The New York Film Festival of the Film Society of Lincoln Center (FSLC) sets the standard for the best arthouse films in the U.S. The 56th annual festival opened September 28, 2018, and ran through October 14. This year’s included a modest number of women directors, but, as Ruth Gordon wrote in the classic Pat and Mike, they were “cherce:”
4, plus 1 co-written by a woman, out of 30
2 out of 14
1 woman co-director, out of 25, and 2 new cinéphile documentaries out of 3 (1 about a woman director)
16 out of 36
Convergence (VR/Immersive Cinema/AI projects):
4 out of 12
Shorts: 7 out of 21
MAIN SLATE:
Happy as Lazzaro – Netflix/Theaters
Release date: 11/30
Alice Rohrwacher, with female cinematographer and editor, takes Italian neorealism to a wonderful level of magic realism for contemporary class and economic consciousness of rural and urban poor, in sympathy with migrants.
High Life – A24
Release date: 2019
Claire Denis’s 18th feature is her first science fiction in her 30-year career – her first in English because, she said at the press conference, “People in space speak English or Russian, not French.” In fraught travel to a black hole, Juliette Binoche is a sensually mad reproduction scientist and Denis-fan Robert Pattinson is a murderer reformed by his baby daughter to face their future.
Private Life – Netflix/theaters
Release date:10/5
Dedicating the film to her daughter, Tamara Jenkins was inspired by her own experiences to humanistically create a 40-something couple toiling with fertility treatments and adoption that impact his suburban sister-in-law and college drop-out daughter in unexpectedly emotional, amusing and moving ways. Read FF2 Media’s review of the film.
Too Late to Die Young – KimStim release
Dominga Sotomayor beautifully symbolizes the rush of freedom in Chile in 1990 as adolescents coming of age in an unconventional co-op family vacation camp on New Year’s Eve.
DOCUMENTARY SPOTLIGHT:
Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes – Magnolia
Release date: 12/7
Alexis Bloom is top-notch at getting accusers from his distant and recent past to bitterly reveal how the late media czar’s pattern of sexual harassment and abuse of power began early in his career – and how Fox News reflects his style and priorities.
The Waldheim Waltz – Menemsha Films
Release date:10/19
Ruth Beckermann vividly reminds us that another president lied about his past, whitewashed his country’s history, encouraged nationalism and anti-Semitism, and won election – in Austria, Spring 1986. Her video tapes from demonstrations alongside “dissidents, socialists, Trotskyites, Jews and outraged people” strikingly contrast with official broadcast coverage. The protests and international media reactions finally pushed her country to deal with their Nazi complicity, even as the same forces are rising again.
REVIVALS AND RETROSPECTIVES
Auteur partners Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet were represented by leftist German shorts from 1960s. (Grasshopper Film release)
Margarethe von Trotta’s Searching For Ingmar Bergman is her personal tribute to the master auteur, emphasizing autobiographical elements and great roles for his actresses/lovers, while encouraging new audiences to his oeuvre. (Oscilloscope Laboratories release)
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
Pamela B. Green is passionate about advancing Guy-Blaché’s recognition as first woman filmmaker, starting 1894 in France as writer, director, and producer, and to the U.S. She went from studio head to forgotten creator of more than a thousand innovative works (now mis-credited, mis-filed, or lost like too many silents). Narrator Jodie Foster joined Green in urging more acknowledgment for her new role model and for theatrical and educational distribution of this exciting and essential documentary.
New York Women in Film & Television presented a panel on “Early Women Film Pioneers: Alice Guy-Blaché”: Jane Gaines on the Women Film Pioneers Project at Columbia University; Susan Lazarus on Women’s Film Preservation Fund, which supported several Guy-Blaché films; and Be Natural co-writer Joan Simon on curating public screenings.
PROJECTIONS – My Top Favorites
In addition to Ericka Beckman’s retrospective of 1980s experimental funny, feminist shorts Cinderella and You the Better (restored by Academy Film Archive), my favorite in former avant-garde section: Jodie Mack’s The Grand Bizarre. This gorgeous collage of global textiles feels like being inside a jacquard loom weaving a mix of cultures, travelogue footage, and animation.
SHORTS – My Top Favorites
In Veslemøy’s Song (International Shorts), Canadian director Sofia Bohdanowicz hand-processed black-and-white film to follow a young woman’s adventures in historical, archival, and musical research (including at Lincoln Center) to re-discover Kathleen Parlow, her grandfather’s teacher and one of 20th century’s eminent female violinists.
In God Never Dies (New York Stories), Barbara Cigarroa’s Texas borderland bicultural experience transfers to NYS’s Hudson Valley. Her actors are farm workers: a single mother with children briefly get a look inside their American Dream – new house in the fields.
The prestige of the NY Film Festival could bring these films to an outlet near you!
© Nora Lee Mandel (10/21/18) FF2 Media
Featured photo: Alba Rohrwacher and Adriano Tardiolo in Happy as Lazzaro (2018)
Photos: New York Film Festival
