Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with director Kiro Russo on his NYFF59 Currents selection, El Gran Movimiento, moderated by NYFF Program Advisor Violeta Bava. Expanding on the hybrid narrative of his remarkable 2016 film Dark Skull, Kiro Russo has mounted a monumental, gently mystical portrait of the contemporary central South American cityscape and those who work within its bowels and environs. Set in the alternately harsh and beautiful terrain of La Paz, Bolivia and its surrounding rural areas, El Gran Movimiento follows a young miner as he looks for work alongside his friends, even as he begins to descend into a mysterious sickness. With its marvelous long-lens zoom work and increasingly dynamic, rhythmic editing, Russo’s film is a hypnotic journey into a psychological space that touches upon the supernatural. El Gran Movimiento opens this Friday in our theaters. For showtimes and tickets, go to filmlinc.org/movimiento.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special programmers preview of our King Vidor Retrospective, a long overdue series dedicated to the fascinating and prolific filmmaker whose career bridged the silent and sound eras of Hollywood, featuring live musical accompaniments at selection screenings, rare 35mm prints, and more. Listen to FLC Programmers Dan Sullivan and Thomas Beard as they discuss the trajectory of one of the Hollywood studio system’s enduringly great auteurs, their recommended films in the series, and more.  Our King Vidor Retrospective kicks off Friday and plays through August 14. Explore the lineup and get tickets and All-Access Passes at filmlinc.org/vidor.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 51st New Directors/New Films with Sara Dosa, director of Fire of Love, moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Tyler Wilson. World-famous volcanologists and lovers Katia and Maurice Krafft fearlessly observed and studied volcanic eruptions up close across the globe; they were at once intrepid adventurers, committed scientists, and innate filmmakers, capturing destructive earth ruptures with surreal beauty and terror. Tragically, they were killed together at the eruption of Japan’s Mount Unzen in June 1991. Using a trove of the couple’s monumental, almost otherworldly 16mm footage, filmmaker Sara Dosa consummately constructs the narrative of their remarkable lives, making the Kraffts into both vivid movie stars and unknowable figures whose pursuits constantly put them on the crater’s edge of existence. Evocatively narrated by Miranda July, Fire of Love is a transportive work of genuine awe. The NDNF51 selection is now playing in theaters.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a programmers preview of the 20th Anniversary Edition of the New York Asian Film Festival with NYAFF Executive Director Samuel Jamier and NYAFF Programmer David Wilentz. The two discussed the robust lineup of over 50 films, favorites from various countries, and much more.  The 20th Anniversary Edition of the New York Asian Film Festival kicks off tomorrow and runs through July 31st. Explore the lineup, all-access passes, talks and Q&As with filmmakers, and get tickets at filmlinc.org/nyaff.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special conversation from the 27th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with Claire Denis and Jim Jarmusch. Claire Denis, the singular cinematic visionary behind Beau Travail (NYFF37), Let the Sunshine In (NYFF55), and High Life (NYFF56), returned to Film at Lincoln Center with this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Opening Night selection Both Sides of the Blade, a searing and unsparing romantic drama. Denis sat down with longtime friend and fellow filmmaker Jim Jarmusch—an icon of the American independent filmmaking landscape, and the official Guest of Honor at the 2022 edition of the festival—for an extended conversation about their decades-spanning careers. Claire Denis’s Both Sides of the Blade opens this Friday in our theaters. Go to filmlinc.org/blade for showtimes and tickets. Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, a boozy and beautiful pilgrimage to Memphis, plays for free outdoors in Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza on July 14. Go to filmlinc.org/free for more details.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A on Secrets & Lies with director Mike Leigh from our recent retrospective on the British filmmaker. Moderated by FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. They discussed the making and trajectory of Leigh's "most commercially successful" film, working with actors, and more. The acclaimed winner of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Mike Leigh’s mid-’90s masterpiece cemented his status as the poet laureate of modern family life. The story concerns Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, awarded Best Actress at Cannes), a working-class white woman whose personal and interpersonal lives are transformed when she learns that a Black optometrist is the child she gave up for adoption 27 years prior. Created, like Leigh’s other films, after long months of intensely collaborative improvisation, Secrets & Lies is remarkable for its lived-in warmth and humor, and above all for its unflinching honesty in capturing the everyday evasions and deceptions that can define our lives.  MUBI is offering a 30-day free trial for all FLC listeners. Get access to the special offer at mubi.com/promos/flc, and be sure to learn more about how you can get a free ticket to a theater each week with MUBI GO, included with your subscription, at mubi.com/go/us.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A with Dario Argento on Deep Red following the world premiere of the new restoration at our retrospective, underway through June 29. The conversation was moderated by Maddie Whittle with interpretation by Michael Moore. Get tickets for our retrospective at www.filmlinc.org/argento Blow–Up’s David Hemmings takes the lead in Argento’s most sophisticated giallo, playing a jazz pianist who struggles to remember a vital piece of evidence after witnessing the murder of Macha Méril’s German psychic. Joined by Argento’s real-life partner Daria Nicolodi in the role of a plucky journalist, Hemmings embarks on a dizzying tour of Rome (with shooting locations in Turin standing in for the capital city) which, through Argento’s roving, suprahuman lens, appears just as haunted and hyper-compartmentalized as the movie’s tortured human protagonists. Ranked among the director’s masterworks, Deep Red is supplemented by Argento’s first score with Italian prog-rock band Goblin and astonishing production design by Giuseppe Bassan.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special programmers preview of Beware of Dario Argento, our 20-film retrospective taking place Friday through June 29. Join FLC Programmers Maddie Whittle and Tyler Wilson in an overview of the Master of Giallo’s oeuvre. Explore the lineup, featuring 17 world premieres of new restorations, the North American Premiere of Dark Glasses, 3D and 35mm screenings, and in-person appearances from Argento himself at filmlinc.org/argento. After the preview, listen to a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and actress Tilda Swinton on their Main Slate selection Memoria, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Collective and personal ghosts hover over every frame of Memoria, somehow the grandest yet most becalmed of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s works. Inspired by the Thai director’s own memories and those of people he encountered while traveling across Colombia, the film follows Jessica (a wholly immersed Tilda Swinton), an expat botanist visiting her hospitalized sister in Bogotá; while there, she becomes ever more disturbed by an abyssal sound that haunts her sleepless nights and bleary-eyed days, compelling her to seek help in identifying its origins. Thus begins a personal journey that’s also a historical excavation, in a film of profound serenity that, like Jessica’s sound, lodges itself in the viewer’s brain as it traverses city and country, climaxing in an extraordinary extended encounter with a rural farmer that exists on a precipice between life and death. Join our special engagement with Memoria, playing for one week only through June 23! Get tickets at filmlinc.org/memoria.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special programmer's preview of the 21st Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, our annual series featuring a diverse and extensive lineup of contemporary Italian films. Join FLC Assitant Programmer Dan Sullivan in an overview of the hidden gems in this year’s festival, taking place June 9 - 15. Explore the lineup and filmmaker Q&As, and get tickets at filmlinc.org/openroads. After the preview, listen to a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman on their Main Slate selection Neptune Frost, moderated by NYFF Director Eugene Hernandez. Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with his partner, the Rwandan-born artist Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place amidst the hilltops of Burundi, where a collective of computer hackers emerges from within a coltan mining community, a result of the romance between a miner and an intersex runaway. Set between states of being—past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience—Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends. Neptune Frost is now playing in select theaters.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special Q&A on Hedwig and the Angry Inch with co-creator, director, and lead John Cameron Mitchell and makeup artist and hairstylist Mike Potter, moderated by FLC’s President Lesli Klainberg. After falling in love with a U.S. Army sergeant, an East Berlin boy named Hansel undergoes a sex-change operation so that he can legally marry his beloved. But the operation goes awry, leaving the boy less than a man, but not quite a woman. Deserted in a Kansas trailer park, now Hedwig reinvents themself as a rock star. Based on the hit off-Broadway musical.  Catch Hedwig and the Angry Inch for free this Friday on Governors Island, presented in association with Newfest, with a pre-show DJ set from John Cameron Mitchell and Michael Cavadia starting at 7pm, and an introduction from John Cameron Mitchell before the screening. Ferry ticket reservations are required before the event. Go to filmlinc.org/hedwig for more information.