New York Film Festival Booklet Design

New York Film Festival 2022

September 20 –

October 16

ABOUT

Film at Lincoln Center is devoted to supporting the art and elevating the craft of cinema. The only branch of the world-renowned arts complex Lincoln Center to shine a light on the everlasting yet evolving importance of the moving image, this nonprofit organization was founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international film. Via year-round programming and discussions; its annual New York Film Festival; and its publications, including Film Comment, the U.S.’s premier magazine about films and film culture, Film at Lincoln Center endeavors to make the discussion and appreciation of cinema accessible to a broader audience, as well as to ensure that it will remain an essential art form for years to come.

White Noise

Noah Baumbach USA

2022, 136 min.

Opening Night · North American Premiere

The Inspection

Elegance Bratton USA

2022, 93 min.

Closing Night Selection · USA Premiere

In one of the year’s most gratifyingly ambitious American films, Noah Baumbach adapts Don DeLillo’s epochal postmodern 1985 novel, long perceived as unfilmable, into a richly layered, entirely unexpected work of contemporary satire.

Filmmaker and photographer Elegance Bratton makes his ambitious narrative debut with The Inspection, a knockout drama based on his own experiences as a gay man in Marine Corps basic training following a decade of living on the streets.

Armageddon Time

James Gray US

2022, 114 min.

NYFF 60th Anniversary Celebration

Aftersun

Charlotte Wells UK 2022, 98 min.

The most personal film yet from James Gray ( The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z) is also one of his greatest, an exquisitely detailed coming-of-age drama that follows Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a sixth grader who dreams of becoming an artist. Also starring Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Strong, Anne Hathaway, and Jaylin Webb.

In one of the most assured and spellbinding feature debuts in years, Scottish director Charlotte Wells has fashioned a textured memory piece inspired by her relationship with her dad, starring Paul Mescal and Francesca Corio as a divorced father and his daughter whose close bond is quietly shaken during a brooding weekend at a coastal resort in Turkey.

All That Breathes

Shaunak Sen India/U.K./USA

2022, Hindi with English subtitles, 94 min.

Corsage

Marie Kreutzer Austria

2022, German with English subtitles, 113 min.

USA Premiere

In this hypnotic, poignant, and beautifully crafted documentary, New Delhi-based filmmaker Shaunak Sen immerses himself with two brothers who for years have been taking it upon themselves to save the black kite, their city’s endangered birds of prey, which the general population largely sees as nuisances despite their essential role in the city’s ecosystem.

A Couple

Frederick Wiseman USA

2022, French with English subtitles, 63 min.

North American Premiere

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 her cloistered with both realism and fanciful imagination.

Legendary American documentarian Frederick Wiseman has made a film based on the diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, structured as a series of monologues delivered with magnificent poise and gathering intensity by star and co-writer Nathalie Boutefeu—a captivating one-woman portrait of a remarkably contemporary rendering of a marriage.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica

Véréna Paravel and Lucien CastaingTaylor

France/Switzerland/USA 2022, French with English subtitles, 117 min.

USA Premiere

Decision to Leave

Park Chan-wook South Korea 2022, Korean and Chinese with English subtitles, 138 min.

In their thrilling new work of nonfiction exploration, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Leviathan) burrow deeper than ever, using microscopic cameras and specially designed recording devices to survey the wondrous landscape of the human body.

Descendant

Margaret Brown USA 2022, 109 min.

A Busan detective is increasingly obsessed with a murder suspect in a puzzling new case: a middle-aged businessman has mysteriously fallen to his death and his wife might be to blame. Park Chan-wook won the Cannes Best Director award for this twisting Hitchcockian detective thriller, one of his most enveloping and accomplished films.

A southern USA town’s submerged history symbolizes an entire nation’s forgotten atrocities in this poignant and cathartic documentary from nonfiction film veteran Margaret Brown, which reckons with the legacy of the Clotilda, a slave ship that brought more than one hundred people to Alabama from Africa in 1860, decades after the practice was made illegal.

Enys Men

Mark Jenkin

U.K.

2022, 91 min.

USA Premiere

In this eerie, texturally rich experience from Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, an isolated middleaged woman spends her days in enigmatic environmental study on an uninhabited, windswept, rocky island off the coast of Cornwall in southwest England, yet she’s also increasingly haunted by her own nightmarish visitations.

EO

Jerzy Skolimowski

Poland/Italy

2022, Polish, Italian, English, French with English subtitles, 86 min.

USA Premiere

The Eternal Daughter

Joanna Hogg

U.K./USA

2022, 96 min.

At age 84, legendary director Jerzy Skolimowski has directed one of his spryest, most visually inventive films yet, following the travels of a peripatetic donkey named EO who begins as a circus performer before escaping on a pastoral trek across the Polish and Italian countryside.

A middle-aged filmmaker and her elderly mother take an eerie, emotional trip to the past when they stay at a fog-enshrouded hotel in the English countryside. The great Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir) 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.

Master Gardener

Paul Schrader USA 2022, 107 min.

North American Premiere

No Bears

Jafar Panahi Iran

2022, Farsi, Azerbaijani, Turkish with English subtitles, 107 min.

USA Premiere

Following First Reformed and The Card Counter, Paul Schrader continues his dramatic renaissance with an equally effective, startling tale about dormant violence and the possibility of regeneration, centering on a horticulturist (Joel Edgerton) who works for the imperious owner (Sigourney Weaver) of a wealthy estate.

Jafar Panahi’s risk-taking output has never slowed down even amidst his internationally condemned treatment by the Iranian government. In No Bears , another virtuosic sleight of hand, the director appears as himself, relocated to a rural border town to remotely oversee the making of a new film in Turkey, the story of which comes to sharply parallel disturbing events that begin to occur around him.

The Novelist’s Film

Hong Sangsoo South Korea

2022, Korean with English subtitles, 92 min.

North American Premiere

For his playful and gently thoughtprovoking 27th feature, Hong Sangsoo takes on the perspective of a prickly middle-aged novelist, Junhee (Lee Hye-young), whose dormant creativity is stoked following a chance encounter with a famous actress (Kim Min-hee).

One Fine Morning

Mia Hansen-Løve France

2022, French with English subtitles, 112 min.

Pacifiction

Albert Serra

France/Spain/Germany/Portugal 2022, French with English subtitles, 162 min.

The intensely poignant and deeply personal latest drama from Mia Hansen-Løve ( Bergman Island ) stars Léa Seydoux as Sandra, a professional translator and single mother at a crossroads, torn between the romantic desire she feels for a married man (Melvil Poupaud) and her obligation towards her sick father (Pascal Greggory).

R.M.N.

Cristian Mungiu

Romania/France

2022, Romanian with English subtitles, 125 min.

USA Premiere

Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra reconfirms his centrality in the contemporary cinematic landscape with this mesmerizing, slowbuilding fever dream about a French bureaucrat (a monumental Benoît Magimel) drifting through a fateful trip to a French Polynesian island with increasing anxiety.

Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days), who dramatizes the tensions of a modern Romania still beholden to dangerous traditions, returns with a gripping, mosaic-like portrait of a rural Transylvanian town riven by ethnic conflicts, economic resentment, and personal turmoil.

Return to Seoul

Davy Chou

Cambodia/France/Germany/South

Korea/Belgium

2022, English, French, and Korean with English subtitles, 115 min.

USA Premiere

Saint Omer

Alice Diop USA

2022, French with English subtitles, 118 min.

USA Premiere

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 nearly ten years.

Scarlet

Pietro Marcello

France/Italy/Germany

2022, French with English subtitles, 103 min.

North American Premiere

Successful journalist and author Rama (Kayije Kagame) attends the trial of a young Senegalese woman (Guslagie Malanga), who has allegedly murdered her own baby daughter. Rama’s plan to write about Laurence in a book inspired by the Medea myth increasingly unravels as she becomes overwhelmed by the case in Alice Diop’s arresting yet highly sensitive, superbly acted fiction feature debut.

One of contemporary cinema’s most versatile talents, Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden) proves again he is as comfortable in the realm of folklore as he is in creative nonfiction with this enchanting period fable that delicately interweaves realist drama, ethereal romance, and musical flights of fancy.

Showing Up

Kelly Reichardt USA

2022, 108 min.

North American Premiere

Stars at Noon

Claire Denis France

2022, English and Spanish with English subtitles, 137 min.

North American Premiere

Continuing one of the richest collaborations in modern American cinema, director Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women) reunites with star Michelle Williams for this marvelously particularized portrait of a sculptor’s daily work and frustrations in an artist’s enclave in Portland.

In Claire Denis’s surprising contemporary thriller, a dissolute young American journalist (Margaret Qualley) and an English businessman (Joe Alwyn) with ties to the oil industry meet by chance while on different, mysterious assignments in modern-day Nicaragua and tumble into a whirlwind romance.

Stonewalling

Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka Japan 2022, Hunanese with English subtitles, 148 min.

USA Premiere

A young flight-attendant-intraining’s plans to finish college are thrown into doubt when she discovers she’s pregnant. Not wanting an abortion, she hopes to give the child away after carrying it to term, while staying afloat amidst a series of dead-end jobs. Beijingbased wife-and-husband team

Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s film is an urgent critique of a modern-day social structure that has few options for women in need of care.

TÁR

Todd Field USA

2022, 157 min.

Trenque Lauquen

Laura Citarella

Argentina

2022, Spanish with English subtitles, 250 min.

North American Premiere

Triangle of Sadness

Ruben Östlund

Sweden/France/UK/Turkey/Germany

2022, 147 min.

Unrest

Cyril Schäublin

Switzerland

2022, Swiss German, Russian and French with English subtitles, 93 min.

USA Premiere

The charisma and emotional precision of Cate Blanchett are put to astounding use in this deft showcase for the actor’s musical artistry, a stinging portrait of a world-famous orchestra conductor’s gradual unraveling that is the first film in sixteen years from director Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children).

In her dazzling and enormously pleasurable new opus—told in 12 chapters spread across two feature films—Laura Citarella takes the viewer on a limitless, mercurial journey through stories nested within stories set in and around the Argentinean city of Trenque Lauquen (“Round Lake”) and centered on the strange disappearance of a local academic.

Ruben Östlund’s wildly ambitious Palme d’Or–winning Buñuelian satire follows two hot young models (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean) who rub elbows with the super-rich on a luxury cruise gone haywire.

Anarchist and socialist philosopher Pyotr Kropotkin experiences a quiet revolution in Cyril Schäublin’s complexly woven timepiece set in the hushed environs of the Swiss watchmaking town of Saint-Imier in the 1870s.

Walk Up

Hong Sangsoo

South Korea

2022

Korean with English subtitles, 97 min.

Successful middle-aged filmmaker Byungsoo (Kwon Haehyo) drops by to visit an old friend, Mrs. Kim (Lee Hyeyoung), the owner of a charming apartment building, only to find his life taking a series of unexpected turns. Hong Sangsoo uses a delicately radical structure in his latest exploration of the complexities of relationships, growing older, and artistic pursuit.

Noah Baumbach Finds the Music in ‘White Noise’

By Kyle Buchanan

Noah Baumbach is not a fan of Netflix’s “skip credits” feature. When he directed “Marriage Story” and “The Meyerowitz Stories,” Baumbach implored the streaming service not to speed viewers past the closing credits and into the next piece of content before the film has technically concluded. Still, the 52-year-old director realizes that on this front, he might be an old-school outlier.

“When I’m watching a movie with my 12-year-old and it finishes, I like to decompress and watch the credits, always,” Baumbach told me Thursday at the Venice Film Festival. “And he’s like, ‘OK, what’s next?’ For him, it’s just words on a screen, but I’m like, ‘Let’s just vibe out on the fonts.’”

To ensure the survival of closing credits, filmmakers now have to make something truly unskippable, and it’s here that Baumbach has delivered in spades: At the end of his

new film, the Venice opener “White Noise,” he delivers a full-blown musical number starring the entire cast and set to the first new LCD Soundsystem song in five years. It’s a deliriously fun sequence that has dominated chatter in the first 24 hours of the festival and is doubly surprising because, like the movie itself, it finds Baumbach working at a scale he’s never before tried.

In “White Noise,” adapted from the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo, Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig play married parents Jack and Babette Gladney: He’s a paunchy professor who blathers about his “advanced Nazism” course, she’s a pill-popper with a mighty ’80s perm. (“She has important hair,” coos Don Cheadle as one of Jack’s colleagues.) The couple’s pillow talk involves morbid debate over which of them will die first, but when a toxic spill forces their neighborhood to evacuate, our leads must confront their obsession with death in a way that hits much closer to home.

The only thing that ever seems to soothe these neurotics is the local supermarket, a gleaming, jumbosized temple of consumerism where everything is always in the right place. With its abundance, bright-white lights

and collection of familiar, beaming faces, a trip to the supermarket in “White Noise” isn’t just like going to heaven — it’s better.

That makes it the perfect place to set the end-credits number. Don’t worry, the sequence isn’t a spoiler — it’s more of a coda, and “a visual, visceral, physical representation of what I felt like the whole movie was about,” Baumbach told me.

Here, nearly every character in the movie cavorts among aisles of Hi-C, Doritos and Ritz Crackers while Driver and Gerwig pull boxes from the shelves with Busby Berkeley-level precision. Later, workers in the checkout area throw plastic bags into the air as if they were feathered fans, and a coterie of college professors — played by the likes of Cheadle, Jodie Turner-Smith, and André Benjamin — boogie in a charmingly fussy fashion.

The sequence made me think of the dance-heavy curtain calls from “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” and “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again,” though Baumbach, a more refined cineaste, was motivated by “8 1/2” and “Beau Travail,” he told me.

“As I arrived at the end of the script, it revealed itself to me as the thing to do,” said Baumbach, who likened it to smaller cinematic flourishes that close his previous films: “‘Frances Ha’ has no unmotivated camera until the very end, and then there’s a push in on her face — it’s very simple. ‘Meyerowitz Stories’ is all piano music and then an orchestra comes in at the end. I like trying to listen for those things.”

He went to LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, who also contributed to Baumbach’s “Greenberg” and “While We’re Young,” to craft “New Body Rhumba,” an upbeat, catchy song about death for the sequence. “I said,

essentially, write the song you would have written if you were writing songs in 1985,” Baumbach said.

“For me, that’s not a hard nudge,” Murphy said at the film’s premiere party. If writing ’80s-inflected songs is well in his wheelhouse, what was the greatest challenge, I asked? “Trying not to die before the song was done,” Murphy replied mordantly. (Jack and Babette could scarcely have phrased it better.)

The dance sequence, choreographed by David Neumann, was shot over two days at an abandoned Ohio superstore. “It actually was as happy shooting it as it is to watch it,” Baumbach said. “It was this contagious feeling. It just felt good. And though Baumbach has flirted with making a movie musical before — he and Driver once explored the idea of adapting Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” eventually using that show’s “Being Alive” as the climactic sung number in “Marriage Story” — making “White Noise” hasn’t fully scratched that itch.

“It makes me interested in doing more of that,” said Baumbach, who also used Neumann to choreograph the movie’s chaotic family breakfasts and massive crowd scenes. “I think this whole movie opened up things for me, aspects of moviemaking that I’ve always been drawn to that the movies I’ve made haven’t needed or wanted.”