The Close-up

Welcome to a new episode of the Film at Lincoln Center podcast. This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Apichatpong Weeraseth-akul about his 2002 feature, Blissfully Yours. We were delighted to have the Thai director recently join us at FLC as part of our complete retrospective, The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. A mesmerizing and sensuous meditation on love and desire, Apichatpong’s second (and first fully fictional) feature film established him as one of world cinema’s most essential talents. The plot follows a romance between a Thai nurse and her boyfriend who go on a jungle picnic with an older woman (whom they both seem to know) in hot pursuit. The tranquility of their date, enveloping and tender as it may initially seem, slowly recedes to reveal a more complex emotional picture, one marked by Apichatpong’s sophisticatedly low-key and true-feeling approach to rendering human desire.

Welcome to a new episode of the Film at Lincoln Center podcast. This week we’re excited to present two conversations, the first a Programmers Preview with the team behind the New York African Film Festival, currently taking place in our theaters through May 16, followed by a Q&A with writer/director Ari Aster from a recent screening of his latest feature, the Joaquin Phoenix-starring Beau Is Afraid. Launched in 1993, the New York African Film Festival was one of the first film festivals in the United States to reflect on the myriad ways African and diaspora filmmakers have used the moving image to tell complex nuanced stories of cultural and aesthetic significance. Under the banner title, Freeforms, the festival will present over 50 films from more than 25 countries that explore and embrace the visionary, probing, and fearless spirit of African film and diaspora storytelling. Listen to our discussion with New York African Film Festival's Founder and Executive Director, Mahen Bonetti, Program Manager, Dara Oj

Welcome to a new episode of the Film at Lincoln Center podcast. This week we’re excited to present a special episode featuring the star-studded speeches from our recent 48th Chaplin Award Gala honoring Viola Davis. Having taken place on April 24 at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the Gala encompassed a joyful celebration of the actor and producer’s incredible body of work, featuring notable speakers and film clips, and culminating in the presentation of the Chaplin Award, an annual honor bestowed upon cinema’s most outstanding talents. The evening’s guest speakers included, in order of appearance, Jayme Lawson, who starred in THE WOMAN KING, George C. Wolfe, who directed Davis in NIGHTS IN RODANTHE and MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM, Meryl Streep, who co-starred in DOUBT, Gina Prince-Bythewood, who directed THE WOMAN KING, Jessica Chastain, who co-starred in THE HELP and THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ELEANOR RIGBY with Davis, and, presenting Davis with the Chaplin Award, Steve McQueen, who directed the actor in WIDOWS

Welcome to a new episode of the Film at Lincoln Center podcast. This week we’re excited to present two Q&As: the first from Chile '76, a 2023 New Directors/New Films selection, and Unrest, a Main Slate selection of the 60th New York Film Festival. Both Chile '76 and Unrest open in our theaters on May 5 with filmmaker Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. In Chile '76, Manuela Martelli places the viewer in a historical moment fraught with anxiety: the early years of Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile. Her narrative presents Pinochet’s oppressive reign from the unusual and surprising perspective of Carmen (a superb Aline Küppenheim), an upper-middle-class woman whose life begins to unravel after local priest Father Sánchez (Hugo Medina) implores her to use her summer beach house, under renovation, to hide an injured young man (Nicolás Sepúlveda) whom she comes to suspect is a victim of political persecution. As Carmen descends into danger, she experiences a gradual moral awakening. Martelli’s film is a ta

Welcome to a new episode of the Film at Lincoln Center podcast. This week we’re excited to present a Q&A from the AppleTV+ documentary, Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blues, with director Sacha Jenkins and Oscar-nominated composer Terence Blanchard. This event recently took place as part of See Me As I Am, Lincoln Center’s year-long celebration of Terence Blanchard in collaboration with seven arts organizations across campus: Film at Lincoln Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Juilliard School, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, The Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, and The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.  A magisterial tribute to a founding father of jazz, Sacha Jenkins’s comprehensive documentary chronicles the life and times of legendary trumpeter Louis Armstrong, from his role in the birth of the musical genre he’d come to epitomize on to his later adventures in Hollywood as an indelible onscreen presence. Working from a wealth of archival footage, Jenkins constructs a stirr

Welcome to a new episode of the Film at Lincoln Center podcast. This week we’re excited to present a Q&A from the 2023 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema premiere of Other People's Children, with director Rebecca Zlotowski and lead actress, Virginie Efira. Other People's Children opens in our theaters on Friday, April 21. Acclaimed writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski (An Easy Girl, 2020 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema) draws from her own life to depict the emotional trajectory of Rachel (Virginie Efira), a schoolteacher whose desire for a biological child seems increasingly unlikely to be fulfilled (as she’s informed by her gynecologist in a delightful cameo from Frederick Wiseman). When Rachel enters into a relationship with car designer Ali (Roschdy Zem), he’s slow to let her know that he’s a single father, but once she finds out she quickly grows to love his precocious daughter, Leila (Callie Ferreira-Goncalves). The stresses and strains of close relationships between adults and children are thoughtfully examin

Welcome to a new episode of the Film at Lincoln Center podcast. This week we’re excited to present a Q&A from Trenque Laquen, a Main Slate selection of the 60th New York Film Festival, opening in our theaters on April 21 from director Laura Citarella, with Q&As with Citarella and actor Ezequiel Pierri on April 21 at 6pm and April 22 at 12:15pm and an intro at 6pm. But first, listen to a special Q&A with the team behind Joyland, a selection of the 52nd edition of New Directors/New Films currently in progress through Sunday, April 9. Director Saim Sadiq and cast members Ali Junejo and Rasti Farooq discuss the film with New Directors/New Films co-chair Florence Almozini. Co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, tickets to New Directors/New Films are available at newdirectors.org Laura Citarella’s enormously pleasurable Trenque Lauquen takes viewers on a limitless journey through stories nested within stories set in and around the Argentinean city of Trenque Lauquen (“Round Lake”) an

Welcome to a new episode of the Film at Lincoln Center podcast. This week we’re excited to present Q&A from Earth Mama, the opening night selection of the 52nd edition of New Directors/New Films. The conversation features writer/director Savanah Leaf and cast members Tia Nomore and Erika Alexander, and is moderated by New Directors/New Films co-chair, Florence Almozini. A devastating and evocative portrait of motherhood refracted through the prisms of race and class, Savanah Leaf’s auspicious, Bay Area–set debut feature follows a pregnant young African American woman (played with immense complexity by Oakland rapper Tia Nomore) as she grapples with whether to give her baby up for adoption amid utterly hostile socioeconomic conditions. Co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, the 52nd edition of New Directors/New Films runs through April 9th and is made up of 27 features and 11 shorts. We’re excited to announce that this year we are offering the chance to see 5 films for only $50.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 60th New York Film Festival with Enys Men director Mark Jenkin and lead Mary Woodvine, moderated by FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini. In 1973, on an uninhabited, windswept, rocky island off the coast of Cornwall in southwest England, an isolated middle-aged woman spends her days in enigmatic environmental study. When she’s not tending to the moss-covered stone cottage in which she lodges, her central preoccupation is a cluster of wildflowers at a cliff’s edge, the blossoms’ subtle changes noted in a daily ledger. She’s also increasingly haunted by her own nightmarish visitations, which seem both summoned from her own past and brought up from the very soil and ceremonial history of this mysterious place. Shot on enveloping, period-evocative 16mm, this eerie, texturally rich experience from Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin conjures works of classic British folk horror but remains its own strange being, a genuine tr

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special Q&A from our recent screening of S. S. Rajamouli’s RRR with composer M.M. Keeravani, who recently won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Naatu Naatu." But first, listen to FLC programmers Maddie Whittle and Tyler Wilson preview our upcoming series, Unspeakable: The Films of Tod Browning, which kicks off tomorrow and runs through March 26. Explore the lineup, including new restorations, 35mm screenings, live musical accompaniment, and get tickets at filmlinc.org/browning. From an original story by V. Vijayendra Prasad, the historical action epic RRR (short for Rise, Roar, Revolt) follows the fictionalized paths of real-life freedom fighters Alluri Sitarama Raju (Charan) and Komaram Bheem (Rama Rao) as they come together in 1920s Delhi to battle the nefarious British Raj for the rescue of a kidnapped girl from Bheem’s tribe. Enjoy Academy Award-winning composer M.M. Keeravani’s conversation on working on the film’s score, his

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special Q&A from the 60th New York Film Festival with Drylongso director Cauleen Smith, moderated by Director and President of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Jacqueline Stewart. Cauleen Smith’s 1998 feature debut, a landmark in American independent cinema, follows Pica (Toby Smith), a woman in a photography class in Oakland, as she begins photographing the young Black men of her neighborhood, having witnessed so many of them fall victim to senseless murder and fearing the possibility of their becoming extinct altogether. This project serves as a point of departure for Smith to explore Pica’s relationship with her family, as well as her relationship with a friend (April Barnett) who becomes the victim of an enigmatic and elusive serial killer lurking in the background. An enduringly rich work of DIY filmmaking, Drylongso remains a resonant and visionary examination of violence (and its reverberations), friendship, and gender. An NYFF60

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcastm we’re featuring a Q&A from the 60th New York Film Festival with Stonewalling (opens March 10!) filmmakers Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka, moderated by FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini and interpreted by Vincent Cheng. Before that, listen to a special programmer’s preview of the 28th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema from FLC Assistant Programmer Maddie Whittle. Our annual festival celebrating the best works in contemporary French film is now taking place through March 12 with filmmaker Q&As, Free Talks, and more. Explore the lineup and get tickets at filmlinc.org/rdvFor more than a decade, Beijing-based wife-and-husband team Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka have been making films about the lives of young people in China—in many cases “left-behind children,” or those whose parents are forced to leave their families to find jobs in cities. Expanding their project, their gripping, humane yet uncompromising latest, shot with a precise formal economy by Otsuka

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we're featuring a conversation with Davy Chou and Park Ji-Min, discussing Return to Seoul at the 60th New York Film Festival with Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Freddie (Park Ji-Min), a young French woman, finds herself spontaneously tracking down the South Korean birth parents she has never met while on vacation in Seoul. From this seemingly simple premise, Cambodian-French filmmaker Davy Chou spins an unpredictable, careering narrative that takes place over the course of several years, always staying close on the roving heels of its impetuous protagonist, who moves to her own turbulent rhythms (as does the galvanizing Park, a singular new screen presence). Chou elegantly creates probing psychological portraiture from a character whose feelings of unbelonging have kept her at an emotional distance from nearly everyone in her life; it’s an enormously moving film made with verve, sensitivity, and boundless energy. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special Everything Everywhere All at Once Q&A from our recent series ‘Verse Jumping with Daniels with directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and producer Jonathan Wang, moderated by FLC Programmer Tyler Wilson. In their second feature-film collaboration, Daniels evoke everyone from Wong Kar Wai, Harmony Korine, and Stephen Chow and everything from video games, YouTube algorithms, wire fu, Japanese anime, late 1990s Hollywood nihilism, and more: Golden Globe® Winner Michelle Yeoh delivers a career-defining performance as Evelyn Wang, a first-generation Chinese-American living above her laundromat business with her aging father (James Hong), her teenage daughter (Stephanie Hsu), and her kind but painfully naive husband (Golden Globe® Winner Ke Huy Quan). Amid an IRS audit (spearheaded by a nearly unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis) that reveals the cracks of her family and livelihood, Evelyn plunges into a multiversal war of “’verse jumpers”

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 60th New York Film Festival with director Albert Serra on Pacifiction, moderated by FLC’s Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini, and a special programmers preview with the curators behind the 51st Dance on Camera Festival, taking place through Monday and featuring 30 new films from 35 countries. Get tickets to the longest-running dance film festival in the world at filmlinc.org/dance. Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra reconfirms his centrality in the contemporary cinematic landscape with this mesmerizing portrait of a French bureaucrat (a monumental Benoît Magimel) drifting through a fateful trip to a French Polynesian island with increasing anxiety. Pacifiction charts the various uneasy relationships that develop between Magimel’s autocratic yet avuncular High Commissioner, De Roller, and the Indigenous locals (including nonprofessional actor Pahoa Mahagafanau in a hypnotic breakthrough as De Roller’s trusted right hand

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast we’re featuring a special Q&A that followed the recent U.S. Premiere of The Birthday during our Jordan Peele curated series, The Lost Rider: A Chronicle of Hollywood Sacrifice, with director Eugenio Mira and lead Corey Feldman. Moderated by FLC Programmer Tyler Wilson. Part comedy of manners by way of Jerry Lewis, part phantasmagorical head trip, Eugenio Mira’s debut has garnered cult status in the years since its premiere at Sitges in 2004, in part for never getting an official home video release or U.S. theatrical premiere—that is, until this January at Film at Lincoln Center. Set in a ruby-red Art Deco hotel in 1987, The Birthday follows hapless protagonist Norman Forrester (Corey Feldman)—whose accent might suggest Brooklyn, New York, but is actually Brooklyn, Baltimore—as he navigates an inhospitable birthday celebration for his scolding girlfriend’s wealthy father (cult icon Jack Taylor) and struggles with the anxieties of his deteriorating romance. The a

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a recent conversation with filmmaker Lukas Dhont on his latest film Close, which was recently nominated for Best International Feature at the 95th Academy Awards, and moderator and critic Thelma Adams. This talk was first exclusive for FLC Patrons.  If you're interested in supporting FLC by becoming a member and exploring member benefits, visit filmlinc.org/members for more information.  Leo and Remi are two thirteen-year-old best friends, whose seemingly unbreakable bond is suddenly, tragically torn apart. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Lukas Dhont's second film is an emotionally transformative and unforgettable portrait of the intersection of friendship and love, identity and independence, and heartbreak and healing. Close is now playing in theaters.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re revisiting a conversation from the 60th New York Film Festival with Mia Hansen-Løve on One Fine Morning, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim, followed by our recent conversation with Jordan Peele, Keke Palmer, and more on the making of NOPE. Few filmmakers are as adept at exploring the contours of modern love and grief as Mia Hansen-Løve, whose intensely poignant and deeply personal latest drama stars Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a professional translator and single mother at a crossroads. Her father, rapidly deteriorating from a neurological illness, will soon require facility care, and her new lover is a married dad whose unavailability only seems to draw her nearer to him, despite—or because of—the fact that she’s going through an overwhelming time in her life. Hansen-Løve, so finely observant of the small nuances of human interaction, creates, in harmonious concert with a magnificent Seydoux, a complicated portrait of a woman torn between romant

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re sharing a talk from the 60th New York Film Festival with Alice Diop & Frederick Wiseman, whose films Saint Omer (opening Friday at FLC with Q&As!) and A Couple, respectively, were both NYFF60 Main Slate selections. The conversation was moderated by Dessane Lopez Cassell, editor-in-chief of SEEN journal with translation by Nicholas Elliott. French filmmaker Alice Diop has said that it was the work of Frederick Wiseman that inspired her to become a documentarian. It is fitting, then, that NYFF60's Main Slate featured new films by Wiseman and Diop that speak to each other in extraordinary ways—including in their deviation from documentary into the more delicate terrain between fiction and nonfiction. Both A Couple (Wiseman) and Saint Omer (Diop) take true stories of extraordinary and fraught women as their bases, probing the formal possibilities and limits of cinema in revealing the inner lives of real people. The two directors convened for a conversation a

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring two conversations from the 60th New York Film Festival. The first is with Carla Simón, director of Alcarràs, an NYFF60 Main Slate selection about a family in present-day Catalonia, moderated by former NYFF Executive Director Eugene Hernandez. The second conversation is a deep dive on liberating lost movies with various Missing Movies board members and advisors. Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale Festival, Carla Simón’s follow-up to her acclaimed childhood drama Summer 1993 is a ruminative, lived-in portrait of a rural family in present-day Catalonia whose way of life is rapidly changing. The Solé clan live in a small village, annually harvesting peaches for local business and export. However, their livelihood is put in jeopardy by the looming threat of the construction of solar panels, which would necessitate the destruction of their orchard. From this simple narrative, pitting agricultural tradition against the onrushing train