Tag Archives: Film at Lincoln Center

JOACHIM TRIER — THE OSLO TRILOGY

Renate Reinsve is captivating as a free spirit unable to settle down in The Worst Person in the World

THE OSLO TRILOGY
Film at Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
January 28 – February 3
The Worst Person in the World opens February 4
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org
neonrated.com

Norwegian director Joachim Trier concludes his Oslo Trilogy with the riveting The Worst Person in the World, which is having a preview screening at Lincoln Center on January 28 before opening there on February 4. Shortlisted for Best International Feature Film, it is part of a weeklong series that includes the first two parts of the trilogy, 2006’s Reprise and 2011’s Oslo, August 31st, along with works selected by Trier and cowriter Eskil Vogt that influenced them.

The Worst Person in the World is highlighted by an unforgettable, captivating performance by Renate Reinsve, who was named Best Actress at Cannes for her portrayal of a young woman who knows what she doesn’t want but isn’t sure about what she does desire. Divided into twelve chapters in addition to a prologue and epilogue, the film follows Julie as she goes from a medical student to a bookstore employee to a photographer, along the way falling in and out of love with a series of men she doesn’t always treat very well. We are often appalled by what Julie does and says, but it’s nearly impossible to turn our backs on her.

Kasper Tuxen’s camera utterly adores Reinsve, with alluring close-ups of her extraordinary eyes, which reveal both her need to be with someone and her craving for freedom. Shortly after meeting Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), an older comic book artist, Julie crashes a wedding party and is instantly drawn to Eivind (Herbert Nordrum); although both have significant others, they dive straight into a gorgeously filmed seduction that involves no touching, wondering whether that counts as cheating. It’s a marvelous scene that questions the very nature of relationships and fidelity and sets the stage for everything that comes next.

Despite Julie’s being the protagonist, the title does not refer only to her; at one point, Eivind thinks he might be the worst person in the world, and the film is likely to make you consider whether you have done anything in your life worthy of the designation. Trier and Vogt explore the dichotomy of intimacy and independence, resulting in a work of deep thought and intelligence. There will be a postscreening Q&A on January 28 at 6:00 with Trier, Reinsve, and Lie, who has major roles in all three part of the trilogy; Trier and Reinsve will be back at the Walter Reade Theater on February 4 for a Q&A following the 5:30 show.

The Oslo Trilogy began in 2006 with Trier’s feature debut, Reprise, in which Erik (Espen Klouman Høiner) and Phillip (Lie) are best friends who want to become literary sensations. Their lives spiral in and out of control as their dreams come within reach in a film swirling with a punk aesthetic. Reprise is screening January 29 and 31 and February 3, with Trier and Lie on hand for a Q&A at the January 29 show at 6:00.

Anders Danielsen Lie is brilliant as a young man trapped in a world of his own making in Oslo, August 31st

Lie is brilliant as a drug addict in Oslo, August 31st, the middle section of the trilogy. He stars as Anders, a junkie who, early on, attempts suicide by filling his pockets with heavy stones and walking into a lake, a la Virginia Woolf. At the last minute he changes his mind and returns to the rehab clinic where he’s trying to get clean. But when he gets a one-day leave in order to interview for a plum job, as an editorial assistant for a well-known literary journal, he challenges his sobriety by visiting old friends and an ex-lover he still pines for and seeking to see his sister, who is severely disappointed in him.

Lie is a powder keg of desperation as Anders, reminiscent of Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Kendall Roy in Succession. He is lost in his own warped reality, refusing help when offered, sure that he is the only one who really understands what is going on inside him. It’s all the more painful to watch because he is wasting such promise, wandering from scene to scene in a fog of his own making. It’s a cautionary tale that begins with random people talking about their life in Oslo, as Trier and Vogt narrow down to the details of one man’s ills. Oslo, August 31st is screening January 30 and February 2 and 3, with Trier and Lie participating in a Q&A at the January 30 show 2:30.

Joachim Trier will introduce Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument at Lincoln Center on January 30

In conjunction with the theatrical opening of The Worst Person in the World on February 4, Trier and Cogt have chosen nine films that have impacted their work and/or they just plain love. The impressive list consists of Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (introduced by Trier on January 29), John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club, Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, Éric Rohmer’s The Green Ray (introduced by Trier on January 28), Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, a digital restoration of Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument (introduced by Trier on January 30), George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story, Erik Løchen’s Remonstrance, and Larisa Shepitko’s Wings.

CAMERA MAN: DANA STEVENS ON BUSTER KEATON

Bill Jr. (Buster Keaton) mimics his father, Bill Campbell (Ernest Torrence), in silent film classic

Who: Dana Stevens, Imogen Sara Smith
What: Screening and discussion about Buster Keaton
Where: Film at Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West Sixty-Fifth St.
When: Thursday, January 27, $15, 7:00
Why: “Steamboat Bill, Jr. may be [Buster] Keaton’s most mature film, a fitting if too-early farewell to his period of peak creative independence,” Slate film critic Dana Stevens writes. “Its relationship to the rest of its creator’s work has been compared to that of Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest.” Stevens gets serious about the Great Stone Face, one of silent film’s best comics, in her brand-new book, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century (Atria, $29.99).

In celebration of the launch of the tome, Stevens will be at Lincoln Center’s Francesca Beale Theater on January 27 at 7:00 to screen a 4K restoration of the 1928 classic, directed by Charles Reisner, about a riverboat battle and true love, preceded by a 2K restoration of Keaton and Edward F. Cline’s twenty-five-minute masterpiece, One Week, about a pair of newlyweds (Keaton and Sybil Seely) and their unusual new home. (Both films feature orchestral scores by American composer Carl Davis.) Stevens will put Keaton’s life and work in sociocultural context with Criterion contributor Imogen Sara Smith, author of Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. If you’ve never seen Keaton on the big screen, now is the time, as no one could turn tragedy into comedy quite like Keaton.

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Alicia Jo Rabins offers a public kaddish for Bernie Madoff in new film

THIRTY-FIRST ANNUAL NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
January 12-25, $12 virtual (all-access $85), $15 in person (all-access $95)
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
thejewishmuseum.org

The 2022 New York Jewish Film festival goes hybrid this year, with more than two dozen shorts and features exploring Jewish art, history, culture, and politics around the world. Running January 12-25 both at the Walter Reade Theater and online, the thirty-first annual event, a collaboration between Film at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum, includes in-person introductions and Q&As for many screenings. The opening-night selection is Mano Khalil’s autobiographical Neighbours, about a six-year old Kurdish boy enamored with the last Jewish family in his village as nationalism and anti-Semitism rise up. The centerpiece is Kaveh Nabatian’s Sin La Habana, dealing with cross-cultural relationships in Cuba. And Aurélie Saada’s Rose closes things out, a tale about a suddenly widowed woman, played by French legend Françoise Fabian, who has to reevaluate her future as she approaches her eightieth birthday.

In addition, there will be a special tribute to film scholar, author, archivist, educator, activist, filmmaker, and independent distributor Pearl Bowser, with virtual screenings of Lloyd Reckord’s 1963 short Ten Bob in Winter and Oscar Micheaux’s 1925 classic, Body and Soul, along with a ten-minute November 2021 interview with Bowser at the Jewish Museum reflecting on the 1970 exhibition she curated there, “The Black Film.”

A KADDISH FOR BERNIE MADOFF (Alicia J. Rose, 2021)
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
Monday, January 17, 1:00 & 7:00
www.filmlinc.org
www.akaddishforberniemadoff.com

I kicked myself when I missed Alicia Jo Rabins’s one-woman show, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, when it debuted at Joe’s Pub in 2012. I had seen her play with the klezmer band Golem and had wanted to see the song cycle live. She released the album in 2014, but now she has collaborated with director and photographer Alicia J. Rose on a delightful, kooky film version, playing at the New York Jewish Film Festival on January 17 at 1:00 and 7:00, with Rose, Rabins, and producer Lara Cuddy at the Walter Reade Theater for postscreening Q&As.

Rose follows Rabins as she becomes endlessly fascinated with the story of Bernie Madoff, the financier who built an elaborate Ponzi scheme over forty years, bilking nearly five thousand clients out of billions of dollars. Rabins, in the midst of an arts residency in a Financial District office tower while earning money by teaching bat mitzvah girls how to chant from the Torah, spoke with numerous people impacted by Madoff’s fraud, from a credit risk officer (her mother’s college roommate), a whistleblower, and an FBI agent to a therapist, a lawyer, and a Buddhist monk.

“I wasn’t just obsessed with Bernie Madoff; I was obsessed with anyone who had a connection to him, and they kept coming, one after the other,” Rabins says in the film. “I interviewed them, went back to my studio, and turned their stories into songs. I was being sucked deeper and deeper into my obsession.”

Each song is its own set piece in a different space, with Rabins dressing up like the person (her wigs are particularly fun while evoking the work of Cindy Sherman) and detailing how they were affected by Madoff’s scheme in such pop tunes as “Due Diligence,” “No Such Thing as a Straight Line,” “Down on the Seventeenth Floor,” “My Grandfather Deserted the Czar’s Army,” and “What Was the Pathology There?” She is occasionally joined by members of her band (drummer David Freeman, cellist Jennifer Kersgaard), meets a couple of yentas by a Palm Beach pool (Robin McAlpine and Judy Silk), participates in synchronized swimming, and considers holding a ritual excommunication. “I hated thinking about Madoff as a Jew. I mean, he’s pretty much the definition of bad for the Jews,” she opines. She’s not the only one to feel that way.

A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff is a great fit for the festival because it is not only about Judaism but also about New York City, shot on location in and around Wall Street, the Lipstick Building in Midtown, the Williamsburg Bridge, and other familiar spots. There is cool animation by Zak Margolis and several Golem songs in the background as Rabins relates her life and art to Madoff’s legacy, incorporating what she refers to as a kabbalistic interconnectedness and a “messianic idea of perfection.” She questions the entire financial system as she explains, “Very few people knew he was just making shit up.” And she admits that “confronting Bernie was confronting myself.” You’re bound to connect with this film in more ways than you might think.

SHORT FILMS ON CREATIVITY: UNTITLED (TANIA PROJECT) (Rima Yamazaki, 2020)
Available virtually January 20-25
www.filmlinc.org
rimayamazaki.com

In the fall of 2017, filmmaker Rima Yamazaki was invited by Ranger Mills, the widower of the late artist Tania Milicevic, to explore her legacy. Yamazaki, who has made previous films about still-life painter Ellen Altfest, on-site painter Rackstraw Downes, photographer James Casebere, and multimedia icon Joan Jonas, had never heard of Tania, but she took on the project, doing a deep dive into her work, which included painting, sculpture, collage, and public installations.

Yamazaki went through Tania’s letters, official documents, press clippings, family photographs, exhibition brochures, and personal writings to form a compelling portrait of the little-known artist, whose large-scale murals can still be seen at the corner of Mercer and Third St. in Manhattan (from 1970) and at 10 Evergreen Ave. in Brooklyn (1967), in addition to a Torah ark she designed for Tribeca Synagogue (1967). Tania was also an early feminist with intriguing statements about life and art — she favored geometric abstract patterns in multiple colors — that Yamazaki types out on the screen.

“I had four husbands . . . but I don’t think I’ve ever been married,” Tania, who was born Tatiana Lewin in Łódź, Poland, in 1920, wrote. “I want to escape gravity and the surfaces that prevent us from feeling our weight — Can we understand what we cannot feel?” she jotted down. And: “I never know what the art world is talking about. . . . I hope they do.”

Yamazaki visits the sites of Tania’s work while also going through her old studio. She uses split-screens to show photos of Tania’s oeuvre, including slides taken by Joel-Peter Witkin, known for his depictions of corpses and grotesque figures. We learn about the Construction Process Environment that Tania and Nasson Daphnis were commissioned to design in 1971 at 1500 Broadway in Times Square as well as her plans for city rooftops, which was left unfinished after her death from cancer in 1982. Yet we never see or hear Tania speak, or see others talk about her. It’s an intensely personal journey for Yamazaki, who shares only select tidbits.

The twenty-five-minute documentary will be available virtually January 20-25 as part of the New York Jewish Film Festival program “Short Films on Creativity,” which also includes Cynthia Madansky’s AA (about poet and photographer Anna Alchuk), Yoav Potash’s Beregovsky #136 (about folklorist Moshe Beregovsky), Asali Echols’s The Violin Upstairs (about the filmmaker’s violin), Eli Zuzovsky’s Mazel Tov (about Adam Weizmann’s wartime bar mitzvah), and Adrienne Gruben’s Lily (about comic-book artist Lily Reneé).

FRANCE

Léa Seydoux is radiant as a famous journalist facing a crisis in Bruno Dumont parable France

FRANCE (Bruno Dumont, 2021)
Film at Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144/165 West Sixty-Fifth St. at Amsterdam Ave.
www.filmlinc.org

“Doing harm once doesn’t mean you’ll keep doing it. That said, if you don’t think someone can change. . . . You believe in nothing. Everyone can change,” an interview subject (Annick Lavieville) tells star television journalist France de Meurs (Léa Seydoux) in Bruno Dumont’s overstuffed social satire, France. The film’s title refers not only to the reporter but to the country itself, as de Meurs’s experiences are supposed to mimic those of the republic’s, although it’s not always clear how.

The film opens with France playing gotcha with President Emmanuel Macron at a press conference; reveling in her attack question, she makes funny faces with her producer, Lou (Blanche Gardin), as if Macron’s answers don’t matter. And indeed they don’t; on her flashy news show, A View of the World, the fearlessly ambitious France creates her own reality, whether it’s manipulating a meeting in the mountains with a Tuareg chief (Youannes Mohammed) battling ISIS jihadists, disregarding fans wanting autographs, hosting political debates on her program, or giving short shrift to her husband, Fred (Benjamin Biolay), and their young son, Jojo (Gaëtan Amiel). She is dismissive, cynical, selfish, and self-serving, as it’s all about the optics and furthering her furious need to succeed.

We might not like her — in fact, we might despise her, which is part of the point, as she represents the state of contemporary media — but every once in a while she lets some actual humanity seep in. When she accidentally injures a man named Baptiste (Jawad Zemmar), she seems genuinely concerned, as he is the sole support for his immigrant parents (Noura Benbahloouli and Abdellah Chadouat). But the North African family is so in awe that such a famous person is visiting them and trying to help, even though she caused the accident and injury, that they refuse to accept any money from her. It presages a later accident that will change her life in a very different way.

Written and directed by Dumont (Camille Claudel 1915, La Vie de Jésus), France keeps the viewer at a distance, perhaps just like the country does. Cinematographer David Chambille’s camera adores Seydoux (The French Dispatch, No Time to Die, Blue Is the Warmest Color), whether she’s dressed in glamorous outfits or wearing military gear in the middle of a firefight. Her shoulder-length blond hair and ruby-red lipstick light up the screen even when she is staring off into the distance, deep in thought that she is likely never to reveal, or perhaps even fully understand herself. France is like an old-fashioned movie star as the film comments on cinema itself in a digital age of reality television and the twenty-four-hour cycle of biased and fake news.

Lou (Blanche Gardin) and France de Meurs (Léa Seydoux) prepare to manipulate their next story in France

Dumont also takes on the social order. “The golden age of nations is over. Nations have lost their authority for good,” a speaker tells guests at a fundraiser. Talking about capitalism, redemption, and salvation, a man at France’s table says, “Believe me, we must give, we must give and keep giving. You won’t run out of money, we’re so rich. To die well, one must die poor. Once you’re dead, your kindness will remain.” But all of the kindness may have already been drained out of de Meurs, without her even realizing it.

The relationship between de Meurs and Lou evokes that of Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) and Susie (Alex Bornstein) on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, but here the pair of women are so unpleasant that you don’t want to see them together too much. And by the time we’re supposed to at last feel some sympathy and concern for France, it’s too late.

“France is sad,” a man says at one point. He could be referring to the country, the character, or the film itself.

BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN: A SKETCH FOR A POSSIBLE FILM

Emi (Katia Pascariu) goes on a strange journey in Rade Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN: A SKETCH FOR A POSSIBLE FILM (BABARDEALA CU BUCLUC SAU PORNO BALAMUC) (Radu Jude, 2021)
Film at Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144/165 West Sixty-Fifth St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Film Forum, 209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, November 19
www.filmlinc.org
filmforum.org

Radu Jude’s brilliantly absurdist Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn lives up to its title, a wildly satiric takedown of social mores that redefines what is obscene. Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 2021 Berlinale, the multipart tale begins with an extremely graphic prologue, a XXX-rated homemade porn video with a woman and an unseen man holding nothing back. In the first main section, the woman, a successful teacher named Emi (Katia Pascariu), is distressed to learn that the video is threatening to go viral. She determinedly walks through the streets of Bucharest, buying flowers (which she holds upside down), discussing her dilemma with her boss, the headmistress (Claudia Ieremia), and calling her husband, Eugen, trying to get the video deleted before her meeting with angry parents at the prestigious private school where she teaches young children.

Jude and cinematographer Marius Panduru follow the masked Emi — the film was shot during the pandemic, so masks are everywhere — on her journey, the camera often lingering on the scene well after Emi has left the frame, focusing on advertising billboards, couples in the middle of conversations, people waiting for a bus, and other random actions, before finding Emi again. She sometimes fades into the background, barely seen through the windows of a passing vehicle or amid a crowd crossing at a light. She gets into an argument with a man who has parked on the sidewalk, blocking her way; she insists that he move the car, but he unleashes a stream of misogynistic curses. Swear words are prevalent throughout the film, mostly adding poignant humor.

The second segment consists of a montage of archival and new footage that details some of Romania’s recent history, involving the military, the government, religion, fascism, Nazi collaboration, patriotism, the two world wars, the 1989 revolution, Nicolae Ceaușescu, domestic violence, jokes about blondes, and the value of cinema itself. The bevy of images also points out which NSFW word is most commonly looked up in the dictionary, as well as which is second. (The film is splendidly edited by Cătălin Cristuțiu, with a fab soundtrack by Jura Ferina and Pavao Miholjević.)

It all comes together in the third section, in the school garden, where Emi faces a few dozen masked, socially distanced, very angry parents and grandparents who want her fired immediately, while the headmistress demands a calm discussion. The masked Emi is a stand-in for all of us, facing the wrath of the unruly mob forcing its sanctimonious platitudes on others when it really needs to look at itself. It’s a riotously funny sitcomlike debate in which Jude roasts many common, hypocritical beliefs held by Romanians (and people all over the world) that have not necessarily changed much from the news clips shown in the previous part.

The cartoonish cast, which includes Olimpia Mălai as Mrs. Lucia, Nicodim Ungureanu as Lt. Gheorghescu, Alexandru Potocean as Marius Buzdrugovici, and Andi Vasluianu as Mr. Otopeanu, really gets to strut its stuff while making sure their masks are properly covering their mouths and noses. They argue about beloved national poet Mihai Eminescu and Russian writer Isaac Babel, delve into various sexual positions, repeat Woody the Woodpecker’s trademark call, and quote long, intellectual passages from the internet as Jude (I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, Aferim!) reveals where society’s true obscenities lie. It’s an irreverent tour de force that offers three distinct endings to put a capper on the strangely alluring affair, turning a scary mirror on the sorry state of twenty-first-century existence.

Playfully subtitled A Sketch for a Possible Film in a reference to André Malraux’s description of Eugène Delacroix’s belief that his sketches could be of the same quality as his paintings, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Romania’s official Oscars submission, opens November 19 at Lincoln Center and Film Forum.

NYFF59: FREE TALKS

Apichatpong Weerasethakul will discuss his new film, Memoria,) at NYFF59 free talk

NYFF59 FREE TALKS
Film at Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater
144 West Sixty-Fifth Street between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
September 25 – October 9, free (first come, first serve one hour before program)
www.filmlinc.org

The New York Film Festival, which opens today, has just announced its slate of free talks, taking place September 25 to October 9 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater (with one exception). Admission is first come, first served starting an hour before each event; the talks will also be recorded for later on-demand viewing on YouTube. The highlight is the inaugural Amos Vogel Lecture, honoring the centennial of the birth of the cofounder of the festival, who is also the subject of a centenary retrospective. The lecture will be given by Albert Serra, the director of previous NYFF selections The Death of Louis XIV and Liberté and who wrote the foreword for the French edition of Vogel’s seminal book, Film as a Subversive Art.

The rest of the panel discussions, in-depth conversations, and filmmaker dialogues are divided into “Deep Focus,” “Crosscuts,” and “Film Comment Live,” with such participants as Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog), Sofia Coppola, Mia Hansen-Løve (Bergman Island), Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World), Todd Haynes (The Velvet Underground), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Memoria, Night Colonies), Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy), and Amy Taubin. The discussion about the thirtieth anniversary of Mississippi Masala with director Mira Nair, star Sarita Choudhury, and cinematographer Ed Lachman, moderated by Jhumpa Lahiri, follows the free screening of the film in Damrosch Park, for ticket holders only. Below is the full schedule.

Jane Campion will delve into her NYFF59 centerpiece selection, The Power of the Dog, with Sofia Coppola

Saturday, September 25
Deep Focus: The Making of Mississippi Masala, with Mira Nair, Sarita Choudhury, and Ed Lachman, moderated by Jhumpa Lahiri, Damrosch Park, 9:30

Sunday, September 26
Roundtable: Cinema’s Workers, with Abby Sun, Ted Fendt, Kazembe Balagun, and Dana Kopel, moderated by Gina Telaroli, Amphitheater, 7:00

Monday, September 27
Crosscuts: Mia Hansen-Løve & Joachim Trier, Amphitheater, 7:00

Saturday, October 2
Deep Focus: Jane Campion, moderated by Sofia Coppola, Amphitheater, 4:00

Crosscuts: Silvan Zürcher & Alexandre Koberidze, Amphitheater, 7:00

Sunday, October 3
Film Comment Live: The Velvet Underground & the New York Avant-Garde, with Todd Haynes, Ed Lachman, and Amy Taubin, Amphitheater, 4:00

Deep Focus: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Amphitheater, 7:00

Tuesday, October 5
Deep Focus: Maggie Gyllenhaal & Kira Kovalenko, Amphitheater, 7:00

Thursday, October 7
Deep Focus: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Amphitheater, 6:30

Saturday, October 9
Film Comment Live: Festival Report, with Devika Girish, Clinton Krute, Molly Haskell, Bilge Ebiri, and Phoebe Chen, Amphitheater, 7:00

BIG SCREEN SUMMER NYFF58 REDUX: SMALL AXE

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe consists of five powerful stories of racism and harassment of West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s to the 1980s (photo courtesy BBC One)

BIG SCREEN SUMMER NYFF58 REDUX
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center / Walter Reade Theater
144 / 165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
June 11 – August 26, $10-$15
www.filmlinc.org

One of the joys of fall, and the signal that the summer blockbuster movie blitz is over, is the New York Film Festival. Since 1963, the NYFF has been presenting a wide range of works from around the world, often with postscreening discussions with members of the cast and crew. The 2020 edition was completely virtual because of the pandemic lockdown, so Film at Lincoln Center (FLSC) is bringing much of the festival back with “Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux,” featuring nearly three dozen films now being shown the way they’re supposed to be seen, on large screens at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center and the Walter Reade Theater. Running June 11 to August 26, “NYFF58 Redux” gets under way with two weeks of Steve McQueen’s mammoth five-part epic about West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s through the 1980s, Small Axe, which was actually made for television; it screens with a newly recorded interview with McQueen, who started as an experimental filmmaker and has made such previous films as Hunger, Twelve Years a Slave, and Shame, and FLSC director of programming Denis Lim.

The multi-award-winning anthology, which premiered on BBC One in the UK and Amazon in the US, begins with Mangrove (June 11-17), the true story of Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes) and the Mangrove Nine, Trinidadian immigrants who were harassed mercilessly by Notting Hill police for establishing a peaceful community at Crichlow’s Mangrove café. The second film, one of the best of 2020, is the exhilarating Lovers Rock (June 11-24), a seventy-minute reggae house party in London in 1980, where a group of men and women dance, sing, and fall in love in a cramped space to such songs as Dennis Bovell’s “Silly Games.” (If you’re wondering who the lone old man is, it’s Bovell himself, making a cameo.) But even as Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and Franklyn (Micheal Ward) hit if off, the spectre of racism is not far away. Intimately photographed by Shabier Kirchner, Lovers Rock is an unforgettable experience.

In Red, White and Blue (June 11-17), John Boyega stars as the real-life Leroy Logan, a frustrated West Indian man who joins the London Metropolitan Police department, hoping to change its fundamental racism from the inside, much to the chagrin of his father (Steve Toussaint). Boyega is riveting as Logan discovers that achieving his goal is going to be a lot harder than he ever imagined. Sheyi Cole makes his film debut in the true story Alex Wheatle (June 12-16) as the title character, a teenager caught in England’s discriminatory social services structure and then arrested for participating in the 1981 Brixton uprising, a protest against poor socioeconomic conditions for the African-Caribbean community that included “Bloody Saturday.” The remarkable anthology concludes with Education (June 11-17), an hourlong exploration of institutionalized segregation in the British school system through the eyes of Kingsley (Kenyah Sandy), who is sent to a “special” school where West Indians are purposely kept undereducated, their potentials squashed early in life. A grand achievement by a master filmmaker, Small Axe is no mere historical document of what happened in London decades ago; it is a powerful examination of systemic racism and anti-immigrant biases that is still alive and well in the twenty-first century, especially here in America.

“Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” continues through August with such other 2020 film festival favorites as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, C. W. Winter’s The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin), Eugène Green’s Atarrabi and Mikelats, Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog, William Klein’s Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento’s The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu, and Orson Welles’s Hopper/Welles, an epic conversation between Welles and Dennis Hopper.