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| Paul Thomas Anderson’s Junun - New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
In the World Premiere of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Junun, the director takes a trip with Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, the composer for Inherent Vice, The Master and There Will Be Blood. Jake Paltrow and Noah Baumbach's De Palma on Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Mission To Mars, The Untouchables, Obsession, Redacted and Carlito’s Way director Brian De Palma and the 53rd New York Film Festival poster artist Laurie Anderson’s Heart Of A Dog are three of the Special Events to look forward to.
László Nemes’s Son Of Saul (Saul Fia), starring Géza Röhrig, Grand Prix winner at the Cannes Film Festival and Hungary's 2016 Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film is being screened as a Film Comment Presents. Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave and John Boorman's Queen And Country were the two previous Film Comment Presents launched during the 51st New York Film Festival.
Junun
"Earlier this year, Paul Thomas Anderson joined his close friend and collaborator Jonny Greenwood on a trip to Rajasthan in northwest India, where they were hosted by the Maharaja of Jodhpur, and he brought his camera with him. Their destination was the 15th-century Mehrangarh Fort, where Greenwood (with the help of Radiohead engineer Nigel Godrich) was recording an album with Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur and an amazing group of musicians: Aamir Bhiyani, Soheb Bhiyani, Ajaj Damami, Sabir Damami, Hazmat, and Bhanwaru Khan on brass; Ehtisham Khan Ajmeri, Nihal Khan, Nathu Lal Solanki, Narsi Lal Solanki, and Chugge Khan on percussion; Zaki Ali Qawwal, Zakir Ali Qawwal, Afshana Khan, Razia Sultan, Gufran Ali, and Shazib Ali on vocals; and Dara Khan and Asin Khan on strings."
Public screening: Thursday October 8 at 9:00pm
De Palma
"Their film moves at the speed of De Palma’s thought (and sometimes works in subtle, witty counterpoint) as he goes title by title, covering his life from science nerd to New Hollywood bad boy to grand old man, and describes his ever-shifting position in this thing we call the movie business. Deceptively simple, De Palma is finally many things at once. It is a film about the craft of filmmaking—how it’s practiced and how it can be so easily distorted and debased. It’s an insightful and often hilarious tour through American moviemaking from the 1960s to the present, and a primer on how movies are made and unmade. And it’s a surprising, lively, and unexpectedly moving portrait of a great, irascible, unapologetic, and uncompromising New York artist."
Public screening: Wednesday, September 30 at 6:00pm
Blow Out will be shown in the Revivals program on Wednesday, September 30 at 9:00pm
Heart Of A Dog
Funded by Arte "… a work of braided joy and heartbreak and remembering and forgetting, at the heart of which is a lament for her late beloved piano-playing and finger-painting dog Lolabelle. Life in the neighborhood—downtown New York after 9/11... the archiving of surveillance records in ziggurat-like structures… Lolabelle’s passage through the bardo… recollections of deaths and near-deaths, terrors personal and global, sad goodbyes and funny ones, dreams and imagined flights… acceptance: Heart of a Dog is as immediate as a paragraph by Kerouac, as disarmingly playful as a Cole Porter melody, as rhapsodically composed as a poem by Whitman, and a thing of rare beauty."
Public screening: Thursday October 8 at 6:00pm
Film Comment Presents: Son Of Saul (Saul Fia)
"A film that looks into the abyss, this shattering portrait of the horror of Auschwitz follows Saul, a Sonderkommando tasked with delivering his fellow Jews to the gas chamber. Determined to give a young boy a proper Jewish burial, Saul descends through the death camp’s circles of Hell, while a rebellion brews among the prisoners. A bombshell debut from director and co-writer László Nemes, Son of Saul is an utterly harrowing, ultra-immersive experience, and not for the fainthearted. With undeniably virtuoso plan-séquence camerawork in the mode of Nemes’s teacher Béla Tarr, this startling film represents a new benchmark in the historic cinematic depictions of the Holocaust. A deeply troubling work, sure to be one of the year’s most controversial films."
Public screening: Tuesday, October 6 at 9:00pm
Tickets go on sale to the general public starting on Sunday, September 13.
This year's New York Film Festival runs from September 25 through October 11.
