NYFF 2020 Announces Free Talks with Garrett Bradley, Sam Pollard, 'Hopper/Welles' Team, and More
Exclusive: This year's lineup of conversations will take place entirely online, though NYFF hopes to join audiences together via the live, free talks.
Kate Erbland
@katerbland
NYFF Live
Film at Lincoln Center
As the New York Film Festival readies to roll out its 58th edition tomorrow (and running through October 11), IndieWire is pleased to share an exclusive look at the many festival-sponsored Talks which will roll out during this year's event. HBO serves as the presenting sponsor of Talks, which supplement NYFF's screenings with a series of free (yes, free) and live panel discussions and in-depth conversations with a wide range of guests.
As announced by festival brass earlier this summer, this year's NYFF is going to operate differently than it has in previous incarnations. The event will combine a brand-new virtual presence with carefully designed outdoor screenings, including two drive-ins. The Talks are taking a new shape, too, and while they are not available as in-person events, as they have been in years past, the festival is hoping to turn them into "an essential live, online meeting place for audiences, filmmakers, and the industry."
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The section includes a new series of talks called Crosscuts, featuring pairings of filmmakers across NYFF sections, genres, and styles, including conversations between Garrett Bradley ("Time," Main Slate) and Ephraim Asili ("The Inheritance," Currents), Sam Pollard ("MLK/FBI," Main Slate) and John Gianvito ("Her Socialist Smile," Currents), Matías Piñeiro ("Isabella," Main Slate) and Nicolás Pereda ("Fauna," Currents), Christian Petzold ("Undine," Main Slate) and Heinz Emigholz ("The Lobby," "The Last City," Currents), and Valeria Sarmiento ("The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror," Currents) and the team behind "Hopper/Welles" (Spotlight).
Several roundtable discussions highlight thematic trends within this year's program: including talks like Outside the Canon, Rethinking World Cinema, The Revolution Will Be Filmed, a panel about the cinematic depiction of global protest movements and police brutality, organized in conjunction with the festival premieres of Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" films and "The Monopoly of Violence."
All talks are live and available for free worldwide and will be conducted via Zoom webinar. Free registration is required to attend. Sign up at the link on each event page. Registrants will receive a confirmation email with a link to tune into the Zoom webinar. During the live talk, attendees can chat questions using the Q&A button. Talks will be recorded and shared at a later date on the Film at Lincoln Center YouTube channel. Talks are organized by Devika Girish and Madeline Whittle, in collaboration with Eugene Hernandez and Dennis Lim.
Check out descriptions of each Talk below, courtesy of NYFF and Film at Lincoln Center.
DEEP FOCUS
In-depth dialogues with festival filmmakers and their collaborators.
The Women of "Smooth Talk," moderated by TCM host Alicia Malone
To celebrate the premiere of the film's new restoration in NYFF58's Revivals section, tune in live for a conversation with the women behind Joyce Chopra's haunting and carefully observed 1985 drama "Smooth Talk." Director Chopra and author Joyce Carol Oates—whose 1966 short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" provided the inspiration for the film—will discuss the creative work of adaptation and the perennially resonant subject matter of a young woman's early encounter with the powers and perils of her sexuality. Sponsored by TCM. Date and time to be announced
Tsai Ming-liang
An unparalleled portraitist of loneliness and longing, Tsai Ming-liang returns to NYFF with "Days": his first feature since 2013's "Stray Dogs," and undoubtedly one of his best, sparest, and most intimate films. We are delighted to welcome the legendary Taiwanese director for an extended conversation about this latest entry in his masterful, decades-spanning oeuvre. Monday, September 28, 8:30pm ET
Marie-Claude Treilhou, moderated by Serge Bozon
Forty years after its original release, Marie-Claude Treilhou's "criminally overlooked" debut film "Simone Barbes or Virtue" remains vital and vivid in its depiction of a young woman's nocturnal perambulations against the landscape of Parisian nightlife. Treilhou's film was produced under the banner of Paul Vecchiali's production house Les Films Diagonale, which the filmmaker and critic Serge Bozon ("Mrs. Hyde, "NYFF55) has characterized as "the last important school of French cinema after the New Wave." Marking the NYFF58 Revivals premiere of the film's new restoration, we're honored to host Treilhou in a talk— moderated by Bozon—about the making and the enduring legacy of "Simone Barbes." Friday, October 2, 2:00pm ET
The Making of "Small Axe"
With his bold and multifaceted "Small Axe" anthology, Steve McQueen has made the films of the moment. The three parts screening in the NYFF58 Main Slate—"Lovers Rock," "Mangrove," and "Red, White and Blue"—capture vividly the lives of London's West Indian community in the 1970s and '80s and their force of will against systemic racism and discrimination. "I dedicate these films to George Floyd, and all the other black people that have been murdered, seen or unseen, because of who they are, in the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere," the director said in May. In this panel discussion, McQueen and his collaborators will dig into the making of this sprawling project and illuminate the artistic and political ambitions that have shaped it. Sponsored by Campari. Sunday, October 4, 2:00pm ET
Gianfranco Rosi
Shot over three years along the war-wrecked borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon, Gianfranco Rosi's "Notturno" is a transfixing, heartrending glimpse into the plight of those living through the rise of ISIS in the vacuum created by the U.S. invasion. The veteran documentary filmmaker, last seen at NYFF with 2016's "Fire at Sea," joins us to discuss his extraordinary body of immersive, empathetic, and urgent nonfiction. Wednesday, October 7, 2:00pm ET
CROSSCUTS
Conversations between filmmakers across festival sections, genres, and styles.
Garrett Bradley & Ephraim Asili, moderated by Yasmina Price
Garrett Bradley's "Time," a Main Slate selection, and Ephraim Asili's "The Inheritance," the Opening Night film of the Currents program, are two of NYFF8's most formally inventive and politically astute films. Combining original and archival material in evocative and unpredictable ways, they engage deeply with radical Black legacies of both cinema and political organizing. Don't miss this conversation between the two directors on their filmmaking practices, aesthetic influences, artistic visions, and more, moderated by writer and researcher Yasmina Price. Friday, September 25, 2:00pm ET
Sam Pollard & John Gianvito
In Currents feature "Her Socialist Smile" and Main Slate selection "MLK/FBI," veteran filmmakers John Gianvito and Sam Pollard interrogate cinematically the ways in which the intellectual and political contributions made by Helen Keller and Martin Luther King, Jr. to 20th-century progressive activism have been obscured or actively challenged across history. We're excited to bring Pollard and Gianvito together to discuss their disparate formal, aesthetic, and discursive approaches, and the challenge of crafting art that resonates in the present moment while frankly reckoning with the untidy contours of the past. Thursday, September 24, 6:00pm ET
Matías Piñeiro & Nicolás Pereda
In Matías Piñeiro's "Isabella" (Main Slate) and Nicolás Pereda's "Fauna" (Currents), one never knows where performance ends and life begins. The two films meditate in poignant ways on storytelling as both an artistic and an everyday act: "Isabella" continues Piñeiro's wryly quotidian takes on Shakespearean dramas, while "Fauna" unearths the violence haunting a Mexican village beneath a veneer of fabrications and arch comedy. In what is sure to be a conversation full of creative insight, the two filmmakers will chat about their shared affinities and inimitable idiosyncrasies. Friday, September 25, 6:00pm ET
Valeria Sarmiento & Filip Jan Rymsza/Bob Murawski
NYFF58 Spotlight selection "Hopper/Welles" and Currents selection "The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror" share a spectral connection: they're both dispatches from beyond the graves of legendary auteurs, respectively, Orson Welles and Raúl Ruiz. In this detailed discussion, the resurrectors of both films—director Filip Jan Rymzsa and editor Bob Murawski in the case of "Hopper/Welles," and Valeria Sarmiento, the filmmaker, editor, and widow of Ruiz—will chat about the unique artistic and logistical process of fashioning a completed film out of the fragments left behind by an iconic filmmaker. Tuesday, September 29, 2:00pm ET
Christian Petzold & Heinz Emigholz
Two major auteurs of German cinema—and brilliant portraitists of modernity—bring sublime and surprising new works to this year's NYFF. In Christian Petzold's Main Slate selection "Undine," a mythical tale of star-crossed lovers plays out against the architecture and industrial history of present-day Berlin. Heinz Emigholz's "The Last City" and "The Lobby"—both featured in the festival's Currents section—extend the director's architectural and spatial preoccupations into playful, fictive realms of the uncanny. Catch the two filmmakers in an unmissable exchange about their common concerns, formal divergences, and cinematic philosophies. Date and time to be announced
Panels and discussions that connect the festival to the themes of the moment.
Join us for what is sure to be a lively, expansive roundtable with the directors featured in NYFF58's New York Stories short film program, part of this year's Currents section. These nine NYC-based filmmakers will discuss their working methods, influences, and creative networks, and the ways in which their filmmaking practices reflect and refract this most cinematic of cities. Participants include Sarah Friedland ("Drills"), Ricky D'Ambrose ("Object Lessons, or: What Happened Whitsunday"), Lewie and Noah Kloster ("Shots in the Dark with David Godlis"), Oliver Shahery ("Wild Bill Horsecock"), Neo Sora ("The Chicken"), Tayler Montague ("In Sudden Darkness"), and Jay Giampietro ("The Isolated"). Saturday, September 19, 2:00pm ET
Outside the Canon
As discussions about reforming and expanding the cinematic canon rage on, some argue that it's time to do away with it entirely—to imagine new and equitable structures, instead of trying to fix the old flawed ones. This roundtable discussion turns the spotlight on individuals and initiatives that bypass gatekeeping institutions, choosing instead to build alternative, collective, and grassroots methods of film distribution and exhibition. Participants include Abby Sun (curator, the DocYard, "My Sight Is Lined with Visions"), Vanessa McDonnell (co-creator, "The Eyeslicer"; programmer, Spectacle Theater), Rooney Elmi (co-founder, No Evil Eye microcinema; founding editor, SVLLY(wood)), Ajay Ram (Upside Film Festival), and Thomas Beard (co-founder and director, Light Industry; programmer-at-large, Film at Lincoln Center). Tuesday, September 22, 6:00pm ET
The Revolution Will Be Filmed
Multiple films in this year's NYFF contend with global protest movements and the fight against police brutality: in the Main Slate, "Mangrove" and "Red, White, and Blue" from Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" anthology chronicle the racist police violence experienced by London's West Indian community in the 1970s and '80s; David Dufresne's Spotlight selection, "The Monopoly of Violence," documents the state repression leveled against France's "yellow vest" protesters. To expand on the timely questions raised by these films, we're bringing together a group of film artists, writers, and scholars for a conversation about the cinematic representation of police brutality and revolutionary protest. Participants to be announced. Saturday, October 3, 2:00pm ET
Rethinking World Cinema
This year's NYFF features trailblazing filmmakers from around the globe who are not only reinventing world cinema, but challenging the very assumptions of that label. New York–educated Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili's "Beginning" is the first feature film from her country to ever screen in the festival. Chaitanya Tamhane's "The Disciple" brings back India—home to one of the biggest film industries in the world—to the NYFF Main Slate after 24 years. "Ouvertures," a work of collective authorship by artists in Haiti, France, and the United Kingdom, defies national or geographic classifications. The directors of these films will join us for a discussion about breaking boundaries and inventing new international canons. Tuesday, October 6, 11:00am ET
The Artist, the Athlete, and the Revolutionary
Among this year's Revivals selections is a pair of intimate, rarely seen portraits of two towering figures of American history: Terrence Dixon's "Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris" and William Klein's "Muhammad Ali, the Greatest." In capturing the tensions experienced by both Baldwin and Ali as outspoken Black public figures in the '70s, the films raise questions that are strikingly relevant to the present moment. Can artists and athletes act as political—perhaps even revolutionary—agents of change? And what are the double binds faced, in particular, by Black artists and athletes in the public eye? This roundtable brings together Soraya Nadia McDonald (critic, The Undefeated); Rich Blint (professor and writer, The New School); Samantha Sheppard (professor, Cornell University; author, "Sporting Blackness"); and Kazembe Balagun (project manager, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung—New York Office) to reflect on these timely themes. Sunday, October 11, 6:00pm ET
Festival Report
For the festival's final week, a group of critics will gather together for a spirited discussion with Devika Girish, Assistant Editor of Film Comment and Film at Lincoln Center, about the movies they've seen in the NYFF58 lineup and their tales from the trenches of the pandemic-era festival. Participants to be announced. Friday, October 9, 6:00pm ET
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