for the first time; and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) is a sports-betting stoner who has never left her father’s apartment—much to the chagrin of her half-sisters, who share a different mother and worldview. Continuing his astute exploration of family dynamics in close-knit spaces, Jacobs follows the siblings over the course of three volatile days, as death looms, grievances erupt, and love seeps through the cracks of a fractured home.  This conversation was moderated by filmmaker Tamara Jenkins.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2012 at the 50th New York Film Festival with No director Pablo Larraín and lead actress Antonia Zegers. Larraín returns to the New York Film Festival this fall with the NYFF62 Spotlight selection Maria. Don’t miss the NYFF premiere of Maria and many more great films at this year's festival. Single tickets will go on sale this Tuesday, September 17! Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff In 1988, Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, due to international pressure, is forced to call a plebiscite on his presidency. The country will vote YES or NO to Pinochet extending his rule for another eight years. Opposition leaders for the NO persuade a brash young advertising executive, Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), to spearhead their campaign. Against all odds, with scant resources and under scrutiny by the despot's minions, Saavedra and his team devise an audacious plan to win the election and set Chile free. The conversation was moderated by Richard Peña.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2011 at the 49th New York Film Festival with The Loneliest Planet director Julia Loktev and lead actress Hani Furstenberg. Acclaimed artist and filmmaker Loktev returns to the New York Film Festival this fall with the NYFF62 Main Slate selection My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow. Single tickets to the festival will go on sale on Tuesday, September 17! Learn more at filmlinc.org/nyff. In The Loneliest Planet, Julia Loktev crafts an intimate relationship film starring Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg as young fiancés backpacking through the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia. The two characters are joined by a mountaineer, forming a trio that quietly treks across dramatic landscapes, where there is just as much said as left unsaid. Loktev dramatically expands her scope with The Loneliest Planet and in the gorgeously filmed mountains has found the perfect setting for isolated, at times suffocating drama. The conversation was moderated by Richard Peña.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2011 at the 49th New York Film Festival with the makers of the Main Slate selection A Dangerous Method: director David Cronenberg, screenwriter Christopher Hampton, producer Jeremy Thomas, and lead actor Michael Fassbender. Cronenberg returns to the New York Film Festival this Fall with the NYFF62 Main Slate selection The Shrouds starring Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger. Don’t miss the U.S. Premiere of The Shrouds and many more great films by securing your Pass to NYFF62 today at filmlinc.org/passes. From acclaimed director David Cronenberg came A Dangerous Method, a dark tale of sexual and intellectual discovery featuring two of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Carl Jung (played by Michael Fassbender) has just begun his psychiatric career, having been inspired by the great Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). When a mysterious and beautiful woman (Keira Knightley) goes under Jung's care, Jung finds himself crossing the line of the doctor/patient relationship, causing great conflict with his mentor and making Jung question his own morality in the process. The conversation was moderated by Scott Foundas.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Between the Temples director Nathan Silver and cast members Carol Kane, Robert Smigel, and Cindy Silver. Directed by New York filmmaker Nathan Silver, who co-wrote the screenplay with C. Mason Wells, Between the Temples follows Jason Schwartzman as a bereaved cantor at an upstate New York synagogue, who has lost his wife, can’t sing anymore, lives with his two mothers, and has a newfound taste for mudslide cocktails. While he keeps kosher and remains devout, his ennui-addled regression seems all but terminal until his 70-year-old grade school music teacher (played by Carol Kane) walks back into his life and becomes his new adult Bat Mitzvah student… and maybe something more.  Something like Harold and Maude by way of Mike Leigh, Silver’s ninth feature is perhaps his most accomplished film yet—a portrait of love in a time of loss that is equal parts touching, cringingly hilarious, and effortlessly strange, shot in stunning 16mm by Sean Price Williams and featuring indelible performances by Schwartzman and Kane. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from 2020 with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker RaMell Ross, moderated by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Garrett Bradley (Time). The two discuss Ross’s documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which was a 2018 New Directors/New Film selection. Ross’s next feature, Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, will open the 62nd New York Film Festival on September 27.  “The American stranger knows Blackness as a fact—even though it is fiction,” says writer-director RaMell Ross. For his visionary and political debut feature, Ross spent five years intimately observing African-American families living in Hale County, Alabama. It’s a region made unforgettable by Walker Evans and James Agee’s landmark 1941 photographic essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which documented the impoverished lives of white sharecropper families in Alabama’s Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Ross’s poetic return to this place shows changed demographics and depicts people resilient in the face of adversity and invisibility. An Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature, Hale County This Morning, This Evening introduces a distinct and powerful new voice in American filmmaking.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Red Island director Robin Campillo from the 2024 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. Rendez-Vous and NYFF veteran Robin Campillo, whose 2017 period drama BPM: Beats Per Minute reconstructed and celebrated ACT UP’s legacy of AIDS activism in France during the 1990s, once again draws on personal history with his latest film, reaching back further to evoke a sumptuously visualized 1970s childhood spent with his military family on Madagascar. Growing up on one of the last remaining French colonial bases on the island, young Thomas (Charlie Vauselle) keeps a curious and observant eye on the adults around him, not least his parents (Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Quim Guterriez). Bonding with young Suzanne (Cathy Pham) over the Fantômette comic books, Thomas’s imagination and observational powers grow even as the world around him is about to die. Making striking use of a child’s perspective, Campillo’s carefully observed drama of a lost world is lyrical and clear-eyed in equal measure. This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Good One director India Donaldson and cast members Lily Collias and James Le Gros from the 2024 edition of New Directors/New Films. Good One opens at FLC on August 9 with Q&As opening weekend. A seemingly small incident has monumental implications in the extraordinary feature debut of India Donaldson, a film of expertly harnessed naturalism and restrained emotional intensity. Seventeen-year-old high school senior Sam (a revelatory Lily Collias) has agreed to join her father Chris (James Le Gros) and his longtime buddy Matt (Danny McCarthy) on a camping trip in the Catskills, though she’d rather be hanging with her friends for the weekend. Affable and wise, Sam at first seems to enjoy the intergenerational bonding experience with the two divorced dads, yet the men’s own festering, middle-aged resentments begin to change the emotional tenor of the trip—until something happens that alters Sam’s perception of the men and her place in their orbit. Amidst the lush beauty and contemplative forest atmosphere in upstate New York, Good One asks provocative questions about the dynamics of family, friendship, and what it means to engage in or avoid conflict. A Metrograph Pictures release. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle.