Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Léa Seydoux, lead actress of the 61t New York Film Festival Main Slate selection The Beast, which will open in our theaters on April 5. The Beast opens at FLC next Friday, April 5 View showtimes and get tickets at filmlinc.org/beast A filmmaker consistently unafraid to wade through the weird miasma of contemporary life, Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama; Coma, NYFF60) works from the outside in, dramatizing the psychological toll of the political and cultural world around us. Here he has created a dynamic and disturbing parable that jumps between three different time periods (1910, 2014, and 2044) to diagnose our acute—and perhaps eternal—feelings of estrangement and alienation. Using Henry James’s haunting 1903 short story “The Beast in the Jungle” as his film’s provocative inspiration, Bonello tells the story of a young woman (Léa Seydoux) who undergoes a surgical process to have her DNA—and therefore memories of all her past lives—removed. In so doing, she realizes her fate has long been intertwined, for better and worse, with a young man (George MacKay). Touching on modern anxieties of AI and incel culture, which may recur throughout history as commonly as love and hate, The Beast, like all good science-fiction, asks essential questions about the ever-shifting status of humanity itself. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection. A Sideshow and Janus Films release. This conversation was moderated by FLC's Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini.

This week we’re excited to present two conversations. First up, with our retrospective celebrating the films of the late Polish director Wojciech Jerzy Has currently running through March 31, listen to Digital Marketing Manager Erik Luers discuss the career of the filmmaker with Annette Insdorf, a celebrated scholar and author of the book Intimations: The Films of Wojech Has. Get tickets to The Long Strange Trips of Wojciech Jerzy Has retrospective at filmlinc.org/has Following that conversation, we’re happy to share a Q&A from the 61st New York Film Festival with La Chimera director Alice Rohrwacher and actors Josh O’Connor & Isabella Rossellini, moderated by NYFF Advisor Michelle Carey. With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and magical realism, Alice Rohrwacher conjures a marvelous entertainment set in a rural Italy eternally caught between the ancient and the modern. La Chimera opens at FLC next Friday, March 29. View showtimes and get tickets now at filmlinc.org/chimera

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with The Animal Kingdom director Thomas Cailley and The Pod Generation director Sophie Barthes as they discuss their playful, up-to-the-minute experiments with genre and the use of speculative fiction to examine political realities and probe timeless emotional truths. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle with interpretation by Nicholas Elliott. Thomas Cailley, whose 2014 breakout feature Love at First Fight charmed audiences with its invigorating fusion of the rom-com and coming-of-age genres, returned to Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with this year’s Opening Night selection, The Animal Kingdom, in which a darkly imaginative sci-fi premise gives way to a thoughtful study of fatherhood. When mankind is plagued with a mysterious infection that selectively mutates the bodies of ordinary people into animal hybrids, a widower and his teenage son must fight to survive in Cailley’s darkly imaginative exploration of a human ecosystem undergoing inexplicable—but potentially liberating—transformation. The Animal Kingdsom is in select theaters now, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Little Girl Blue director Mona Achache, producer Laetitia Gonzalez, and lead actress Marion Cotillard as they discuss the 2024 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema selection with FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. The lives and legacies of three generations of extraordinary women artists are unpacked in Mona Achache’s César-nominated hybrid documentary. Achache, herself an accomplished writer and filmmaker, turns her gaze on her mother, Carole—a writer, photographer, and actress, and the daughter of novelist and screenwriter Monique Lange (goddaughter of William Faulkner). Carole’s myriad professional achievements notwithstanding, her private life was indelibly marked by predatory behavior she experienced at the hands of those close to her, including family friend Jean Genet. Marion Cotillard brilliantly embodies Carole across a series of hauntingly resonant reconstructions that, alongside a generous archive of video, photography, and personal writing, create a rounded portrait of a troubled but outstandingly creative mind. Achache blurs the line between truth and fiction, producing a work as fittingly unsettling and unforgettable as her mother’s own story.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Denis Villeneuve, the subject of a recent retrospective presented by FLC and who’s new highly anticipated sci fi-epic, Dune: Part Two, is now in theaters worldwide courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures. The saga continues as award-winning filmmaker Denis Villeneuve embarks on Dune: Part Two, the next chapter of Frank Herbert’s celebrated novel Dune, with an expanded all-star international ensemble cast. The big-screen epic continues the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s acclaimed bestseller Dune with returning and new stars, including Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, and Austin Butler. Dune: Part Two explores the mythic journey of Paul Atreides as he unites with Chani and the Fremen while on a path of revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family. Facing a choice between the love of his life and the fate of the known universe, he endeavors to prevent a terrible future only he can foresee. This conversation was moderated by FLC Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Lulu Wang, who’s new Prime Video series Expats is now streaming. Lulu Wang casts her penetrating gaze on the intersection of race and class in Hong Kong’s milieu of expats, and the migrant domestic workers employed by them, in this vivid adaptation of Janice Y. K. Lee’s widely acclaimed novel, The Expatriates (1998). Across six episodes, Expats shuttles back and forth between the prelude and aftermath of a tragedy that has dramatically reshaped the lives of three women—Margaret (Nicole Kidman), a mother left shattered as she navigates her way through an inconceivable loss; her neighbor Hilary (Sarayu Blue), herself struggling to regain control of her marriage in the face of infidelity; and the twentysomething, free-spirited Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), who finds herself caught in the center of Margaret and Hilary’s anguish. But for the limited series’ feature-length fifth episode, the three women recede into the background with Wang shifting her focus in an entirely different direction, and transforming this rich tapestry of stories into something altogether more complex. In this penultimate episode, “Central,” Margaret and Hilary’s Filipina caretakers, Essie (Ruby Ruiz) and Puri (Amelyn Pardenilla), come to the fore as we follow them on their day off—socializing, corresponding with family abroad, and carving out time to pursue their own dreams, but who nevertheless remain entangled in their employers’ quandaries, and whose own future hangs in the balance of their every decision. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with About Dry Grasses director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. An NYFF61 Main Slate selection, About Dry Grasses opens at FLC next Friday, February 23rd. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/grasses. In a village nestled within the wintry landscape of the East Anatolia region of Turkey, an art teacher named Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) is struggling through what he hopes to be his final year at an elementary school. Already tiring of the unforgiving environment, where he has been assigned by the government’s public education system, Samet is further disillusioned and frustrated after a young girl in his class, Sevim, appears to accuse him of inappropriate behavior. The only light on the horizon for Samet is his growing friendship with—and clear attraction to—a teacher from a nearby school, Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a sharp, politically engaged woman unafraid to put the self-involved Samet in his place for his general apathy and narcissism. Turkey’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards, the latest deeply philosophical drama from Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, NYFF49) is a work of elegant, novelistic filmmaking, rigorously unpacking questions of belief versus action, the tangible versus the enigmatic, and who we wish to be versus how we live. A centerpiece conversation between Samet and Nuray—capped off by a provocative metacinematic flourish—ranks with Ceylan’s greatest sequences, and Dizdar, who won the Best Actress prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, commands every second she’s on screen. A Sideshow/Janus Films release. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Advisor Violeta Bava.

A panel of critics and programmers discuss French film critic Serge Daney's politically driven analysis and radical enthusiasms of the 1970s. They explore the relation between mise-en-scène and moral perspective, the cinema as an antidote to advertising, and the critic's role as an ally to filmmakers. They also discuss Selchine's legacy in cinema, Sajdani's journey as a filmmaker, and the insights into the mind of Cérgé. Additionally, they delve into the evolution of writing style and perspective, as well as the process of selecting films for the program.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Trân Anh Hùng to discuss the NYFF61 Spotlight selection, THE TASTE OF THINGS, opening at Film at Lincoln Center on February 9th. The director will appear in person at select screenings opening weekend as well as for a sneak preview on Thursday, Feb. 8. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/taste. Destined to be remembered as one of the great films about the meaning, texture, and experience of food, this sumptuous, exceptionally well-crafted work, set in late 19th-century France, stars Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel (married, decades ago, in real life) as Eugénie, a cook, and Dodin, the gourmet chef she has been working with for 20 years. As they reach middle age, they can no longer deny their mutual romantic feelings, which have so long been concentrated in their passionate professionalism. This simple narrative—based upon Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel LA PASSION DE DODIN-BOUFFANT, GOURMET—sets the table for a sublime, sense-heightening exploration of pleasure, in which the play of sunlight across a late-afternoon kitchen is as meaningful as the image of a perfectly poached pear or the crisp of a buoyant vol-au-vent. Director Trân Anh Hùng won the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his bravura, scrupulously deployed feat of epicurean cinema. France’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards. An IFC Films release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Bas Devos and actress Liyo Gong to discuss the NYFF61 Main Slate selection, HERE, opening at Film at Lincoln Center on February 9th. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/here. Stefan, a migrant construction worker living in Brussels, is planning a trip home to his mother in Romania. In preparing for his voyage, he reconnects with local family members over gifted bowls of homemade soup, interacts with strangers, and discovers a revivifying commune with nature. This all leads him to an unexpected connection with Shuxiu, a Chinese-Belgian bryologist, who’s studying the local moss. The gradual cultivation of this friendship—beautifully performed by actors Stefan Gota and Liyo Gong—motivates this hushed, emotionally resonant film about the power of observation, of people often deemed socially invisible, and of the larger green world surrounding us. In his lovely and tranquil fourth feature, Belgian filmmaker Bas Devos (GHOST TROPIC) has created a work that finds transcendence in the simplest human encounters and the most radiant of cinematic gestures. Winner of the Best Film prize in the Berlin International Film Festival’s Encounters competition. A Cinema Guild release.