49th New York Film Festival Pans for Gold

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 29 August 2011 13:32

Written by Laura Blum

New York Film Festival to screen 27 films on its main slate September 30-October 16, 2011

Only one Manhattan cinema event gets to call itself the New York Film Festival, though the pool of fests with "N," "Y," two "F's" and other qualifying letters has surged like Irene´s East River. As science says, the simplest reduction is most the elegant solution. And NYFF is nothing if not elegant.

Now in its 49th year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's sometimes esoteric but mostly essential showcase sets its angle wide, moving between crowd ticklers such as Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist and auteurist prizewinners such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Like Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne’s The Kid With A Bike and Joseph Cedar's Footnote, these nuggets were mined at the Cannes Film Festival.

So was Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, starring Kirsten Dunst. The depression drama was among the Riviera's strongest heat sources this May, where it played alongside Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre, Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala and Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s This Is Not A Film. The list continues; New Yorkers can confidently quarry Cannes without the expense of a trans-Atlantic crossing.

The Berlin Film Festival also provided bounty for NYFF programmers: Pina and The Turin Horse, for example. The former is Wim Wenders’ 3D profile of the late choreographer Pina Baush and the latter is Béla Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky's swansong, about the fate of a horse whose whipping by his master knocked Friedrich Nietzsche off his rocker. Also from the Berlinale comes Asghar Farhadi’s Separation and Ulrich Köhler’s Sleeping Sickness, both Golden Bear winners.

David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method and Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In are due special fuss as "gala screenings." You might think the creepy flesh screamer of the pair is from Cronenberg and the psychological drama, from Spain's student of nervous breakdowns. Not so.

Nor can NYFF's past serve as prelude to this year's opening night protocol. Roman Polanski's Carnage will do the honors, yet this adaptation of Yasmin Reza's play God of Carnage is merely a North American -- not world -- premiere and the filmmaker won´t be on hand to take his bows. (The film makes its way to NY from the Venice Film Festival, as does A Dangerous Method, Abel Ferrara's 4:44: Last Day on Earth and Steve McQueen‘s Hunger encore, Shame.)

Alexander Payne's The Descendants will close the fest. The George Clooney starrer is the third Payne feature to tease the Festival screen with his signature mix of wry social commentary and crabbed hero. Payne will also hold down a show 'n tell via the restored On Cinema forum.

Simon Curtis's My Week With Marilyn will do Centerpiece honors. Michelle Williams goes platinum as Marilyn Monroe facing off with Laurence Olivier on the British set of The Prince and the Showgirl. What went down on the set of My Week With Marilyn? Post-screening Q&A with Williams will reveal all, including that she´s no dumb blonde.

One film (or shall we say two?) that gets its world premiere at NYFF is Martin Scorsese‘s twin documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World. All things must pass and so did Harrison, but in Scorsese's immortalizing cinema the guitar-thrumming Beatle lives on.

Invited to rub shoulders with the fest's film nobility are emerging talents from around the world. Gaul's Mia Hansen-Løve, whose The Father of My Children played at New Directors New Films, graduates to the NYFF screen with Goodbye First Love. US indiemaker Sean Durkin returns to Lincoln Center with his buzzy debut feature, Martha Marcy May Marlene. And Ruben Östlund’s Play from Sweden and Alice Rohrwacher’s Corpo Celeste from Italy caused hums at Cannes' Director’s Fortnight. Nadav Lapid’s Policeman snared trophies at the Jerusalem Film Festival but also at Locarno, where Argentina´s Santiago Mitre and Russia/US's Julia Loktev screened The Student and The Loneliest Planet, respectively.

To round out the main lineup, the Festival will mount an ambitious program of events and screenings including Nicholas Ray´s We Can't Go Home, William Wyler's Ben-Hur in widescreen and Velvet Bullets and Steel Kisses: Celebrating the Nikkatsu Centennial, a tribute to Japan's venerable film studio.

Perhaps as a marker of the zeitgeist leading up to recent Springs and tents, a number of this year´s films cop a "confrontational attitude," noted Program Director and Selection Committee Chair Richard Peña in a statement. Viewers will see that the globe is indeed warming up as "characters pass from recognition of a problem or situation to actual resistance."

Dive deeper into Festival churn at filmlinc.com.

Main Slate:

4:44: Last Day On Earth, directed by Abel Ferrara (USA)
A Separation, directed by Asghar Farhadi (Iran)
Corpo Celeste, directed by Alice Rohrwacher (Italy/Switzerland/France)
Footnote, directed by Joseph Cedar (Israel)
George Harrison: Living In The Material World, directed by Martin Scorsese (USA)
Goodbye First Love, directed by Mia Hansen-Løve (France/Germany)
Le Havre, directed by Aki Kaurismäki (Finland/France/Germany)
Martha Marcy May Marlene, directed by Sean Durkin (USA)
Melancholia, directed by Lars von Trier (Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany/Italy)
Miss Bala, directed by Gerardo Naranjo (Mexico)
Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey)
Pina, directed by Wim Wenders (Germany/France/UK)
Play, directed by Ruben Östlund (Sweden/France/Denmark)
Policeman, directed by Nadav Lapid (Israel/France)
Shame, directed by Steve McQueen (UK)
Sleeping Sickness, directed by Ulrich Köhler (Germany/France/Netherlands)
The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius (France)
The Loneliest Planet, directed by Julia Loktev (USA/Germany)
The Kid With A Bike, directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Belgium/France)
The Student, directed by Santiago Mitre (Argentina)
The Turin Horse, directed by Béla Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky (Hungary/France/Germany/Switzerland/USA)
This Is Not A Film, directed by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (Iran)
Opening Night:
Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski (France/Germany/Poland)
Closing Night:
The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne (USA)
Centerpiece:
My Week With Marilyn, directed by Simon Curtis (UK)
Gala Screenings:
A Dangerous Method, directed by David Cronenberg (UK/Canada/Germany)
The Skin I Live In, directed by Pedro Almodóvar (Spain)

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