Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with the team behind the opening night selection of this year’s New Directors/New Films. Presented by Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, the 55th edition of New Directors/New Films takes place April 8-19, with many filmmakers scheduled to attend in person. Get tickets at newdirectors.org

The following conversation features Leviticus director Adrian Chiarella and lead actors Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen, moderated by New Directors/New Films selection committee member Madeline Whittle.

Sundance favorite Leviticus expounds daringly on the horror-movie truism that sexual desire makes you vulnerable—notably, to gruesome death. Named for the book of the Old Testament used to justify homophobia, the wrenching and terrifying feature debut from Adrian Chiarella begins with Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) breaking into an abandoned mill, their matey horseplay soon surrendering to its powerful homoerotic subtext. Fans of Heated Rivalry will appreciate how Chiarella draws out the intuitive connections that form beneath the show of machismo that the young men take pains to maintain for their traditional community—in this case, the provincial Australian town where Naim’s mother (Mia Wasikowska in a complex, calibrated performance) has relocated them, dragging him along to a local church’s praise meetings in search of fellowship. Gothic iconography lurks in Chiarella’s oppressive and foreboding widescreen compositions, and soon, after Ryan and another boy are subjected to a disturbing exorcism intended to cure them of their urges, the community’s queer youths, already picked on, begin to be picked off by a spectral killer that appears to them in the form of their forbidden love objects. Ingeniously complicating the deep interrelation between teen sexuality and slasher movie iconography, and staging his set pieces with chilling precision, Chiarella announces himself as a new Aussie horror auteur to stand alongside Jennifer Kent and the Philippous.

This week we’re excited to present a recent conversation with acclaimed German filmmaker Christian Petzold as he discusses the NYFF50 selection Barbara (2012) in a conversation moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

Make sure to catch Petzold’s latest feature, the NYFF63 selection Miroirs No. 3 currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/miroirs

Set in 1980, Barbara, the first chapter of Christian Petzold’s trilogy “Love in Times of Oppressive Systems,” centers around a doctor—played by the incomparable Nina Hoss, in her fifth film with the director—exiled to a small town from East Berlin as punishment for applying for an exit visa from the GDR. Planning to flee for Denmark with her boyfriend, Barbara remains icy and withdrawn around her colleagues, particularly with the lead physician, who is hiding a secret of his own. With her patients, however, the guarded doctor is kind, warm, and protective, even risking her own safety for one of her charges. Masterfully controlled and totally absorbing, this Cold War thriller expertly details the costs of telling and withholding the truth.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Two Prosecutors director Sergei Loznitsa, moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. An NYFF63 Main Slate selection, Two Prosecutors is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Janus Films.

The latest film from the great Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa is a scalpel-precise tale of the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy. Adapting a novel by Soviet writer and political prisoner Georgy Demidov, set in the Soviet Union in 1937, Loznitsa follows the attempts of an idealistic government-appointed prosecutor to expose the mistreatment of a dissident Bolshevik writer who has been jailed and tortured without evidence of wrongdoing. As he gradually comes to realize, the lack of cause for the man’s imprisonment is hardly unique under Stalin’s regime, and the neophyte lawyer may be putting himself in danger by exposing his own moral righteousness. Loznitsa constructs his story with a patient yet unmistakable sense of mounting dread, focusing on the devastating minutiae that allows fascism to function in our world.

The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation from June of 2023. In this conversation, director Béla Tarr discusses his 2000 feature Werckmeister Harmonies with Film at Lincoln Center Vice President of Programming Florence Almozini as part of Tarr’s two-day visit to FLC three years ago. FLC will present “Farewell to Béla Tarr,” a seven-film tribute to the late Hungarian filmmaker whose singular body of work stands among the most rigorous and influential in modern cinema, March 27-31. View full screening schedule and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/tarr

Werckmeister Harmonies stands among the defining achievements of Béla Tarr’s late period and remains, alongside Sátántangó, one of his most widely celebrated works. Directed with Ágnes Hranitzky and adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, the film unfolds as a sustained immersion in a weather-beaten provincial town unsettled by the arrival of a traveling circus bearing a colossal stuffed whale—and rumors of a shadowy “Prince.” At its center is the quietly perceptive postman János (Lars Rudolph), whose wide-eyed curiosity contrasts with the mounting paranoia around him. Composed in precisely choreographed long takes and animated by Mihály Víg’s incantatory score, the film transforms rumor and unrest into a searching meditation on harmony, disorder, and the fragility of civic life. A Janus Films release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Dry Leaf director Alexandre Koberidze and composer Giorgi Koberidze as they discuss their new film. An NYFF63 Currents selection, Dry Leaf opens at Film at Lincoln Center on Friday, March 20 with Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/leaf

This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

In soccer, a “dry leaf” is a kick that produces an unpredictable landing of the ball. Shaken by the disappearance of his grown daughter, a sports photographer goes looking for her through a Georgian landscape strewn with football fields. An invisible companion in tow, he meets potential witnesses whose perspectives prove distorted or contradictory. Confirming his position as one of contemporary cinema’s most intrepid artists, director Alexandre Koberidze (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, NYFF59) shot the film on an antiquated Sony Ericsson phone. What might seem a perverse choice reveals itself, over Dry Leaf’s epic length, as a brilliant thematic gesture that elicits its own temporal register. Set to a haunting score by the director’s brother Giorgi, this melancholic mystery presents Georgia’s open plains and mountain regions in alien, oneiric contexts. One emerges from its transporting rhythms with a fresh perspective on the world.

The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.