Festival:
The 60th New York Film Festival
Dates:
September 30-October 16
About:
Nearly 60 new features – among them, 15 works of nonfiction or hybrids – are showcased in this major Fall cinema event.
Main Slate:
ALL THAT BREATHES
Director: Shaunak Sen
Against the darkening backdrop of Delhi’s apocalyptic air and escalating violence, two brothers devote their lives to protect one casualty of the turbulent times: the bird known as the Black Kite.
ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED
Director: Laura Poitras
A profile about photographer Nan Goldin and her battle against the Sackler family pharmaceutical dynasty.
DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA
Director: Véréna Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Focusing on five hospitals in northern Paris neighborhoods, this film reveals that human flesh is an extraordinary landscape that exists only through the gaze and attention of others.
DESCENDANT
Director: Margaret Brown
After a century shrouded in secrecy and speculation, descendants of the Clotilda – the last known ship carrying enslaved Africans to the United States – reclaim their story.
Spotlight:
A COOLER CLIMATE
Director: James Ivory, Giles Gardner
Rediscovered film James Ivory shot during a life-changing trip to Afghanistan in 1960 unleashes a Proustian reverie of his life as traveler, outsider, and artist.
IS THAT BLACK ENOUGH FOR YOU?!?
Director: Elvis Mitchell
A definitive narrative of the Black revolution in 1970s cinema, from genre films to social realism.
PERSONALITY CRISIS: ONE NIGHT ONLY
Director: Martin Scorsese, David Tedeschi
A profile of entertainer David Johansen, equally celebrated as the lead singer-songwriter of the androgynous 1970s glam punk groundbreakers The New York Dolls and for his complete reinvention as hepcat lounge lizard Buster Poindexter in the 1980s.
SR.
Director: Chris Smith
A tender and fittingly irreverent portrait of the life and career of Robert Downey Sr, the fearless, visionary American director who set the standard for counterculture comedy in the sixties and seventies.
THE SUPER 8 YEARS
Director: David Ernaux-Briot, Annie Ernaux
Super 8 films, shot between 1972 and 1981, reveal not only a family archive but a testimony to the pastimes, lifestyle, and aspirations of a social class in the decade after 1968.
Currents:
DRY GROUND BURNING
Director: Joana Pimenta, Adirley Queirós
This blend of documentary and speculative fiction takes place in the nearly postapocalyptic environs of the Sol Nascente favela in Brasilia, where a fearsome outlaw Chitara leads an all-female gang that siphons and steals precious oil from the authoritarian government.
MUTZENBACHER
Director: Ruth Beckermann
Various men step in front of the camera to engage with the scandalous, anonymously written novel of Viennese modernism Josefine Mutzenbacher (1906).
REWIND & PLAY
Director: Alain Gomis
Thelonius Monk is on the loose on French TV in 1969, where the jazz giant takes down an arrogant journalist with cosmic attitude.
SLAUGHTERHOUSES OF MODERNITY
Director: Heinz Emigholz
A film of quiet observation and historical excavation focusing on creation and destruction in cities and provinces in Argentina, Germany, and Bolivia.
TALES OF THE PURPLE HOUSE
Director: Abbas Fahdel
The French-Iraqi filmmaker and his wife, the painter Nour Ballouk, start exploring Lebanon through their art, to grasp the beauty and hardships of a generous country that seems to be on the edge of the abyss.
THE UNSTABLE OBJECT II
Director: Daniel Eisenberg
A dynamic triptych that patiently observes people working at three factories around the world, showing the rigorous labor as well as the intricate design and craft that go into every detail and level of production.
what (not) to doc 