Wednesday, September 14, 2011

NYFF 2011 Preview

 The Turin Horse

 Dreileben

 A Separation

Shame

                                                             This Is Not A Film

I have tickets for 16 films so far for this year's New York Film Festival (18 if you count the German trilogy Dreileben as 3 separate films, which it is). Nearly all the films on my wish list from Cannes (except for Tree of Life and Drive which have already opened) were selected for the NYFF. Some films from Venice and/or Toronto which I would like to have seen in the lineup are missing, including Golden Lion winner Faust by Aleksandr Sokurov, and new films by Chantal Akerman, Todd Solondz, Terence Davies, Ann Hui and Johnnie To. However, I'm very pleased that I got tickets for the following films, in chronological order of their appearance in the festival (from the Main Slate unless otherwise noted):

Dreileben (Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler) (Special Screening)
A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo)
Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki)
We Can't Go Home Again (Nicholas Ray) (Masterworks)
Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
Invasión (Hugo Santiago) (Masterworks)
You Are Not I (Sara Driver) (Masterworks)
Shame (Steve McQueen)
The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
The Student (Santiago Mitre)
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky)
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky) (Special Screening)
This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)
Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve)

I also plan to get tickets for Kenji Mizoguchi's Hometown, part of the sidebar salute to Japan's Nikkatsu Studio, and Peter von Bagh's Sodankyla Forever Parts 3-4. I saw Part 1 of Sodankyla at Film Comment Selects and look forward to the continuation of this loving compilation tribute to the eponymous Finnish film festival. I also have a work-related connection to one of the filmmakers of Paradise Lost 3 which will enable me to meet the directors, whose previous installments of the Paradise Lost series are riveting documents of the miscarriage of American justice. And if I don't succumb to exhaustion I may also add Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet and James Benning's Twenty Cigarettes.