The Close-up

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

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special conversation from our recent sneak preview screening of Corsage with director Marie Kreutzer and lead Vicky Krieps.  In a perceptive, nuanced performance, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) quietly dominates the screen as Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who begins to see her life of royal privilege as a prison as she reaches her fortieth birthday. Marie Kreutzer boldly imagines Elizabeth’s cloistered, late-19th-century world within the Austro-Hungarian Empire with both austere realism and fanciful anachronism, while staying true and intensely close to the woman’s private melancholy and political struggle amidst a crumbling, combative marriage and escalating scrutiny. Star and director have together created a remarkable vision of a strong-willed political figure whose emergence from a veiled, corseted existence stands for a Europe on the cusp of major, irrevocable transformation. Corsage, an official selection of the 60th New York Film Festi

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special conversation with Hugh Jackman on his latest film, The Son, which recently played in our theaters exclusively for FLC Patrons. If you're interested in supporting FLC by becoming a member and exploring member benefits, go to filmlinc.org/members. For a limited time, get 30% off Memberships with the promo code HOLIDAY30; available for Contributor-level Memberships and above. A cautionary tale that follows a family as it struggles to reunite after falling apart. The Son centers on Peter (Hugh Jackman), whose hectic life with his infant and new partner Beth (Vanessa Kirby) is upended when his ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern) appears with their son Nicholas (Zen McGrath), who is now a teenager. The young man has been missing from school for months and is troubled, distant, and angry. Peter strives to take care of Nicholas as he would have liked his own father to have taken care of him while juggling work, his and Beth's new son, and the offer of

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special conversation between The Eternal Daughter director Joanna Hogg and filmmaker Martin Scorsese. The two talked about discovering each other's filmography, Hogg’s lifelong friendship with Tilda Swinton, and the process of creating art out of grief.  The Eternal Daughter follows a middle-aged filmmaker and her elderly mother who take an eerie, emotional trip to the past when they stay at a fog-enshrouded hotel in the English countryside. The great Joanna Hogg uses this Victorian gothic scenario for an entirely surprising, impeccably crafted excavation of a parent-child relationship starring Tilda Swinton in a performance of rich, endless surprise. The NYFF60 selection plays  daily in our theaters. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/eternal.

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a programmers preview of our Yoshimitsu Morita retrospective and a conversation from the 60th New York Film Festival between filmmakers Joanna Hogg & Kelly Reichardt.  First up, listen to programmers Dan Sullivan and Aiko Masubuchi dive into the career and films of Yoshimitsu Morita, one of the most fascinatingly idiosyncratic and prolific directors in modern Japanese cinema. Our Yoshimitsu Morita retrospective takes place through December 11 with special introductions during opening weekend. Get tickets and All-Access Passes at filmlinc.org/morita.  After the preview, we’re revisiting an NYFF60 conversation with The Eternal Daughter director Joanna Hogg and Showing Up director Kelly Reichardt. Two of the leading auteurs of contemporary cinema, Joanna Hogg and Kelly Reichardt have built acclaimed bodies of work that stand out for their epic existential scope and intimate emotional textures. With The Eternal Daughter and Showing Up, respectivel

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring two conversations: the first with director Jerzy Skolimowski and co-writer Ewa Piaskowska on the NYFF60 selection, EO, and the second with director Nikyatu Jusu and producer Nikkia Moulterie on the ND/NF51 selection Nanny. At age 84, legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski has directed one of his spryest, most visually inventive films, following the travels of a peripatetic donkey named EO. After being removed from the only life he’s ever known in a traveling circus, EO begins a journey across the Polish and Italian countryside, experiencing cruelty and kindness, captivity and freedom. Skolimowski imagines the animal’s mesmerizing journey as an ever-shifting interior landscape, marked by absurdity and warmth in equal measure, putting the viewer in the unique perspective of the protagonist. Skolimowski has constructed his own bold vision about the follies of human nature, seen from the ultimate outsider’s perspective. EO, a New York Times Critic's

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a talk from the 60th New York Film Festival with photographer, artist, and activist Nan Goldin, moderated by NYFF programmer Rachael Rakes. In the NYFF60 Centerpiece selection All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, documentarian Laura Poitras takes as her subject Nan Goldin. An era-defining artist who rose from the New York “No Wave” underground to become one of the great photographers of the late 20th century, Goldin put herself at the forefront of the battle against the Sackler family and their pharmaceutical empire, both as an activist at art institutions around the world that had accepted millions from the Sacklers and as an advocate for the destigmatization of drug addiction. This intimate, career-spanning conversation with Goldin dove into the personal and political roots of her creative practice, the radical humanism of her photography, and the defiant intertwinings of her art and activism.  All the Beauty and the Bloodshed opens on November

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special introduction from Martin Scorsese ahead of the premiere of Personality Crisis: One Night Only at the 60th New York Film Festival, followed by a Q&A with directors Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, subject David Johansen, Executive Producer Mara Hennessey, producer Margaret Bodde, and Leah Hennessey, moderated by FLC Programmer Dan Sullivan. Continuing his vibrant and invaluable documentaries about iconic American artists and musicians such as George Harrison: Living in the Material World, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, and the Fran Lebowitz portrait Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese turns his camera on another beloved New York institution: the singular David Johansen. Equally celebrated as the lead singer-songwriter of the androgynous ’70s glam punk groundbreakers The New York Dolls and for his complete reinvention as hepcat lounge lizard Buster Poindexter in the ’80s, the chameleonic Johansen has created an entire genre unto himself,