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| Isabelle Huppert, Hong Sang-soo favourite (In Another Country, Claire’s Camera) stars in New York Film Festival highlight A Traveler’s Need Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (co-written with Mona Fastvold and Silver Lion Best Director winner at the Venice International Film Festival), starring Adrien Brody with Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Stacy Martin, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, and Alessandro Nivola; Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed Of The Sacred Fig (Germany’s Oscar submission, Special Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Award winner at the Cannes Film Festival) with Soheila Golestani, Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki, Niousha Akhshi, and Missagh Zareh; Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April (Special Jury Prize in Venice) with Ia Sukhitashvili, plus Hong Sang-soo’s By The Stream, starring Kwon Haehyo, Kim Minhee, and Cho Yunhee and his A Traveler’s Needs (winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival) starring Isabelle Huppert (In Another Country, Claire’s Camera), round out the five early bird highlights in the Main Slate program of the 62nd New York Film Festival.
RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, Steve McQueen’s Blitz, and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door (also with Alessandro Nivola and capturing the Golden Lion) are the Opening, Closing and Centerpiece Gala selections, and Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, an adaptation of the novel by William S Burroughs is the Spotlight Gala pick.
The Main Slate selection committee is chaired by New York Film Festival Artistic Director Dennis Lim, and includes Florence Almozini, Justin Chang, K Austin Collins, and Rachel Rosen.
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| The Brutalist |
Part One of émigré architect László Toth’s (Adrian Brody) journey from 1947 to 1952, called The Enigma of Arrival (also the title of V. S. Naipaul’s autobiographical novel), leads him to Pennsylvania (introduced effectively by a tourist newsreel of the time). Brody’s performance is raw and tender and fragile and heartbreaking. His rawness is matched by Alessandro Nivola as László’s cousin Attila, who picks him up from the bus. The hug the two men share doesn’t feel like a movie hug. It is as though both actors for an instant had sudden access to a deep well of ancestral traumas. Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), László’s wife is still stuck in the chaos of post-war Europe. Industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), in honor of his deceased mother, wants László to construct a building for him that is to contain a library, an auditorium, a gym, and a chapel. Dreams, fragments, trains, movement, steel, train tracks, Ayn Rand, the economic miracle, jazz, the UN, the State of Israel - eventually bring László to Carrara, to pick out marble with Van Buren, which ushers us to the film’s entombed heart of darkness. The belly of the mountain echos images of Dora-Mittelbau. The Hard Core Of Beauty, as Brady Corbet calls the second part of his extraordinary VistaVision movie, culminates in an Epilogue at the 1980 Venice Biennale.
The Brutalist will have its US première at the New York Film Festival on Saturday, September 28 at 11:45am with Brady Corbet, Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Stacy Martin participating in a post-screening Q&A - Alice Tully Hall
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| The Seed Of The Sacred Fig |
The Seed Of The Sacred Fig
Writer/director Mohammad Rasoulof fled Iran earlier this year after having been sentenced to eight years in prison. The sacred fig of the title is known to wrap around its host tree to strangle it. Interspersed with actual footage of the political protests, shot on cellphones, the film focuses on Iman (Missagh Zareh), a newly appointed Investigating Judge at the Revolutionary Court in Tehran and his family. Considering himself a devout and righteous man, he is deeply conflicted by what his promotion brings with it - decisions over life and death without time to properly assess the circumstances. His wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) is happy about the promise of a bigger apartment, while his social media savvy daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki) notice how much their life is about to change when the fact that Rezvan’s college friend Sadah (Niousha Akhshi) wants to stay the night, while the dorms are renovated, causes concern. On the streets the protests increase, demonstrations against the mandatory wearing of the hijab are violently suppressed, droves of people are arrested. Wire tapping and pressure, questions of career and conscience funnel into a thriller-like search for a missing gun in an ancient desert labyrinth. When you find yourself with a new understanding how creeping threats took a toll on people in certain regimes of the past, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig also jolts back with force, that what you are watching are not historic events, but a very real present, affecting the lead actors, still in Iran, today.
Mohammad Rasoulof will participate in Q&As on Monday, September 30 following the 8:30pm screening - Alice Tully Hall; Tuesday, October 1 following the 1:45pm screening - Francesca Beale Theater. The Seed Of The Sacred Fig opens at Film at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, November 27.
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| April |
April
Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician in rural Georgia, is being investigated for negligence after a newborn dies at the hospital where she works. Rumors of illegal abortions are in the air and as we follow Nina in her daily and nightly life, a broad picture emerges. The film begins with breathing and a figure resembling a faceless clay sculpture come to life from the mud. We hear invisible kids laugh and run. Cranes are flying. The place seems fallen out of time. Is it April? It might as well be T.S. Eliot’s cruelest month Dea Kulumbegashvili had in mind with its torrential rainstorms and flaming shots of cherry blossoms and poppy fields gleaming in almost otherworldly beauty. Intense and foreboding, long car trips on unpaved dirt roads past simple dwellings, wild dogs and even wilder stray men. The whimpers of a deaf-mute girl and a camera (cinematography by Arseni Khachaturan of Luca Guadagnino’s Bones And All) that stays still for as long as it takes. A terrifying nightly cow market happening in the back of trucks. The buzzing of a fly. A colleague tells Nina, “I miss you like I miss my childhood.” Akin to The Brutalist, April makes you feel righteousness and wickedness in the concrete, before the mind has a chance to spin its wheels.
April will have its US premiere on Monday, October 7 at 9:00pm - Alice Tully Hall
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| A Traveler’s Needs |
By The Stream and A Traveler’s Needs
Textile artist Jeonim (a wonderfully grounded Kim Min-hee) teaches at a college in Seoul in By The Stream. Each department is to submit a short piece for the theatre festival, but a scandal got the previous director fired, after he dated three of the seven students acting in his play. Jeonim asks her estranged uncle Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo), formerly a well-known actor and director, to help them out. He accepts to the delight of Jeonim’s boss and mentor Jeong (Cho Yun-hee), who is a great fan. As each morning begins with Jeonim sketching by the nearby stream, the days are filled with ripples of fresh encounters, extended meals of eel, autumn leaves, and copious amounts of daytime alcohol, whose effects shift the dynamics from exuberance to solemnity, from shyness to fatuity, from the profound to the silly and back. No other filmmaker has explored these reverberations more nuanced or thoroughly than Hong Sang-soo. What it means to teach and to voyage is explored in his A Traveler’s Needs, which features Isabelle Huppert as Iris, the most unwonted instructor of French imaginable. Does her newly invented method of recording innermost truths really work in replacing grammar and vocabulary? Or is she a grifter? Having all the hallmarks of a trickster of lore, complete with a penchant for the milky local rice wine called Makgeolli, a grass green cardigan, and floppy hat, she embodies a catalyst without a past who changes the lives of those she encounters.
A Traveler’s Needs will have its North American premiere on Wednesday, October 2 at 9:00pm followed by a Q&A with Isabelle Huppert and on Thursday, October 3 following the 6:15 screening - Walter Reade Theater. A Traveler’s Needs opens at Film at Lincoln Center on Friday, November 22 (with a sneak preview on November 21 with Isabelle Huppert in person). By the Stream has its US premiere on Friday, October 4 at 9:00pm - Walter Reade Theater
The 62nd New York Film Festival runs from Friday, September 27 through Monday, October 14
