Main Slate is the core of the program, a selection of the most exceptional new films from around the world.
Opening Night · RaMell Ross in person at Sept. 27 screenings at Alice Tully Hall
RaMell Ross’s extraordinary realization of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida adopts an ingenious visual approach to the novel’s exercise in subjectivity. Ross’s first fiction feature confirms his status as a visionary cinematic artist.
Centerpiece · U.S. Premiere · Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore, and Tilda Swinton in person at Oct. 4 screenings at Alice Tully Hall
Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a best-selling writer, rekindles her relationship with her friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war journalist with whom she has lost touch for a number of years. Almodóvar’s finely sculpted drama, his first English-language feature, is the unmistakable work of a master filmmaker.
Closing Night · North American Premiere · Steve McQueen, Saoirse Ronan, and Elliott Heffernan in person at Oct. 10 screenings at Alice Tully Hall
This authentic and astonishing recreation of London during its blitzkrieg by the Germans during World War II, about a working-class single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) separated from her 9-year-old son, George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), pushes the artistry of Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) to ever more impressive levels.
Payal Kapadia in person on Oct. 7 & 8
The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated with a vivid, humane richness by Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut about three working-class women dealing with professional and romantic disruptions.
Sean Baker and Mikey Madison in person on Sept. 28
Sean Baker’s screwball comedy about sex, love, and money stars Mikey Madison as an exotic dancer from Brighton Beach thrust into the lap of luxury when she’s whisked away on a whirlwind romance with a wealthy young customer. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
U.S. Premiere · Dea Kulumbegashvili in person on Oct. 7 & 8
When a newborn baby dies after an otherwise routine delivery, obstetrician Nina falls under suspicion for negligence, her standing in the small town further jeopardized by people’s knowledge that she provides illegal abortion services to local women. Dea Kulumbegashvili’s follow-up to her debut Beginning balances long-take realism and nightmarish expressionism.
U.S. Premiere · Brady Corbet, Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Stacy Martin in person on Sept. 28
An accomplished Hungarian Jewish architect and World War II survivor (Adrien Brody) reconstructs his life in the U.S. and enters the orbit of an obscenely wealthy captain of industry (Guy Pearce) in Brady Corbet’s richly detailed, brilliantly acted recreation of postwar America.
U.S. Premiere
Chu Sieon, a retired professional director, arrives at a university to direct a short theater piece at the invitation of his estranged niece, rebuilding his bond to her and forging a new one with an admiring female professor in this deeply affectionate rendering of the constant process of self-actualization.
U.S. Premiere · Jia Zhangke in person on Oct. 8 & 9
The preeminent dramatist of China’s rapid 21st-century growth and social transformation, Jia Zhangke has taken his boldest approach to narrative yet with Caught by the Tides, assembled from footage shot over a span of 23 years. The always captivating Zhao Tao carries this marvelous film about cinema’s ability to capture the passage of time and the persistence of change.
Mati Diop in person on Sept. 28 & Oct. 1
Mati Diop documents the voyage home of 26 treasures of the African kingdom of Dahomey after having been plundered by French colonial troops, centering her brilliant, magical film around contemporary questions of belonging in our postcolonial world. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival.
U.S. Premiere · Roberto Minervini in person on Oct. 8 & 9
A regiment of battle-fatigued Union soldiers makes its way west, forging ahead to survey the forbidding landscape of the Northwest frontier, in this transporting, existential Civil War drama from Roberto Minervini.
North American Premiere · Carson Lund in person on Oct. 2 & 3
Set in autumnal Massachusetts, sometime in the 1990s, Carson Lund’s poignant and gracefully accomplished debut feature lovingly nestles in with a pair of amateur recreation league baseball teams as they play one last game at their beloved Soldiers Field before it’s torn down for the construction of a middle school.
Miguel Gomes in person on Oct. 8 & 9
In this fanciful and high-spirited cinematic expedition, Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes (Tabu, Arabian Nights)—winner of this year’s Best Director prize at Cannes—takes a journey across East Asia, skipping through time and countries with delirious abandon as the world both expands and closes in around an unsettled couple from colonial England.
U.S. Premiere · Neo Sora in person on Sept. 29 & 30
Contemporary global anxieties over the gradual sliding into governmental totalitarianism find an original and touching outlet in this resonant drama set sometime in the near future in a Tokyo high school, where best friends Kou (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) run afoul of their disciplinarian principal (Shiro Sano), who has installed a draconian surveillance system.
U.S. Premiere · Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste in person on Oct. 5 & 6
Mike Leigh returns to a contemporary milieu for the first time since Another Year for this raw, uncompromising domestic drama starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies) in a gutsy, excoriating performance as a middle-aged, working-class woman whose emotional and physical health problems have metastasized into a profound and relentless anger.
U.S. Premiere · Athina Rachel Tsangari in person on Sept. 29 & 30
Rich in atmospherics and thematic resonance, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s new film, starring Caleb Landry Jones and Harry Melling and adapted from the acclaimed novel by British writer Jim Crace, takes place in a remote village in medieval England marked by superstition and the scapegoating of outsiders.
Alain Guiraudie in person on Sept. 29 & 30
The teasingly entwined ambiguities of love and death continue to fascinate Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake, NYFF51), who returns at the top of his game with a sharp, sinister, slyly funny thriller about a young man who returns to his small hometown in rural France and insinuates himself into the lives of a series of acquaintances.
World Premiere · Julia Loktev in person on Oct. 6
American filmmaker Julia Loktev, born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent media journalism in Putin’s Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Structured in five chapters, Loktev’s film is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety.
Q&A with Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor in person on Sept. 29 & Oct. 1
This eye-opening, vérité-style documentary, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors over the course of five years, provides a harrowing account of the systematic onslaught of destruction experienced by Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli military.
U.S. Premiere · Paul Schrader in person on Oct. 5 (joined by Uma Thurman and Michael Imperioli) & Oct. 6
In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays a celebrated documentarian at the end of his life who has agreed to appear in a film by a former protégé in the hopes of setting the record straight about himself. Paul Schrader’s emotionally naked drama feels like a direct address to the viewer.
U.S. Premiere
A middle-aged man’s sudden death brings about a reckoning with the past for an extended Zambian family in Rungano Nyoni’s scalding drama, which balances domestic realism and expressionistic absurdity with precision.
U.S. Premiere · Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias in person on Oct. 5 & 6
A fascinating, strange but true tale told from the perspective of a sentient hippo—which once belonged to murdered drug lord Pablo Escobar—at the moment of its death, Pepe poses provocative questions about the ever-shifting ecological stakes of life on earth and the nature of being.
Mohammad Rasoulof in person on Sept. 30 & Oct. 1
Winner of a Special Prize from the jury and three other awards at the Cannes Film Festival after its director escaped a prison sentence from Iran for criticizing the government, Mohammad Rasoulof’s searing drama is an epic of anti-patriarchal political conviction about a judge’s investigator at odds with his progressive daughters.
U.S. Premiere · David Cronenberg in person on Oct. 5 & 6
In David Cronenberg’s sly and thought-provoking latest, techno-entrepreneur Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger), Karsh uncovers a potentially vast conspiracy.
North American Premiere · Yeo Siew Hua in person on Sept. 28 & 30
A young married couple’s baby daughter goes missing and suspicion falls on their voyeur neighbor (Lee Kang-sheng, the star of Tsai Ming-liang’s films) in Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua’s riveting and unsettling thriller about contemporary surveillance culture and the mysteries of the human heart.
World Premiere · Robinson Devor in person on Oct. 9 & 10
In September 1975, Sara Jane Moore fired two shots at President Gerald Ford on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco’s Union Square. Moore holds the center of this fleet and compelling nonfiction drama from protean filmmaker Robinson Devor, who lends it the feel of a 1970s thriller.
North American Premiere · Pia Marais and Jeremy Xido in person on Oct. 7 & 8
The only survivor of a plane crash, a young girl is used by her missionary father as a faith healer. Just as she is beginning to have a will of her own, another crisis emerges when loggers encroach on the land, threatening the local tribe in Pia Marais’s mesmerizing morality tale.
North American Premiere · Isabelle Huppert in person on Oct. 2 & 3
Isabelle Huppert is a nomadic Frenchwoman named Iris who drifts into the lives of a disconnected group of people in a Seoul suburb in her third delightful outing with Hong Sangsoo, a gentle exploration of human motivation and the surprising connections between people despite—or because of—language barriers.
U.S. Premiere · Trương Minh Quý in person on Oct. 1 & 2
Two young coal miners enjoy secret moments of physical embrace before one of them embarks on a dangerous emigration to another country. From this personal drama, Vietnamese filmmaker Trương Minh Quý digs deeper to excavate the memories and legacies of a nation.
U.S. Premiere · Philippe Lesage in person on Oct. 6 & 7
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, who has proven unparalleled in evoking the psychological contours of teenagers finding their paths through treacherous emotional landscapes.
U.S. Premiere · Wang Bing in person on Sept. 28 & 29
In this enveloping second part of the Youth trilogy, shot between 2015 and 2019, Wang Bing deepens his vérité portrait of a generation struggling to survive on meager wages amidst a nation’s economic expansion, emphasizing the distrustful, increasingly combative relationship between workers and management.
U.S. Premiere · Wang Bing in person on Sept. 29 & Oct. 1
Wang Bing concludes his monumental Youth trilogy in expansive fashion, giving ever wider scope to the lives of migrant workers in Zhili’s textile factories as they plan to go to their remote hometowns to visit their families and celebrate the festivities for New Year’s break.
