#579 - Frederick Wiseman in Conversation with John Wilson

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.

Director Zeinabu irene Davis, writer Marc Arthur Chéry, and cast members Michelle A. Banks & John Earl Jelks discuss Compensation, an NYFF62 Revivals selection, with moderator Racquel Gates. Compensation opens at Film at Lincoln Center on February 21. Learn more at filmlinc.org/compensation Inspired by Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem of the same title, Zeinabu irene Davis’s debut feature is an exploration of language, migration, illness, love, and ritual that likewise illuminates unique Black histories, cultures, and artistry. Starring Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks, the film follows two couples in different time periods between the early and late 20th century who must contend with their emotions, tensions between Deaf and hearing experiences, and the toll of structural racism on Black lives during major medical epidemics. Shot in luminous black-and-white and incorporating a rich trove of historical photos, an original ragtime score, and title cards, Compensation evokes both a sense of tragedy and a hopefulness for life that remains persistent in the hearts of Black Americans today. A Janus Films release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 62nd New York Film Festival with I’m Still Here director Walter Salles, lead actress Fernanda Torres, and Brazilian journalist & author Marcelo Rubens Paiva. This conversation was moderated by FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. An NYFF62 Spotlight selection, I’m Still Here is now nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, Best International Feature, and Best Picture. One afternoon in 1971, Rubens Paiva, a former congressman and outspoken critic of Brazil’s newly instituted military dictatorship, was taken from his home in Rio de Janeiro by government officials, told nothing more than that he must give a “deposition” to authorities, and disappeared. Adapted from his son Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir, this overwhelming, richly realized political drama from Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) stays tightly wedded to the perspective of Rubens’s wife, Eunice (a shattering Fernanda Torres), whose indefatigable search for the truth about her husband would stretch out for decades. A devastating true story, I’m Still Here is exhilarating in its portrayal of human tenacity in the face of injustice. Featuring a deeply affecting appearance from Fernanda Montenegro, Oscar nominee for Salles’s Central Station. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui of the new hit documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. The story of Christopher Reeve is an astonishing rise from unknown actor to iconic movie star, and his definitive portrayal of Clark Kent/Superman set the benchmark for the superhero cinematic universes that dominate cinema today. Reeve portrayed the Man of Steel in four Superman films and played dozens of other roles that displayed his talent and range as an actor, before being injured in a near-fatal horse-riding accident in 1995 that left him paralyzed from the neck down. After becoming a quadriplegic, he became a charismatic leader and activist in the quest to find a cure for spinal cord injuries, as well as a passionate advocate for disability rights and care - all while continuing his career in cinema in front of and behind the camera and dedicating himself to his beloved family. From the directors of McQueen, Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, this film includes never-before-seen intimate home movies and an extraordinary trove of personal archive material, as well as the first extended interviews ever filmed with Reeve’s three children about their father, and interviews with the A-list Hollywood actors who were Reeve’s colleagues and friends. The film is a moving and vivid cinematic telling of Reeve’s remarkable story. This conversation was moderated by Melena Ryzik. Super/Man is now streaming on Max.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Hard Truths actresses Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin. A Main Slate selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival, Mike Leigh’s latest film Hard Truths is now playing at Film at Lincoln Center. 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 between was moderated by Madeline Whittle.

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with writer/director Robert Eggers who recently joined us for a Q&A following a screening of his highly anticipated new feature Nosferatu. Across four intensely stylish, powerfully atmospheric and richly detailed feature films, Robert Eggers has established himself as one of contemporary cinema’s most singular auteurs. His work looks to different historical periods, folkloric traditions, and the abject and the arcane alike to craft enigmatic and utterly gripping parables about madness, the antagonism between man and nature, and desire as all-consuming compulsion. But his films, while deeply researched and steeped in worlds that themselves predate the advent of cinema, are nevertheless plainly the output of a passionate cinephile, an artist both in conversation with film history and in conversation with the the history of the occult. This is particularly evident in his latest, Nosferatu, which takes up the challenge of reinventing the story of Dracula after the seminal treatments by F.W. Murnau, Tod Browning, Werner Herzog, and Francis Ford Coppola, to name a few. This February, Film at Lincoln Center is excited to present Conjuring Nosferatu: Robert Eggers Presents, a special series made up of the films that inspired Eggers’s spellbinding new take on fiction’s most famous monster, an eclectic can’t-miss array of gothic Hollywood deep cuts, rare works of Eastern European folk horror, and captivating evocations of 18th-century England, as well as a special screening on 35mm of his own Nosferatu. Stay tuned to filmlinc.org for more information. This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Dan Sullivan.