#570 - RaMell Ross and Barry Jenkins on Nickel Boys, Adapting Colson Whitehead, and More

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross and Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk director Barry Jenkins. The Opening Night selection of NYFF62, Nickel Boys is now playing in select theaters, courtesy of Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios. Director RaMell Ross has crafted something of a new American masterpiece with the NYFF62 Opening Night selection Nickel Boys. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Black teens at a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida (inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys), Nickel Boys brings Ross’s extraordinary felicity and radical sense of perspective as a photographer of Black life in the South to a historical fiction that is as much about the trauma of racism in the U.S. as about the politics of subjectivity and spectatorship. We were thrilled to welcome RaMell Ross for a wide-ranging conversation with Barry Jenkins—another masterful filmmaker known for his visionary and lyrical approach to depicting Blackness and the American South onscreen, including in his own Colson Whitehead adaptation, 2020’s The Underground Railroad series. NYFF Free Talks are presented by HBO. This Free Talk between RaMell Ross and Barry Jenkins was sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Oh, Canada director Paul Schrader. Oh, Canada is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Kino Lorber. In an unvarnished, commanding performance, Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a celebrated political documentarian who has reached the end of his life. Wracked with cancer, Leonard has agreed to appear in a film by a former protégé (Michael Imperioli) in the hopes of setting the record straight about himself. Cinema becomes a confessional space as Leonard, accompanied by his stalwart wife and former student, Emma (Uma Thurman), excavates his own past, facing down regrets and guilt, and interrogating his own career, personal life, and political courage. Constructed with nonlinear flashbacks featuring Jacob Elordi as a young Leonard, the film passes in and out of different time periods, back to the 1960s, matching the slippery consciousness of its storyteller. Adapted from the book Foregone by Russell Banks, Paul Schrader’s emotionally naked drama feels like a direct address to the viewer, a filmmaker’s reckoning with his formidable status and persona. This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Director of Programming Florence Almozini.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with The Room Next Door director Pedro Almodóvar and cast members Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, and John Turturro. The Room Next Door opens at Film at Lincoln Center on December 20th. Get tickets a filmlinc.org/room 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. The two women immerse themselves in their pasts, sharing memories, anecdotes, art, movies—yet Martha has a request that will test their newly strengthened bond. Pedro Almodóvar’s finely sculpted drama, his first English-language feature, is the unmistakable work of a master filmmaker, a hushed and humane portrayal of the beauty of life and the inevitability of death, graced with incandescent performances by Moore and Swinton that tap the very essence of being. Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s treasure of a novel, What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar has exquisitely reframed his career-long fascination with the lives of women for an American vernacular, capturing Manhattan and upstate New York with enraptured affection. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Hard Truths director Mike Leigh and cast members Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Tuwaine Barrett. Hard Truths opens at Film at Lincoln Center for an exclusive one-week running beginning December 6. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/truths Mike Leigh returns to a contemporary milieu for the first time since Another Year for this raw, uncompromising domestic drama that continues the great British filmmaker’s inquiries into the possibility for happiness and the limits of human connection. In a gutsy, excoriating performance, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies) absorbs herself completely into the role of Pansy, a middle-aged, working-class woman whose emotional and physical health problems have metastasized into a profound and relentless anger that’s become toxic for everyone around her, including her husband, grown son, doctors, and even strangers on the street. Raging against every aspect of her domestic life and fearful of the world beyond, Pansy only finds potential solace in the unwavering love of her sister. Bringing his customary, thrilling eye for the details of human behavior and the complexities of social interaction, Leigh has created in close collaboration with his extraordinary cast a rigorous and unflinching look at a life in freefall. This conversation was moderated by NYFF programmer K. Austin Collins.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with The Seed of the Sacred Fig director Mohammad Rasoulof.   The Seed of the Sacred Fig opens at FLC on November 27. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/fig A target of Iran’s hardline conservative government for his films’ criticism of the state, director Mohammad Rasoulof fled his home country to avoid an eight-year prison sentence, though he hadn’t finished editing his latest film yet. His searing drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig won a Special Prize from the jury and three other awards on its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is every bit as urgent and gripping as its real-life backstory would portend: longtime government worker Iman (Missagh Zareh) has just received a major promotion to the role of judge’s investigator, to the hopeful delight of his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani); at the same moment, a series of student protests against the government have exploded in the streets, stoking the sympathies of their independent-minded daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). The growing wedge between progressive children and traditional parents intensifies through a series of unsettling events that put Iman’s future in jeopardy. Both paranoia thriller and domestic drama, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is above all an epic of anti-patriarchal political conviction. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection. A NEON release. This conversation was moderated by NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with A Traveler’s Needs lead actress Isabelle Huppert. A Traveler’s Needs opens at Film at Lincoln Center beginning Friday, November 22nd. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/traveler Isabelle Huppert reunites with Hong Sangsoo for their third delightful outing, this time starring as a nomadic Frenchwoman named Iris who drifts into the lives of a disconnected group of people in a Seoul suburb. In need of money, she has taken up giving French lessons, although she has no teaching experience to speak of. Cutting an ethereal figure in a straw hat, flowered sundress, and green cardigan, Iris puzzles the locals with her unorthodox methods and unyielding love for a Korean rice wine. Iris’s effect on those around her is at once familial, romantic, and pedagogical, leading to a succession of gently amusing moments of cultural confusion and curiosity. Hong’s endearing, enigmatic observational comedy is a gentle exploration of human motivation and the surprising connections between people despite—or because of—language barriers. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Berlinale. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Payal Kapadia and producer Thomas Hakim of the NYFF62 Main Slate selection All We Imagine as Light. All We Imagine as Light opens at Film at Lincoln Center on November 15 with Payal Kapadia in person! Get tickets at filmlinc.org/light 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. Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital—head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha)—and a newly retired coworker Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia’s film alights on prosaic moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is pursued by a courtly doctor; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside resort with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actors with an unforced expressivity and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, co-directors of No Other Land, a Main Slate selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival.  No Other Land opens at FLC on November 1. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/land 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. Headed by Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham (also two of the film’s directors), the collective commits itself to filming and protesting the demolitions of homes and schools and the resulting displacement of their inhabitants, which were carried out to make way for Israeli military training ground. In addition to the indelible footage of destruction and expulsion captured by its undaunted witnesses, No Other Land serves as a moving portrait of friendship between Adra and Abraham, who form a philosophical and political alliance despite the drastic differences in their abilities to exist freely in this world. Winner of multiple awards including the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film at the 2024 Berlinale. All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Main Slate selection committee member Justin Chang.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Mati Diop on Dahomey, a Main Slate selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival.  Dahomey opens at FLC on October 25, with Q&As opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/dahomey The African kingdom of Dahomey, which ruled over its region at the west of the continent until the turn of the 20th century, saw hundreds of its splendid royal artifacts plundered by French colonial troops in its waning days. Now, as 26 of these treasures are set to return to their homeland—now within the Republic of Benin—Diop documents their voyage back, transforming this rich subject matter into a multifaceted examination of ownership and exhibition. Alternating images of nocturnal melancholy and debates among students at Benin’s University of Abomey-Calavi about what should be done with the objects, Dahomey brilliantly negotiates a lost past and an unsure present. All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Main Slate selection committee member Justin Chang.

Director Robinson Devor and co-writers Jason Reid, Bob Fink, and Charles Mudede joined NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim for the world premiere of Suburban Fury at the 62nd New York Film Festival. 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. All NYFF62 feature documentaries are sponsored by HBO.