Here's some information from the 48th New York Film Festival 2010 (NYFF) about Special Screenings and programming.
It's a collection of film events that rivals even the main slate in its breadth and interest!
For the NYFF 2010 MAIN SLATE
see: http://qporit.blogspot.com/2010/08/48th-new-york-film-festival-2010.html
For the NYFF 2010 DIRECTORS DIALOGS
see: http://qporit.blogspot.com/2010/08/nyff-2010-dialogs-with-directors.html
Sept. 24 - Oct. 10
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF NICOLAE CEAUSESCU
Frederick Wiseman's BOXING GYM
A LETTER TO ELIA from Martin Scorsese & Kent Jones
In-person 11-film tribute to Japanese master director Masahiro Shinoda
Special appearances by Olivier Assayas, Mike Leigh and David Thomson
Views from the Avant-Garde
This fascinating breath of programming will include special screenings of Andrei Ujica's acclaimed essay film The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, the latest from documentary master Frederick Wiseman, and Martin Scorsese's personal homage to the late Elia Kazan.
Also included are two Masterworks programs, Elegant Elegies: The Films of Masahiro Shinoda and Fernando de Fuentes' Revolutionary Trilogy;
Returning to the festival stage is audience favorite, The Cinema Inside Me, this year featuring an in-depth, illustrated conversation with Olivier Assayas; as well as Views from the Avant-Garde making its fourteenth experimental journey to the screen.
Once again, the New York Film Festival will partner with HBO in hosting four HBO Directors Dialogues (see separate article: http://qporit.blogspot.com/2010/08/nyff-2010-dialogs-with-directors.html).
The Masterworks and Special event programs offer a plethora of special event screenings and discussions, exploring varying stories, storytelling-processes and filmmaking styles and allow audiences additional opportunities to sample what they have always loved about the New York Film Festival and perhaps try out what they have always been curious to explore further.
Masterworks Elegant Elegies: The Films of Masahiro Shinoda
Running Sept. 25 - Oct. 10
A spectacular filmmaker and key to the Japanese New Wave, Shinoda was fascinated by both traditional Japanese aesthetics and the modernity of cinema. Gamblers betting it all in games they can't win, samurais heading into their final battles, lovers realizing their bonds are no match for an uncaring destiny: This is the remarkable universe of Masahiro Shinoda.
This Masterworks program will showcase 12 of Shinoda's films, including such not to be missed titles as, Pale Flower, Double Suicide, and The Ballad of Orin.
We're honored to welcome Mr. Shinoda to this year's festival for this special tribute, presented as part of the 150th Anniversary Celebration of Japan-NYC Friendship.
Masterworks: Fernando de Fuentes' Mexican Revolution Trilogy
Running Sept 29-30
A foundational figure of Mexican cinema and a true jack-of-all trades, Fernando de Fuentes landed in the cinema in the early Thirties and made this remarkable trilogy of films on the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1918, the first major revolution of the twentieth century. All three films in this series deal with the intimate nature of the conflict -- how often it pitted friend against friend, brother against brother.
Of special interest is Let's Go with Pancho Villa, Latin America's first super-production, made in full collaboration with the Mexican government when they were trying to jump-start a national film industry.
Following the screening of Let's Go with Pancho Villa, there will be a panel discussion on the cinematic depiction of the Mexican revolution. Prints courtesy of La Cinemateca de la UNAM.
A Letter to Elia & America, America Sept. 27
6:15 (A Letter to Elia) +
7:45 (America, America)
A Letter to Elia
Martin Scorsese & Kent Jones, 2010, USA; 60m
A Letter to Elia is a heartfelt declaration from one great American filmmaker to another, as Scorsese speaks candidly and passionately about one of his formative filmmaking influences: the late Elia Kazan. Utilizing precisely chosen clips from Kazan's signature films, and interview footage of the director himself, Scorsese and Jones recount the director's tumultuous journey from the Group Theatre to the Hollywood A-list to the thicket of the blacklist. But most of all, they make a powerful case for Kazan as a profoundly personal artist working in a famously impersonal industry.
Mon Sep 27: 6:15
America, America
Elia Kazan, 1963, USA; 174m
Based on the life of Kazan's own uncle, the director's favorite among his 19 feature films is the unforgettable story of an impoverished and oppressed Greek Turk determined to escape, by any means necessary, to the land of the free. His perilous journey across mountains and oceans, through arranged marriages and crafty swindlers, rivals that of an earlier Greek voyager, Odysseus, in its epic emotional sweep. Rarely screened and never released on DVD.
Mon Sep 27: 7:45
Nuremberg [The Schulberg/Waletzky Restoration]
U.S. Premiere
Stuart Schulberg, 1948, USA; 78m
One of the greatest courtroom dramas in history, Nuremberg shows how the international prosecutors built their case against the top Nazi war criminals using the Nazis' own films and records. The trial established the "Nuremberg principles" - the foundation for all subsequent trials for crimes against the peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Though shown in Germany as part of the Allies' de-Nazification campaign, U.S. officials decided not to release Nuremberg in America for political reasons, nor was it shown in any other country. Over the years, the picture negative and sound elements were lost or destroyed. Sandra Schulberg and Josh Waletzky's restoration uses original audio from the trial, allowing you to hear the defendants' and prosecutors' voices for the first time. The film ends with Justice Robert H. Jackson's stirring words - "Let Nuremberg stand as a warning to all who plan and wage aggressive war" - words which leap the decades and make Nuremberg startlingly contemporary.
A panel discussion will follow the screening, featuring the following participants:
Benjamin Ferencz, chief prosecutor, Nuremberg trial of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen; first head of Claims Conference for Jewish restitution; advocate of the International Criminal Court; Aryeh Neier, human rights advocate; President, Open Society Institute; former director of ACLU and Human Rights Watch; Emilio DiPalma, one of the courtroom guards seen in the film; author of memoir Just a Kid: A Guard at the Nuremberg Trials; Sandra Schulberg, creator (with Josh Waletzky) of the restoration; daughter of the film's writer/director Stuart Schulberg.
Tue Sep 28: 6:15
The Cinema Inside Me: Olivier Assayas
Presented at Alice Tully Hall on Oct. 3
Filmmaker turned film critic (at Cahiers du cinema) turned filmmaker, Olivier Assayas (Carlos) has become over the past two decades one of the most respected filmmakers working anywhere today. His critical writing on cinema was crucial for introducing the new Asian cinema into France, and he continues to maintain a strong interest in the avant-garde and experimental films. In conversation with NYFF Selection Committee Chairman Richard Peña, Mr. Assayas will offer a personal guided tour of some key moments in his own history of cinema-showing sequences from films and by filmmakers who powerfully influenced his thoughts on cinema as well as his filmmaking practice.
Views from the Avant-Garde
Sept. 30 - Oct. 3
Curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith.
For its 14th year, Views offers an expanded edition, presenting four nights of New York and world premieres from the frontiers of innovative moving image making. Highlights include:
Robert Beavers's The Suppliant,
James Benning's Ruhr,
Nathaniel Dorsky's Pastourelle,
a restoration of Manoel de Oliveira's Rite of Spring,
and Phil Solomon's three-screen American Falls.
Also expect new work by Thom Andersen, Ute Aurand, Stephanie Barber, Mati Diop, David Gatten, Janie Geiser, Lewis Klahr, Dani Leventhal, Jeanne Liotta, Matt McCormick, Tomonari Nishikawa, Michael Robinson, Fern Silva, Deborah Stratman, Peter Tscherkassky and many others, plus nightly special Furman Gallery projection performances by Paul Clipson and Bruce McClure.
Frederick Wiseman's Boxing Gym
Boxing Gym
Frederick Wiseman, 2010, USA; 91m
Master documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman returns to the Festival with his terrific 38th feature. Taking as his subject Lord's Boxing Gym in Austin, Texas, Wiseman observes men, women, and children as they train and interact in a lively and diverse environment. The irresistible portrait is marked by Wiseman's sensitive eye and adroit editing, and recalls his past meditations on bodies in motion (Ballet, La Danse) and on violence, people at play, and America in microcosm. Followed by a conversation and Q&A with Frederick Wiseman.
Oct. 4, 6:15
Mike Leigh: Shooting London
Acclaimed director Mike Leigh-at the NYFF with his newest film Another Year-is a quintessential chronicler and interpreter of London (past and present). London is the city he lives and works in, and a "character" all its own in the Leigh universe. Leigh will discuss the importance of London neighborhoods and sites in his films, and their integration into his films' themes. Moderated by Adrian Wootton, CEO of Film London and interspersed with a selection of film clips.
Oct. 6, 6:30
Biographical and Beyond: An Evening with David Thomson, Featuring Birth
Praised as the finest reference book ever written about movies, David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film is its author's idiosyncratic, indispensible, and deeply addictive indexing of the key players in the history of moving pictures, from Abbott and Costello to Catherine Zeta-Jones. On the eve of the publication of the revised and expanded Fifth Edition, we have invited Thomson (himself a former member of the NYFF selection committee) to discuss his work, his writing process, and to present a film of his choosing. His selection is Birth (2004), director Jonathan Glazer's metaphysical thriller starring Nicole Kidman as a woman who becomes convinced that a 10-year-old boy is the reincarnation of her late husband. Thomson has hailed the film as a neglected masterpiece. Post-screening discussion with David Thomson and Film Society Associate Program Director Scott Foundas, followed by book-signing in the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery.
Oct. 7, 6:30
Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, with
A Matter of Life and Death
Oct. 8, 6:30 (Cameraman) & 8:45 (Matter)
Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
Craig McCall, 2010, UK; 86m
As wonderfully informative as it is delightfully entertaining, Cameraman traces the eight-decade career of cinematographer Jack Cardiff. A child actor who found his true calling on the other side of the camera, Cardiff was the first European to be trained in shooting Technicolor; a few years later, Michael Powell promoted the ace cameraman to full-scale cinematographer for A Matter of Life and Death. Soon, cinematic history would be made: together, Powell and Cardiff set the standard for the creative use of color in classics such as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. Craig McCall traces the development of Cardiff's art on both sides of the Atlantic, detailing his constant interaction with the painters and paintings he admired while offering a treasure lode of Cardiff anecdotes about Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Marilyn Monroe and a host of other legends. A Strand release
Oct 8, 6:30
A Matter of Life and Death
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1946, UK; 104m
In Cardiff's pioneering collaboration with Powell, a dashing young WWII airman (David Niven) chats up, then bares his soul to a beautiful radio operator (Kim Hunter) even as his planes dives to earth. It's not quite clear where precisely Niven comes down, because the movie takes a turn from Technicolor wartime melodrama into a meditation on the worth of a life and the righteousness of a death, as they're weighed in a chilly, monochrome Heaven and in an operating room where surgeons work to save Niven's damaged brain. No comfy allegory here; Powell's gem is made of harder-and more valuable-stuff. With Raymond Massey, Roger Livesey, Robert Coote, Marius Goring, and Richard Attenborough.
Oct. 8, 8:45
The Autobiography of Nikolae Ceaucescu
Andrei Ujică, 2010, Romania; 180m
An astonishing work of the sociopolitical imagination, Andrei Ujică's audacious essay film imagines the life of the controversial Romanian President as he himself might have recalled it on the eve of his 1989 execution. Working from a treasure trove of pristine archival footage (of official communist-era newsreels), enhanced by an ingenious sound design, Ujică spins a riveting first-person narrative that traces its subject's rapid rise through the political ranks, his efforts to unify the Communist East, and even his goodwill tour of the Americas-with little matters like the millions of ordinary Romanians denied basic human services consigned to Ceausescu's subconscious (and Ujică's cutting room floor). The pièce de résistance: a North Korean welcome ceremony that ranks with Busby Berkley at his most kaleidoscopic.
Oct. 9, 11:30am
Joe Dante's The Hole in 3D
The Hole
Joe Dante, 2009, USA; 92m
Like his Gremlins, Explorers and Small Soldiers, director Joe Dante's latest frightmare-and his first in 3D-takes place in one of those placid, Midwestern anytowns that, in the sci-fi classics of the 1950s, regularly played host to intergalactic blobs, body snatchers and other strange invaders. Here, the aberrations come from below rather than above-specifically, from a boarded-up pit in the basement of an ordinary suburban home, which gets reopened when a single mother and her two curious sons move in. Like a Freudian Pandora's box, the hole gives rise to the deepest fears of those who peer into it, from the purely abstract to the terrifyingly physical. All of which is mere prelude for our eventual plunge down the hole itself, which Dante turns into an ingenious, Caligarian funhouse of long shadows, exaggerated perspectives and things that go bump in the night (all, it should be noted, accomplished on a fraction of usual Hollywood budget). Winner of the Venice Film Festival's inaugural Persol 3D award.
Oct. 9, 6:00
Dracula
the Spanish-Language version, accompanied by Gary Lucas
The fascinating and more "full-blooded" 1931 Spanish-language version of the classic tale is freshly accompanied by an eerie live solo guitar performance by guitarist, composer, and Grammy-nominated songwriter Gary Lucas. Directed by George Melford, the movie was filmed at night in Hollywood on the same sets as the Bela Lugosi Dracula with a Spanish-speaking cast. Lucas's score has received great critical acclaim and, together with the immortal blood-sucker, promises to make for an unforgettable night.
Oct. 9, 9:30
The Marvelous World of Segundo de Chomón
Known as the "Spanish Méliès," Segundo de Chomón was a major film pioneer whose inventive special effects and optical processes influenced the cinema for years to come, and can be found in many silent classics, from Pastrone's Cabiria to Gance's Napoleon-not to mention his own extraordinary works. Through the generosity of the Filmoteca de Catalunya in Barcelona, we're delighted to present a sampler of de Chomón's great achievements, including masterworks such as The Electric Hotel, The Witch's Cave, and The King of Dollars, with piano accompaniment by Makia Matsumura.
Film scholar Tom Gunning will be on hand to discuss the importance of de Chomón's work.
Oct. 10, 12:30
Foreign Parts
Verena Paravel & J.P. Sniadecki, 2010, USA; 80m
Tucked between the new Citifield baseball stadium and the Van Wyck overpass lie a ramshackle collection of auto-body repair shops and other small businesses, staffed by an extraordinarily multicultural cast of characters. But New York City has other plans: the area has been targeted for development, complete with apartments, malls, and parks, and this commercial shantytown may soon be a memory. Filmmakers Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki have created a revealing and tender portrait of Willets Point, Queens,that captures the many roads the American dream has taken. Best First Feature, Locarno Film Festival
Oct 10, 3:30
Ticket Information:
General Public tickets will be available September 12th. For more information visit
www.FilmLinc.com/nyff
or call 212 875 5601.
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