(New York) The New York Film Festival unveiled the main list of its 62nd annuale edition, with a selection including AnoraSean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning film, The Room Next Door by Pedro Almodóvar and Dahomey by Mati Diop. Like fire by Philippe Lesage, already presented as a world premiere at the Berlinale, is also there.
Thirty-three feature films will make up the core lineup of the annual festival presented by the Film at Lincoln Center organization. This year’s main lineup is particularly international, with films from 24 countries, and includes 19 directors making their debut in the festival’s most prestigious section.
The festival, as previously announced, will begin on September 27 with Nickel Boys by RaMell Ross, an adaptation of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead. Almodóvar, who is making his 15e appearance in the main New York program, will present The Room Next Doorstarring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, as the festival’s centerpiece. Blitz Steve McQueen’s film about the bombing of London during World War II will be the closing film.
A number of winners from the Cannes Film Festival in May will make their U.S. or North American premieres. Along withAnoraThere is Grand Tourby Miguel Gomes, winner of the Cannes Best Director Award; All We Imagine as Light by Payal Kapadia, winner of the Grand Prix; On Becoming a Guinea Fowl by Rungano Nyoni, featured in the “Un Certain Regard” section; and The Seed of the Sacred Figby dissident Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof who fled his home country to release his film.
As for Like fire by Philippe Lesage, it won the Grand Prix du jury Génération at the most recent Berlin Festival. It stars Arieh Worthalter, Paul Ahmarani, Sophie Desmarais, Noah Parker and Aurélia Arandi-Longpré, and received rave reviews when it was recently released in France.
“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means reflecting the state of the world,” Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, said in a statement.
“The most remarkable thing about the films in the main selection – and the other sections we will announce in the coming weeks – is the extent to which they focus on cinema’s relationship with reality. They are reminders that, in the hands of its most essential practitioners, cinema has the capacity to take in the world, to intervene and reimagine it.”
Among the films that will also be presented, we find: Oh, Canada by Paul Schrader with Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi, Caught by the Tides by Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke and The Shrouds by David Cronenberg.
Roberto Minervini’s film about the American Civil War, The Damned and Carson Lund’s about baseball, Eephus will also be on display.
Also coming to New York: Hard Truths by Mike Leigh, The Brutalists by Brady Corbet, starring Adrien Brody as an architect and Holocaust survivor, and the world premiere of My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow by Julia Loktev, a documentary about independent journalism in Putin’s Russia.
The New York Film Festival, which runs from September 27 to October 14, takes place at Lincoln Center and a few other venues around the city.