Main Slate for 56th New York Film Festival announced

Claire Denis and Paweł Pawlikowski among filmmakers whose work will feature

by Anne-Katrin Titze

Top L to R: Barry Jenkins - If Beale Street Could Talk, Jean-Luc Godard - The Image Book, Joel Coen & Ethan Coen - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Paweł Pawlikowski - Cold War
Bottom L to R: Jafar Panahi - 3 Faces, Paul Dano - Wildlife, Bi Gan - Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Olivier Assayas - Non-Fiction
Top L to R: Barry Jenkins - If Beale Street Could Talk, Jean-Luc Godard - The Image Book, Joel Coen & Ethan Coen - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Paweł Pawlikowski - Cold War Bottom L to R: Jafar Panahi - 3 Faces, Paul Dano - Wildlife, Bi Gan - Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Olivier Assayas - Non-Fiction

27 additional films for the Main Slate program of the 56th New York Film Festival including Christian Petzold's Transit, Claire Denis' High Life, Paweł Pawlikowski's Cold War, Christophe Honoré's Sorry Angel, and Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters have been announced by the Film Society of Lincoln Center today. They will be joining the Opening Night selection, Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite, starring Rachel Weisz, Olivia Colman, and Emma Stone; Centerpiece - Alfonso Cuarón's Roma with Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Daniela Demesa, Nancy García García, and Marco Graf; and Closing Night - Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate, starring Willem Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh with Oscar Isaac, Rupert Friend, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Mads Mikkelsen, and Niels Arestrup.

New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said, "Francis Ford Coppola said that the cinema would become a real art form only when the tools of moviemaking became as inexpensive as paints, brushes, and canvases. That has come to pass, but at the same time it’s become increasingly tough to do serious work that is beholden to nothing but the filmmaker’s need to express these emotions in this form in moving images and sound. So if I were pressed to choose one word to describe the films in this year’s Main Slate, it would be: bravery.

These films were made all over the globe, by young filmmakers like Dominga Sotomayor and masters like Fred Wiseman, by artists of vastly different sensibilities from Claire Denis to the Coen Brothers, Jafar Panahi to Jean-Luc Godard. And the unifying thread is their bravery, the bravery needed to fight past the urge to commercialized smoothness and mediocrity that is always assuming new forms. That’s what makes every single title in this year’s Main Slate so precious, and so vital."

The 2018 New York Film Festival runs from September 28 through October 14.

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