#642 - Lesley Manville on Midwinter Break

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Dry Leaf director Alexandre Koberidze and composer Giorgi Koberidze as they discuss their new film. An NYFF63 Currents selection, Dry Leaf opens at Film at Lincoln Center on Friday, March 20 with Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/leaf This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In soccer, a “dry leaf” is a kick that produces an unpredictable landing of the ball. Shaken by the disappearance of his grown daughter, a sports photographer goes looking for her through a Georgian landscape strewn with football fields. An invisible companion in tow, he meets potential witnesses whose perspectives prove distorted or contradictory. Confirming his position as one of contemporary cinema’s most intrepid artists, director Alexandre Koberidze (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, NYFF59) shot the film on an antiquated Sony Ericsson phone. What might seem a perverse choice reveals itself, over Dry Leaf’s epic length, as a brilliant thematic gesture that elicits its own temporal register. Set to a haunting score by the director’s brother Giorgi, this melancholic mystery presents Georgia’s open plains and mountain regions in alien, oneiric contexts. One emerges from its transporting rhythms with a fresh perspective on the world. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Academy Award-nominated actress Lesley Manville as she discusses the new film Midwinter Break with FLC programmer Madeline Whittle. Directed by Polly Findlay and based on the 2017 novel Bernard MacLaverty, Midwinter Break is a stirring meditation on faith, commitment, and the enduring power of love, as a longtime couple takes a life-changing trip to Amsterdam. The film co-stars Academy Award nominee Ciaran Hinds. Midwinter Break is now playing in select theaters,, courtesy of Focus Features.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Miroirs. No. 3 director Christian Petzold as he discusses his new film with NYFF programmer Florence Almozini. An NYFF63 selection, Miroirs No. 3 opens at Film at Lincoln Center on March 19 with Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. See the film and more films from Christian Petzold at our seven-film showcase from March 16-19 of the renowned German director’s signature works. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/petzold Christian Petzold’s (Transit, NYFF56) haunting, beautifully crafted new film stars Paula Beer as a pianist from Berlin who’s taken in by a mysterious woman in an isolated country house after surviving a violent car crash.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Pompei: Below the Clouds director Gianfranco Rosi as he discusses his documentary with FLC programmer Dan Sullivan. An NYFF63 selection, Pompei: Below the Clouds opens at Film at Lincoln Center on March 6th with in-person filmmaker Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets now at filmlinc.org/clouds The great Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi (Notturno, NYFF58) specializes in kaleidoscopic portraits of people living amid anxiety and uncertainty. Among his most striking and monumental works, his latest details with pointillist precision and unnerving beauty a region in Naples living under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius and above the simmering Campi Flegrei volcanic caldera, which has in recent years experienced increasingly frequent and alarming tremors. In this volatile environment, Rosi finds archeologists reckoning with both uncovered ancient artifacts and the wreckage of tomb raiders, squads of diggers descending into long abandoned tunnels, emergency centers already at breaking points, and a populace experiencing a generalized daily disquietude, fearful of an eruption like the one that buried Pompeii in 79 A.D. Linking modern and ancient life, Pompei: Below the Clouds alights on a specific region yet feels connected to everyone’s contemporary moment—the contemplation of the unimaginable nestled within our daily existence. An NYFF63 Main Slate selection. A MUBI release. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with director Rebecca Zlotowski and lead actress Jodie Foster as they discuss the NYFF63 selection A Private Life. A Private Life is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Zlotowski’s unpredictable and playful murder mystery stars an entrancing Jodie Foster, in her first French-language performance, as an American psychoanalyst in Paris whose tightly knit world begins to unravel after the sudden death of a patient. Unpredictable and loose-limbed, A Private Life, like its incandescent star in her most dexterous role in years, is a complete delight. A Private Life is currently in select theaters, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation between FLC Programmer Madeline Whittle and Digital Marketing Manager Erik Luers as they discuss the upcoming retrospective Looking for Ms. Keaton, taking place at Film at Lincoln Center February 13-19. This week-long showcase celebrates the late Diane Keaton, a paradigm-shifting performer whose contributions to the art and craft of screen acting cemented her legacy as an auteur in the truest sense of the word. View the full screening schedule and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/keaton After the conversation, be sure to listen to Diane Keaton’s acceptance speech of Film at Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Award at our special Gala honoring the iconic actress from the spring of 2007. Looking for Ms Keaton is sponsored by Criterion, your trusted curator of great cinema.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival between filmmakers Oliver Laxe and Ben Rivers, moderated by NYFF programming advisor Antoine Thirion. Oliver Laxe’s Sirat returns to Film at Lincoln Center for a theatrical engagement beginning next Thursday, February 5th. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/sirat. On top of sharing an enthusiasm for mystery, the elements, and utopias, Ben Rivers and Oliver Laxe also shared a producer and a shooting location on their latest films. Rivers’s Mare’s Nest and Laxe’s Sirât are both apocalyptic road movies; the first follows a child through a variety of haunted landscapes in Spain and the United Kingdom, while the second follows a man, his young son, and a motley group of ravers as they try to find their way out of a besieged desert on the borderlands of Morocco, near Spain. Each film is a radical enigma that invites spectators to engage with cinema sensorially. NYFF was pleased to welcome Laxe and Rivers for a wide-ranging conversation about the making of their new films and their intersecting artistic and thematic preoccupations. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with director Hlynur Pálmason as he discusses the NYFF63 selection The Love That Remains. This conversation was moderated by NYFF programmer Justin Chang. The Love That Remains opens at Film at Lincoln Center this Thursday, January 29 with in-person Q&As and screenings of Pálmason‘s companion film Joan of Arc. View showtimes and secure tickets at filmlinc.org/loveremains Charting the gradual evolution of a family in the midst of an irreparable fracture, Hlynur Pálmason’s follow-up to his feature film Godland is a poignant domestic drama that observes life’s changes with humor and whimsy, set against the majestic, ever-shifting Icelandic landscape. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we're excited to present a conversation with director Lav Diaz and lead actor Gael García Bernal as they discuss the NYFF63 selection Magellan with NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Interpretation by Gil Quito. Every astonishing visual composition carries historical and political weight in the monumental new film from singular Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, who mounts an absorbing story of colonial conquest and obsession, starring Gael García Bernal as Ferdinand Magellan. Magellan is now in theaters, courtesy of Janus Films. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with One Battle After Another cast member Benicio del Toro as he discusses his performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's new film that’s been heralded as one of the year’s finest. This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Programmer Tyler Wilson. Paul Thomas Anderson’s most viscerally thrilling film to date is a total blast, an epic, comic adventure of the weird new America that spans years and stretches from across the treacherous rolling-hill highways of the southwest and beyond. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, but with a flavor and cinematic rush that’s pure PTA, One Battle After Another is an exhilarating, ultimately moving portrait of undying commitment to family amidst the mania of our contemporary world.