Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

Film at Lincoln Center
Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

The Film at Lincoln Center Podcast is a weekly podcast that features in-depth conversations with filmmakers, actors, critics, and more.

  1. #585 - Sarah Friedland, Kathleen Chalfant, Carolyn Michelle, and H. Jon Benjamin on Familiar Touch

    APR 5

    #585 - Sarah Friedland, Kathleen Chalfant, Carolyn Michelle, and H. Jon Benjamin on Familiar Touch

    This week we’re excited to present a conversation from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films with Familiar Touch director Sarah Friedland and cast members Kathleen Chalfant, Carolyn Michelle, and H. Jon Benjamin. This conversation was moderated by New Directors/New Films co-chair Dan Sullivan. Presented by The Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, the 54th edition of New Directors/New Films (ND/NF) takes place through April 13, and has, since 1972, showcased new and emerging filmmakers whose distinctive visions and risk-taking works highlight the vitality and potential of cinema. The Opening Night selection of this year’s festival, Familiar Touch is about an octogenarian named Ruth (played by Kathleen Chalfant) who has been living independently, but cracks have started to emerge: toast is placed to dry in the dish rack, confusion rests on her face, the dead are spoken of in present tense while the living (such as a son right before her) go entirely unrecognized. Her entrance into an assisted-living facility begins the strange, transcendent journey that is Familiar Touch, Sarah Friedland’s feature debut, which earned three awards at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, including the Lion of the Future, Best Director, and Best Actress for Chalfant’s astonishing turn. Friedland builds her drama through sharp honesty, and tough as its material may be, few films are so tonally flexible, so able to turn on a dime: stray moments of tenderness, humility, even absurdity poke through, with a love and care for Ruth shown by characters and creators alike. Familiar Touch portends the arrival of major directorial talent and we were honored to have it as the opening night selection of the 54th edition of New Directors/New Films. Familiar Touch will open in select theaters beginning June 20th, courtesy of Music Box Films.

    30 min
  2. #584 - Miguel Gomes on Grand Tour

    MAR 29

    #584 - Miguel Gomes on Grand Tour

    This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Grand Tour director Miguel Gomes. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection, Grand Tour is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center, courtesy of Mubi. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/tour. In this fanciful and high-spirited cinematic expedition, the uncommonly ambitious Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes (Tabu, NYFF50; Arabian Nights, NYFF53) takes a journey across East Asia, skipping through time and countries with delirious abandon to tell the tale of an unsettled couple from colonial England and the world as it both expands and closes in around them. It’s 1918, and Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) has escaped the clutches of beckoning marriage, leaving his bemused fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), in indefatigable pursuit. Edward gives chase from Mandalay to Bangkok to Shanghai and beyond, while Gomes responds with a splendid and enthralling series of scenes that use a magic form of cinema to situate us in these places both then and now, keeping us at a knowingly exotic traveler’s distance while also immersing us in rhythm, texture, and emotional reality. Whether black-and-white or color, zigzagging or meditative in tone, scripted or captured as documentary, Grand Tour is splendid, moving, and human-scaled. Winner of the Best Director prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. A MUBI release. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

    23 min
  3. #583 - Matt Dillon and Anamaria Vartolomei on Being Maria

    MAR 22

    #583 - Matt Dillon and Anamaria Vartolomei on Being Maria

    This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 20205 edition of the just-concluded Rendez-vous with French Cinema with Being Maria cast members Matt Dillon and Anamaria Vartolomei. Being Maria is now in select theaters, courtesy of Kino Lorber. Actors don’t choose roles,” actor Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal) tells his daughter Maria Schneider (Anamaria Vartolomei). “Roles choose them!” After her galvanizing performance as a young woman seeking out an illegal abortion in Audrey Diwan’s Happening (ND/NF 2022), Vartolomei delivers another indelible portrait of a woman in extremis with writer-director Jessica Palud’s second feature, moving beyond Schneider’s encounter with director Bernardo Bertolucci on the set of Last Tango in Paris, during the shoot of the infamous “get the butter” scene (which the actress repeatedly identified as a violation of her consent), to contemplate the actress’s larger life and legacy. The shoot itself is meticulously reconstructed—featuring a remarkable turn by Matt Dillon as Schneider’s significantly more famous costar and scene partner, Marlon Brando—in order to contextualize the private and public fallout from Schneider’s equally iconic and traumatizing breakout performance. Palud was herself an assistant director for Bertolucci at age 19 (the same age Schneider was during the production of Last Tango) and brings a welcome eye for complexity to an unsparing, compassionate reframing of a much-discussed incident—rooted firmly in the perspective of the actress at its center. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle.

    31 min
  4. #582 - Philippe Lesage and Noah Parker on Who by Fire

    MAR 15

    #582 - Philippe Lesage and Noah Parker on Who by Fire

    This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Who by Fire director Philippe Lesage and actor Noah Parker. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection, Who by Fire is now playing at Film at Lincoln Center with in-person Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/fire A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multigenerational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted coming-of-age drama from Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage (Genesis, New Directors/New Films 2019). Ostensibly a merry reunion between well-known film director Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter) and his longtime friend and former collaborator Albert Gary (Paul Ahmarani), the vacation gradually becomes something far more complex and less stable, especially with the combustible admixture of Albert’s teen son’s best friend, Jeff (Noah Parker), and Albert’s self-asserting daughter Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré). Long-simmering middle-aged resentments surface, set against the anxieties of the young, all captured sensitively by Lesage, who in recent years has proven unparalleled in evoking the psychological contours of teenagers finding their paths through treacherous emotional landscapes. Featuring thrillingly choreographed dinner sequences of mounting tension, Who by Fire confirms Lesage as a major contemporary filmmaker, with its assured tonal negotiation of the naturalistic and the oneiric, the joyous (especially an epic dance interlude to The B-52s) and the ominous. This conversation was moderated by NYFF selection committee member K. Austin Collins.

    30 min
4.6
out of 5
106 Ratings

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The Film at Lincoln Center Podcast is a weekly podcast that features in-depth conversations with filmmakers, actors, critics, and more.

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