The New York film festival, like the city in which it’s hosted, is large, glitzy and fiercely individualistic. For the better part of its 53 years, the event has screened award-season bait (Life of Pi, The Social Network and Gone Girl all world-premiered as opening-night films), alongside artier selections that make no effort to cater to mainstream sensibilities.
This year is no different. Blockbuster director Robert Zemeckis opens the festival with The Walk, an eye-popping 3D awards contender, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, the man who crossed the Twin Towers on a high-wire in 1974 and was the subject of James Marsh’s Oscar-winning documentary, Man on Wire. Closing out the event is the world premiere of Don Cheadle’s directorial debut, Miles Ahead – a biopic of jazz musician Miles Davis. There will also be a centerpiece screening of Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle’s biopic starring Michael Fassbender as the Apple innovator, which was first unveiled at the Telluride film festival, where it stood out and started to gain awards buzz. Not to be outdone, Steven Spielberg premieres Bridge of Spies, his spy thriller and potential Oscar player, starring Tom Hanks as a cold war American lawyer recruited by the CIA to defend a Soviet spy (Mark Rylance) and arrange for his swap with a captured U-2 pilot in East Berlin.
Less commercial selections this year include Nanni Moretti’s motherly drama Mia Madre, Jia Zhangke’s experimental epic, Mountains May Depart, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s brazenly bizarre The Lobster – starring Colin Farrell as a man who must secure a life partner, lest he becomes an animal of his choosing. Among the documentaries, Laura Israel will give a world premiere Don’t Blink: Robert Frank, about the photographer and film-maker, while Michael Moore will bring his latest scathing critique of the US, Where to Invade Next, to the festival after it recently had its world premiere at the Toronto international film festival.
Kent Jones, who succeeded Richard Peña as the festival’s director of programming and selection committee chairman in 2013, says he has only one criterion to meet when putting together each year’s slate: “that it be good”.
Of commercial versus art-house fare, Kent says: “They are one in the same; I’ll put it this way: we are only interested in showing movies that we like, period.”
Says Jones: “For me, there’s no distinction between ‘arthouse fare’ and ‘Oscar fare’. I find the consumer categories that are constantly reiterated in all media, day in and day out – ‘arty’, ‘popular’, ‘fast-moving’, ‘slow’, ‘esoteric’, ‘audience-friendly’ – worse than useless and demeaning to film-makers.”
Since the NYFF was first founded in 1963 by Richard Roud and Amos Vogel, the festival has never had a juried competition, nor served as a hotbed for film sales. The only major change that occurred was the recent expansion of the festival with the opening of the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, situated across the street from screening venues Alice Tully Hall and the Walter Reade Theater. The new multi-screen theater has enabled the Film Society of Lincoln Center to expand the NYFF’s programming, allowing more room for documentaries, revivals and shorts.
This year, notable selections not part of the main lineup include a 15th anniversary screening of Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, with the cast and directors in attendance; a free tribute to documentary icon Albert Maysles, who died this year; and a screening of Laurie Anderson’s autobiographical experimental film Heart of a Dog.
Laura Poitras, whose documentary Citizenfour won the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary shortly after debuting at the NYFF, is also in the mix this year, with a selection of short-form episodic works, presented as part of Poitras, AJ Schnack and Charlotte Cook’s Field of Vision, a new, film-maker-driven documentary unit. One of these includes Asylum, in which the director shadows WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as he publishes classified diplomatic cables and seeks asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy.
