#624 - Park Chan-wook and Lee Byung Hun on No Other Choice

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with Father Mother Sister Brother director Jim Jarmusch and cast members Adam Driver, Indya Moore, Luka Sabbat, Vicky Krieps, and Tom Waits. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. The NYFF63 Centerpiece selection, Father Mother Sister Brother will open at Film at Lincoln Center on December 24. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/jarmusch For years, Jim Jarmusch has written, directed, and produced delicate, character-driven films. Winner of the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion, Father Mother Sister Brother is a perceptive study in familial dynamics, a feature film carefully constructed in the form of a triptych. The three chapters all concern the relationships between adult children reconnecting or coming to terms with aging or lost parents, which take place in the present, and each in a different country. Siblings Jeff and Emily (played by Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) check up on their hermetic father (played by Tom Waits) in rural New Jersey; sisters Lilith and Timothea (Vicky Krieps and Cate Blanchett) reunite with their guarded novelist mother (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin; and twins Skye and Billy (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) return to their Paris apartment to address a family tragedy. Father Mother Sister Brother is a kind of anti-action film, its subtle and quiet style carefully constructed to allow small details to accumulate—almost like flowers being carefully placed in three delicate arrangements. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

We’re excited to present a conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with director Bi Gan as he discusses the NYFF63 Main Slate selection Resurrection. Resurrection opens at Film at Lincoln Center on Thursday, December 11. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/resurrection This phantasmagoric dream machine from visionary Chinese director Bi Gan is an elusive yet monumental love letter to a century of cinema. Unfolding over five chapters that feature a dazzling array of styles, Resurrection is a cascade of imagery united by a luminous mythopoetic conceit: in a sci-fi-coded world where people have lost the desire to dream in the hopes of prolonging life, rogue “fantasmers” continue to stoke their imaginations and exist within unreality. From this magical premise, the film sends its ever-morphing protagonist through a series of genres, from Méliès-inflected silent fantasy to wartime thriller to con-artist buddy picture to millennial vampire romance—the latter depicted in one of Bi’s customary, and ever astonishing, single takes. Resurrection is one of the most audacious and ambitious gifts for cinematic thrill-seekers in many a moon. And before you get to that conversation between Resurrection director Bi Gan and NYFF programmer Florence Almozini, please listen to a brief programmer’s preview of our new retrospective Kōzaburō Yoshimura: Tides of Emotion, now in progress at FLC through December 11! The conversation is between FLC Programmer Dan Sullivan and FLC Digital Marketing Manager Erik Luers. To view the complete schedule and secure tickets to the retrospective Kōzaburō Yoshimura: Tides of Emotion, please visit filmlinc.org/yoshimura

This week we’re excited to present a special conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival with members of the filmmaking team behind the Main Slate selection BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, including director Kahlil Joseph, screenwriter Madebo Fatunde, artist Kaneza Schaal, and filmmakers Savanah Leaf and Raven Jackson, moderated by Jon-Sesrie Goff, Program Officer at the Ford Foundation. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions opens in select theaters this Friday, November 28th. Visual artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph’s video installation BLKNWS debuted in galleries and museums across the country in 2019, immersing viewers in the imagined world of a television news network from a Black perspective. After expanding this concept into a short film, Joseph has developed it even further into a feature film, and the result is a celebration of Black life that reconceptualizes and remediates common, corporate notions of journalism. Joseph’s sprawling film is an uninterrupted gush of ideas, mixing newly shot footage and extant media, leaping from fantastical images to historical narratives, collapsing boundaries that often separate documentary and fiction. A multidimensional work of vision and ambition, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions offers an alternately riotous and meditative compendium of the Black experience. A Rich Spirit release. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a special conversation with Peter Hujar’s Day director Ira Sachs. An NYFF63 Main Slate selection, Peter Hujar’s Day is now playing daily at FLC. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/hujar FLC and Janus Films recently presented a deep-dive discussion into the inspiration behind the film and the connection between Peter Hujar and his deeply felt legacy in New York City. Held in the Amphitheater at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, this free talk with writer/director Ira Sachs was moderated by Antonio Monda, writer and Artistic Director of the international literary festival Le Conversazioni. The photographer Peter Hujar, whose images exist in an important lineage and dialogue with the work of groundbreaking gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, forms the center of the latest movie by fearless independent American filmmaker Ira Sachs. Based on rediscovered transcripts from an unused 1974 interview by nonfiction writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall), in which she asked Hujar (Ben Whishaw) to narrate the events of the previous day in minute detail, Peter Hujar’s Day is a mesmerizing time warp, an illustration of the life of the creative mind, the quotidian and the imaginative at once, fully and lovingly inhabited by its two brilliant actors.

This week we’re excited to present a special conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival between Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe, moderated by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Maddie Whittle. This talk is sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter. Two films in this year’s NYFF lineup center on artists confronting the passage of time: Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon stars Ethan Hawke as the legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart, fretful and embittered at the prospect of his one-time creative partner scaling the heights of musical-theater celebrity; Kent Jones’s Late Fame adapts Arthur Schnitzler’s novella about a once-upon-a-time New York poet, played by Willem Dafoe, who is intoxicated by the sudden attentions of a coterie of twentysomething would-be literati. Each film taps into extraordinary reserves of wit and melancholy via the contributions of their lead actors, titans of contemporary American cinema and exemplary interpreters of the cultural forces that have defined their respective generations. NYFF was thrilled to bring together Hawke and Dafoe for an in-depth discussion of their craft, their creative philosophies, and their portrayals of aging artists on the brink of an uncertain future. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a special conversation from the 63rd New York Film Festival between filmmakers Joachim Trier and Noah Baumbach, moderated by Film at Lincoln Center programmer Maddie Whittle. This Talk is sponsored by Deadline. NYFF veterans Noah Baumbach and Joachim Trier returned to the festival this year with a pair of films that explore how artistry, authenticity, and artifice collide in the public and private lives of star actors and famed filmmakers. In Baumbach’s charmingly reflexive Jay Kelly, an aging megastar—played, fittingly, by George Clooney—arrives at a crisis point in his career; haunted by the past and uninspired by the present, he embarks on a somewhat reckless screwball adventure with his entourage (featuring Adam Sandler and Laura Dern) in tow. Meanwhile, Trier’s Sentimental Value finds an acclaimed stage actress (Renate Reinsve) and her estranged movie-director father (Stellan Skarsgård) clashing, connecting, and introspecting over a film project that draws from their complicated lives. Dramatizing the dimensions of modern-day, larger-than-life celebrity with deft humor, both films hone in on the relationships—familial, professional, transactional—that undergird the creative process and industrial artmaking. Baumbach and Trier joined NYFF63 for a lively, probing discussion of their approaches to writing grounded, lived-in characters, and the collaborations that have shaped their own illustrious bodies of work. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Widely hailed by critics, audiences, and artists alike as one of the greatest directors working today, Martin Scorsese—the subject of Rebecca Miller’s monumental NYFF Spotlight selection Mr. Scorsese—is a lifelong trailblazer, a guiding light whose passionately committed artistic vision, ebullient cinephilia, and dedicated stewardship of film history (exemplified through his work with The Film Foundation and the World Cinema Project) have left an indelible mark on the terrain of American and global cinema for the last six decades. On the occasion of Mr. Scorsese’s world premiere, the special panel discussion On Mr. Scorsese took viewers behind the scenes of Miller’s comprehensive biographical portrait and celebrated the enduring influence and still-evolving legacy of this icon of American cinema. The discussion centered on his vibrant creative relationships with longtime collaborators in front of and behind the camera, placing those artists in conversation with fellow filmmakers whose own work bears the influence of the great auteur’s artistry and mentorship. Panelists included Rebecca Miller, Ari Aster, Michael Imperioli, and Margaret Bodde (producer and Executive Director of the Film Foundation), moderated by NYFF Talks programmer Madeline Whittle. The 63rd New York Film Festival and On Mr. Scorsese are presented in partnership with Rolex.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Paul Thomas Anderson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, and Chase Infiniti as they discuss their hit film One Battle After Another, which was recently presented on 70mm at our Walter Reade Theater. This conversation was moderated by NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. In One Battle After Another, washed-up revolutionary Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) exists in a state of stoned paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited, self-reliant daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). When his evil nemesis resurfaces after 16 years and Bob’s daughter goes missing, the former radical scrambles to find her, father and daughter both battling the consequences of his past. 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 One Battle After Another is now in theaters.

Welcome to the final edition of the daily 63rd New York Film Festival podcast. On today’s edition, Park Chan-wook and Lee Byung Hun join NYFF selection committee member Justin Chang to discuss No Other Choice. In his diabolical new thriller, director Park crafts a dark fable about the cutthroat nature of contemporary work culture, starring Lee Byung Hun as a husband and father who takes violent action after being laid off. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Director Jafar Panahi returned to the New York Film Festival for the first time in 25 years to present the Main Slate selection It Was Just an Accident, his first film since his 2022 imprisonment. NYFF was honored to invite Panahi for special conversation with none other than Martin Scorsese. The legendary filmmakers discussed Panahi's childhood, early days of filmmaking, his relationship with Abbas Kiarostami, the rebellious nature of his work, his 2025 Palme d’Or winner, and much more. Thank you to interpreter Sheida Dayani. It Was Just An Accident opens at Film at Lincoln Center on October 15 with Panahi in person. The 63rd New York Film Festival is presented in partnership with Rolex.