#586 - Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez on Invention

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Invention director Courtney Stephens and lead actress Calle Hernandez (moderated by FLC's Tyler Wilson) from this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films. 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. Personal anguish and noirish mystery are inextricably bound in Invention, wherein Callie Hernandez (who co-conceptualized the film, and plays a cross between herself and some other vision) seeks the truth about her father—an inventor of devices boasting untapped power—whose death is not what it seems. Traversing a backwoods America of oddballs, cretins, estate vultures, and even the occasional sweetheart, Hernandez’s journey is a constant reminder of how much our loved ones hide from us in life and death alike. Courtney Stephens’s years in experimental documentary cinema help turn this Super 16mm–shot investigation narrative on its head, while a commanding performance confirms Hernandez as a captivating screen performer and artist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Film at Lincoln Center Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle, as she discusses the films featured in the 2025 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. Unifrance and Film at Lincoln Center present the 30th edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, running from March 6 to March 16. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/rdv. This celebrated festival offers a dynamic showcase of contemporary French filmmaking, featuring an array of 23 films by both emerging voices—some selected as part of Unifrance’s 10 to Watch 2025 Program, a yearly initiative honoring a new generation of directors and actors who contribute to the vitality of French creation—and seasoned directors that tackle relevant and enduring themes. This selection of North American, U.S., and New York premieres celebrates the energy, innovation, and range of French cinema. The conversation was moderated by Erik Luers, FLC's Digital Marketing Manager.

This week we’re excited to present a recent conversation with Mickey 17 writer and director Bong Joon Ho, interpreted by Sharon Choi, and moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. From the Academy Award-winning writer/director of Parasite (which was an NYFF57 Main Slate selection), Bong Joon Ho now presents his next groundbreaking cinematic experience, Mickey 17, based on the novel by Edward Ashton. The unlikely hero, Mickey Barnes has found himself in the extraordinary circumstance of working for an employer who demands the ultimate commitment to the job… to die, for a living. Mickey 17 stars Robert Pattinson as the title character (well, characters) and also stars Naomi Ackie, Academy Award nominee Steven Yeun, Academy Award nominee Toni Collette, and Academy Award nominee Mark Ruffalo. Mickey 17 will open in theaters nationwide on Friday, March 7.

This week we’re excited to present a recent conversation with legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, moderated by multiple-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker John Wilson. Through March 5, Film at Lincoln Center presents “Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution,” a retrospective featuring an extensive selection of films spanning decades of the iconic filmmaker’s prolific career, all newly restored in 4K. With 11 of Wiseman’s films having been selected for the New York Film Festival since 1967, this series signifies a celebration of the long-standing relationship between FLC and the renowned documentary filmmaker. Once limited to 16mm film prints rarely screened in theaters, these invaluable works can now be experienced in their fullest form at the Walter Reade Theater. To view the remaining screening schedule and to get tickets, please visit filmlinc.org/wiseman.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with Universal Language director Matthew Rankin, cast members Ila Firouzabadi & Pirouz Nemati, and producer Sylvain Corbeil. A Currents selection of NYFF62, Universal Language is now in select theaters, courtesy of Oscilloscope. With deadpan, absurdist charm, Manitoban filmmaker Matthew Rankin triangulates a group of interconnected storylines set in a wintry, bleakly beautiful Winnipeg. Two kids discover a bank note frozen in a block of ice, which they hope to retrieve to buy their classmates a new pair of glasses. A tour guide brings befuddled visitors on a walking tour of the city’s modest environs. A melancholy man (Rankin, in an autobiographical role) returns home from Montreal to reunite with his family after many years. Imagining a city in which Farsi is the predominant language, Rankin’s visually and narratively inventive film was inspired by Iranian films of the 1970s, frequently humanistic children’s fables, in this case transferred to a world of beige, concrete brutalist buildings and increasingly surreal, Tati-esque humor. Universal Language was the winner of the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. NYFF62 Currents features are sponsored by Mubi.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of the New York Jewish Film Festival with Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire director Oren Rudavsky and co-producer Annette Insdorf. This conversation was moderated by Rachel Chanoff. With his unforgettable and shattering 1958 memoir Night, Elie Wiesel forever changed the way the Holocaust would be written about. A survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager, the Romanian-born Wiesel became an international spokesperson and renowned author, eloquently transforming his trauma into literature of the highest and most profound order. In this enthralling new documentary, filmmaker Oren Rudavsky goes deeper into Wiesel’s philosophically abundant inner life, depicted with nuance and tenderness, and enriched by access to his personal archives. In many ways a private man despite being one of the most public voices of Holocaust remembrance, Wiesel is presented here in newly intimate ways known only to his closest friends. Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire stands as a crucial testament to an extraordinary man who helped shape our collective memory of the darkest chapter of the 20th century.