62nd New York Film Festival Adds Films from Matías Piñeiro, Matthew Rankin, Jem Cohen, Ben Russell & More

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Following the Main Slate and Spotlight sections, the 62nd New York Film Festival, taking place September 27-October 14 at Lincoln Center and venues across NYC, has unveiled its Currents section. The Currents slate includes 12 feature films and 28 short films in six programs, representing more than 20 countries, and complements the Main Slate, tracing a more complete picture of contemporary cinema with an emphasis on new and innovative forms and voices. The section presents a diverse offering of productions by filmmakers and artists working at the vanguard of the medium.

Highlights include the 14-hour exergue – on documenta 14, Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, Matías Piñeiro’s You Burn Me, Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell’s Direct Action, the world premiere of Jem Cohen’s Little Big, and Far, Yashaddai Owens’ James Baldwin film Jimmy, Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré’s 7 Walks with Mark Brown, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, Lilith Kraxner, Milena Czernovsky’s bluish, and more.

See the Currents lineup below and learn more here.

Currents Centerpiece Little, Big, and Far Jem Cohen, 2024, Austria/U.S., 121m German and English with English subtitles World Premiere Jem Cohen brings the same meditative elegance and intellectual curiosity he did to Museum Hours (2012) with his stargazing new feature, again using the cinematic form to patiently interrogate ways of seeing and being. The principal subject of Cohen’s film is an Austrian astronomer named Karl who has been re-evaluating his work and life after turning 70, and who travels to a mountaintop on a Greek island in search of the darkest sky against which to view the cosmos. Yet the real matter of the singular Little, Big, and Far—whose title refers to the three concepts Karl and his physicist wife believe are at the core of their work—is as vast as the universe itself, a reckoning with scientific truth at a moment of humanity’s existential crisis.

7 Walks with Mark Brown Pierre Creton, Vincent Barré, 2024, France, 103m French with English subtitles U.S. Premiere Filmmaker and farmer Pierre Creton returns to the Normandy landscape so lushly portrayed in last year’s A Prince (NYFF61). Now, in this singularly tranquil documentary, co-directed with filmmaker-sculptor Vincent Barré, he offers an experience pleasing in its magnificent simplicity. Accompanied by a small filming crew, Creton and Barré follow paleobotanist Mark Brown across seven locations in the Pays des Caux region as he seeks out native plants from which an ancient garden could be created and explains, with the loving tenderness of a true expert, the etymology, beauty, and scientific properties of the region’s flora. Structured in two halves, 7 Walks with Mark Brown first documents the making of these expeditions and then presents the result, a cinematic work of taxonomy and poetry, of nature and camaraderie.

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 2024, U.S., 75m English and French with English subtitles “We are making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered,” says Zita Hanrot, the actress playing an actress grappling with the legacy of the real-life figure she’s supposed to be playing: the Martinique writer Suzanne Césaire. Overshadowed by her husband, the poet and politician Aimé Césaire, Suzanne was a feminist activist as well as a member of the Négritude movement in Paris in the 1930s. For her bold project of reclamation, filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich has taken a metacinematic and mesmerizing approach, using voice-over and direct address to evoke her writing, as well as meditative, immersive 16mm images of forests in Martinique to burrow to the complex truths about a woman, artist, and mother forgotten to history. Uniting Hunt-Ehrlich’s elegant narrative and visual strands is the presence of Hanrot, herself a new mother going through her own reckoning.

bluish Lilith Kraxner, Milena Czernovsky, 2024, Austria, 83m English, German, and Russian with English subtitles North American Premiere A film of deep tranquility permeated by roiling sensations of desire and uncertainty, the latest reverie from Austrian directors Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky (Beatrix, Art of the Real 2022) transmits the tense unfolding of young adulthood by following two women as they move through their day, a physical part of their urban environment yet set apart in emotional isolation. The two students seem different on the surface: the introverted Errol gazes at the world in meditative solitude, while Sasha, a Russian émigré, seems keen on meeting people and networking within her artistic circles. Yet through Kraxner and Czernovsky’s marvelously oblique approach to character and storytelling, they both come to represent the beautiful fragility of human connection. Winner of the International Grand Prix at this year’s FIDMarseille International Film Festival.

DIRECT ACTION Guillaume Cailleau, Ben Russell, 2024, Germany/France, 212m (incl. 5m intermission) French, English, and Arabic with English subtitles U.S. Premiere This detailed portrait of the intricate processes of a French political eco-activist group, a collaboration between American experimental filmmaker Ben Russell and French artist Guillaume Cailleau, is a work of striking, meaningful duration, philosophically immersing viewers in the world of its committed subjects by focusing on the physical. Set in the Notre-Dame-des-Landes commune in western France, where the collective plans and carries out its mission—termed ZAD (Zone to Defend)—to disrupt and discourage corporations and state entities from building on and destroying land, DIRECT ACTION follows the minutiae and daily efforts leading to the protest of a reservoir development. Winner of the Best Film award in the Berlinale’s Encounters section, Cailleau and Russell’s film shows the stakes, pitfalls, and reverberations of taking a militant stance against the injustices of our times.

exergue – on documenta 14 Dimitris Athiridis, 2024, Greece, 848m U.S. Premiere Present politics collide with global contemporary art in this monumental documentary portrait of the making of the controversial 2017 edition of documenta, the influential art exhibition held every five years in the German city of Kassel. Told in a largely vérité style, exergue – on documenta 14 follows the edition’s artistic director Adam Szymczyk and his team of collaborators over two volatile years of inspiration, negotiation, and herculean planning, Presented in 14 chapters, it reveals how the exhibition—wrestling with colonialist legacy and neoliberalism and ambitiously unfolding in both Kassel and Athens—itself became a cultural and political battleground, signaling seismic shifts to come in Europe and beyond. In its breathtaking breadth and specificity, Athiridis’s fully engrossing film is as extensive a look behind the scenes of the contemporary art world as we have ever seen, and a supremely compelling and timely examination of the complex intersections of art, money, and power. Premiere screening in three parts across three days with 15m intermissions; second screening in two parts across two days with 30m intermissions.

Fire of Wind Marta Mateus, 2024, Portugal/Switzerland/France, 72m Portuguese with English subtitles North American Premiere In the feature debut of Portuguese filmmaker Marta Mateus, director of the acclaimed short Barbs, Wastelands (2017), a peasant community of vineyard workers at harvest time become characters in a timeless myth. Hiding high in the branches of oak trees from a dangerous runaway bull, they escape into dreams and memories, their experience evoking personal and political pasts as day descends into night. Set in the Alentejo region in southern Portugal, where Mateus grew up, Fire of Wind is both earthy and deeply symbolic in its imagery, its characters coming to embody the historical memory of the landscape, still haunted by Salazar’s mid-20th-century dictatorship.

Jimmy Yashaddai Owens, 2024, France/Turkey, 67m In November 1948, James Baldwin left New York and, thanks to a fellowship grant, relocated to Paris. The 24-year-old writer would spend most of the next decade there, escaping American racism and his own social alienation, ensconcing himself in the city’s Algerian quarters and the community of Left Bank artists in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and writing his first books. In his first feature, photographer and filmmaker Yashaddai Owens imagines Baldwin’s first experiences in Paris in impressionistic fashion. Shooting in black-and-white on 16mm film, Owens conveys a subjective feeling of wonder and freedom as Baldwin (Benny O. Arthur) observes and absorbs his new environment, and experiences newfound individuality and erotic liberation. A work of exhilaration, set to a lush original score by Paco Andreo, Jimmy is a portrait of the artist reconnecting with the world.

Lázaro at Night Nicolás Pereda, 2024, Canada/Mexico, 76m Spanish with English subtitles U.S. Premiere Nicolás Pereda, whose films elegantly balance wry, naturalistic interpersonal comedy and surreal transcendence, returns with a marvelous inquiry into art-making, storytelling, and the fragile bonds of friendship that takes his blend of the theatrical and the mundane to a new level. The film centers on a trio of friends, connected by a writing workshop they attended years earlier. Today, as they navigate romance and infidelity, their bond is further complicated by the fact that they are all auditioning to be in the same low-budget movie. Connected by a complex sound design that occasionally collapses time and space, scenes of absurd mundanity give way to the fantasy of fiction, its triangle of poets, artists, and actors motivated equally by wishful dreaming and comic, everyday neuroses.

The Suit Heinz Emigholz, 2024, Germany/Mexico/Argentina/U.S., 90m English and German with English subtitles North American Premiere That loquacious cynic known only as “Old White Male,” played by John Erdman in Heinz Emigholz’s 2020 film The Lobby (NYFF58), returns in this delirious, sci-fi-comic follow-up in which our fearless, joyless monologist covers an even wider spectrum of human absurdity as he wrestles with the biggest question mark of all: The Future. Smarting from his last experience making a movie with “that nobody of a director,” which he’s told was “rejected by a once-famous film festival” for its alleged misanthropy, Erdman is this time joined by a caustic, endlessly philosophizing German filmmaker (Susanne Bredehöft) and a robot version of himself from the past (visualized as his own disembodied, portable miniature head). Shot in Berlin, Malta, and Mexico City, but set mostly in his bunker-like home, The Suit gives Erdman ample room to expound upon cinema, the corporeal vs. the digital, the apocalypse, architecture, health and nutrition, and what it means to see and be seen in a world that’s increasingly turning inward. Texts include everything from Walter Benjamin to Nelly Furtado, and nothing is sacred.

Universal Language Matthew Rankin, 2024, Canada, 89m Farsi and French with English subtitles 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. Winner of the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. An Oscilloscope release.

You Burn Me / Tú me abrasas Matías Piñeiro, 2024, Argentina/Spain, 64m Spanish with English subtitles North American Premiere In his consistently generative films, Argentinian filmmaker Matías Piñeiro (The Princess of France, NYFF52; Isabella, NYFF58) finds compelling cinematic ways to express the eternal hold that classical texts have on the modern world. In his inventive You Burn Me, the tragic romantic relationship between ancient Greek poet Sappho and the siren goddess Britomartis, as described in “Sea Foam,” a chapter in Italian novelist Cesare Pavese’s 1947 book Dialogues with Leucò, becomes the starting point for an elegantly constructed exercise of research, performance, and interpretation by a group of contemporary women. Given to repetition and abstraction, Piñeiro’s film brings desire and myth to vivid life, reflecting the fragmented nature of what remains of Sappho’s poetry. A Cinema Guild release.

CURRENTS SHORT FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

Currents Program 1: The Will to Change 79m

Black Glass Adam Piron, 2024, U.S., 9m World Premiere Before his legendary proto-cinematic studies in motion, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned to document the United States Army’s war against the Modoc tribe in Northern California in a series of stereographs, many of them staged. Alternately unnerving, meditative, and explosive, Adam Piron’s Black Glass examines the entangled histories of visual technology and the genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations by white settlers through a violent collision of image and sound.

Man number 4 Miranda Pennell, 2024, U.K., 10m North American Premiere A photograph taken in Gaza in late 2023 and found on social media initiates a process of forensic and associative analysis as a dense sea of pixels gradually reveals shapes (human figures, geographical features, buildings, a mysterious box) that prompt a series of questions about the regimes of representation and the structures of violence beyond the frame.

An All-Around Feel Good Jordan Lord, 2024, U.S., 25m World Premiere Investigating the contradictions of being disabled and American, Jordan Lord’s essay film braids themes of representation, access, nationalism, and labor, interrogating cinema’s status as, at once, an ambient phenomenon and an inherently ableist medium. Assembling audio description and commentary along with found and original media, An All-Around Feel Good troubles assumptions about what it means to pay attention and to belong—to a nation, an audience, a unified collective.

The Deep West Assembly Cauleen Smith, 2024, U.S., 35m World Premiere America’s violent history of settler colonial extraction and enslavement is posited against the expansive lens of geologic time in The Deep West Assembly. Commingling theater and computer animation, textiles and dance, Black and Indigenous cultural traditions, Cauleen Smith locates an anti-racist methodology for the end of the world in the spaces underground, where the interior of the Earth becomes a place of possibility and new ways of relating.

Currents Program 2: Identification Marks 79m

Track_ing Chanyeol Lee, Hanna Cho, Samgar Rakym, Ali Tynybekov, 2024, South Korea/Kazakhstan, 23m No Dialogue with English, Korean, Kazakh, and Russian subtitles North American Premiere The emerging field of computer vision turns its powers toward one of cinema’s earliest subjects: the train journey. With surprising insights and occasional poetry, software follows the human along old routes of imperial expansion, across borders of landscape and language. Blinking awake in a sleeper car, it is another passenger slowly discerning its surroundings—and another machine with which we remake our world.

I Remember (depth of flatten cruelty) James Richards, Tolia Astakhishvili, 2024, Germany, 10m North American Premiere Artists Tolia Astakhishvili and James Richards’s collaboration cultivates a sense of ruin and renovation, an architectural ouroboros in which previously created work yields new use. In this digitally composed space, volume is collapsed, vertiginously upending our visual perception. The camera-eye floats unsteadily within it, as the soundtrack weaves together heterogeneous materials, further propelling and disorienting us through their world.

Efforts of Nature Morgan Quaintance, 2024, U.K., 19m In Efforts of Nature, a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa, a skewed Bach aria, and throbbing electronics are set against the oceanic oozing pixels of digitized video images, monochromatic aurorae seen from space, and a disjointed inner monologue haunted by the language of wellness. This seemingly disparate corpus of material is composited into an affecting whole. What emerges, through the craft of director Morgan Quaintance’s trademark tense harmony between sound and image, is a paranoid meditation on chronic pain, recovery, and physical, mental, and planetary states of dissolution.

Being John Smith John Smith, 2024, U.K., 27m U.S. Premiere An autobiographical reflection on his unassuming name leads the filmmaker down a wayward path through family photographs, personal archives, and internet searches. Alternately wry and wistful, peppered with Smith’s characteristically droll commentary, Being John Smith flits between self-deprecation and cris de coeur, offering quietly hilarious observations on Smith’s lower-middle-class origins and career as an avant-garde cinema luminary as well as unexpectedly melancholic impressions on age and extinction.

Currents Program 3: Signal to Noise 79m

Grandmamauntsistercat Zuza Banasińska, 2024, Netherlands/Poland, 23m Polish with English subtitles Assembling communist-era propaganda from the Educational Film Studio in Łódź, Poland, the playful and sinister Grandmamauntsistercat recasts Baba Jaga, the fabled witch of Slavic folklore, as a prehistoric, matriarchal goddess and anti-anthropocentric icon. Collecting, collaging, and warping a vivid bounty of archival images, filmmaker Zuza Banasińska exposes their patriarchal ideologies and representational strictures and detonates them in the name of liberation.

Jizai Maiko Endo, 2024, Japan, 15m Japanese and French with English subtitles North American Premiere The imaginative powers of the child are augmented by Maiko Endo’s near-future fabulations. Reverberations of Chris Marker’s La Jetée can be felt as technologists test ocular and robotic instruments real or imagined, in the lab and in the field. They whisper about “the third eye” as their young subjects grope toward a livable future for humanity among terrestrial elements or the stars.

Like an Outburst Sebastián Schjaer, 2024, Argentina, 11m English subtitles World Premiere Microorganisms float against a desert landscape, the lights from cellphone towers blink like fireflies, and a mysterious dialogue between two minds adjusting to a new beginning. In Sebastián Schjaer’s Like an Outburst, animals, humans, and machines seek a tenuous coexistence and different ways of seeing and living in the world.

Hemel Danielle Dean, 2024, U.K./U.S., 30m World Premiere Returning to her hometown—the eponymous planned community, oriented around a factory—Danielle Dean alloys fiction and documentary, collective memory and autobiography, amid a hail of meteorites. Borrowing from Quatermass II, a midcentury science-fiction thriller shot in Hemel Hempstead as it was still being built, her film renders small-town xenophobia and corporate drudgery in the heightened tenor of an alien invasion plot.

Currents Program 4: Space Is the Place 75m

Revolving Rounds Christina Jauernik, Johann Lurf, 2024, Austria, 3-D, 11m U.S. Premiere Synchronized cameras trace a stereoscopic crawl through fields and greenhouses in early morning sunlight. An early-century 3-D device projects footage of a pea plant that shatters into a throbbing mass of particles to reveal the vibrant materiality of the film strip. In Revolving Rounds, Christina Jauernik and Johann Lurf lead the eye on a journey beyond dimensions of Cartesian space and familiar states of matter, an odyssey to the limits of perception and back.

ESP Laura Kraning, 2024, U.S., 3m Streaks of iridescence and dull clatter disintegrate the brutalist architecture of Albany’s Empire State Plaza in Laura Kraning’s ESP as modernist structures glitch, smear, and flicker through the intervention of a faulty inkjet printer, rendering the capital city into a pulsing monochrome tesseract, a sinister grid of light and noise.

re-engraved Lei Lei, 2024, U.S., 25m Chinese with English subtitles World Premiere The fragile materialities of Yangzhou wood engraving and analog film converge in Lei Lei’s fractal portrait of labor and craft. Exploring techniques of light and poetry, wood and celluloid, re-engraved montages demonstrations of expertise with a cacophonous electronic soundtrack and the personal histories of the women whose labor sustains these traditions.

A Black Screen Too Rhayne Vermette, 2024, Canada, 16mm, 2m U.S. Premiere A single, sketchy line, etched directly into the emulsion, is soon the axis of a dense grid. Its cells slip between positive and negative space, then shatter into a riot of colored panes. Like a mosaicist letting slip her tray of tiles, Rhayne Vermette shifts her sights from the human-scale impressionism of her previous feature Ste. Anne (NYFF59), and attends to a primordial drama of form in miniature.

The Land at Night Richard Tuohy, Dianna Barrie, 2024, Australia, 16mm, 14m Against a dense, sinister soundtrack of drones, bells, night creatures, and electric hum, flashes of illumination reveal a trembling crepuscular landscape in Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie’s The Land at Night. It’s a nocturnal ramble through dry grasslands, empty roads, and the skeletal remains of deserted dwellings.

Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya Malena Szlam, 2024, Australia/Canada, 20m U.S. Premiere The luminous flora, volcanic geographies, and plunging horizons of the Gondwana Rainforest in the eastern ranges of Australia metamorphose into an imaginary landscape in Malena Szlam’s Archipelago of Earthen Bones, in which 16mm in-camera editing and superimpositions suggest a lithic temporal scale, deconstructing and reforming desert, mountain, and sky in a dazzling palette of orange, black, and viridescence.

Currents Program 5: Material Worlds 72m

Vibrant Matter Pablo Marín, 2024, Argentina/Spain, 7m U.S. Premiere A city, at once ancient and modern, emerges from among the brush. As wind works at the leaves, the grass, the microphone, the image is subject to its viewer’s hand, which sets snarls of traffic askew, flips a building like a coin, shakes the trees until they splinter. Pablo Marín sketches a suspension of the laws of physics, his compositions offer an idiosyncratic view of a metropolis in flux.

Towards the Sun, Far from the Center Pascal Viveros, Luciana Merino, 2024, Chile, 17m Spanish with English subtitles North American Premiere The lens traces the pattern-made world as an omniscient eye falls upon its subjects, following their journey as small dramas emerge. Interest snags on two such figures who move differently than the rest through one airless afternoon in Santiago, solving the maze of urban entanglement as only lovers can.

No Spank Jordan Strafer, 2024, Greece, 10m World Premiere In No Spank, a remote Greek island that doubles as a starched and highly regimented girls’ school serves as the setting of Jordan Strafer’s mordant and ribald coming-of-age story, in which the artist’s trademark mise-en-scène, flair for period minutiae, and tensely taciturn performances evoke the grim frustrations, petty rebellions, and light body horror of adolescence.

Sinking Feeling Zachary Epcar, 2024, U.S., 21m World Premiere In Zachary Epcar’s Sinking Feeling, human bodies and voices are counterposed with the shimmering abstractions, ambient fizzle, and rigid linearity of corporate architecture. A disquieting glimpse into a post-post-modernity of dread and torpor, Sinking Feeling peels back the surfaces of these Ballardian non-places to release pent-up fluids, a stifled longing, a hidden radiance.

The Invisible Worm Rosalind Nashashibi, 2024, U.K., 17m World Premiere Benjamin Britten’s elegiac musical setting of William Blake’s “The Sick Rose” supplies the title of Rosalind Nashashibi’s video, which unfolds as an elliptical cross-media dialogue between the multimedia artist Elena Narbutaitė, the sculptures of Marie Lund, and Nashashibi’s own paintings and camera. What emerges is a set of funny and deep reflections on artist-types and the contexts and meanings of art-making—as a place to breathe and wonder, or a form of wasting time. “Don’t take it all too seriously.”

Currents Program 6: Poetry Is Not a Luxury 69m

Refuse Room Simon Liu, 2024, Hong Kong/U.S., 10m World Premiere Tangled spirals, rapid encounters, a quiet war between the vertical and the horizontal: Simon Liu’s Refuse Room captures Hong Kong’s architectural densities and lurid fluorescence through shadows, graffiti, and detritus, surfacing the tense and dizzying atmospheres of a city in anxious slumber, caught between fragmentation and solidarity.

Machine Boys Karimah Ashadu, 2024, Nigeria/Germany/Italy, 9m Hausa with English subtitles A film of electric sonic and visual rhythms, Karimah Ashadu’s Machine Boys is one part 21st-century Scorpio Rising and one part incisive micro-ethnography. Intimately capturing Lagos’s sub-economy of motorcycle taxis—known locally as “Okada”—Ashadu zooms in on both the thundering, tricked-out machines and the bodies of the riders, whose performances of masculine bravado mask the precarity of their dangerous and illegal livelihoods.

Razeh-del Maryam Tafakory, 2024, Iran/U.K./Italy, 28m Farsi with English subtitles U.S. Premiere The dense layerings of inky newsprint and appropriated footage in Maryam Tafakory’s Razeh-del retell the history of Zan, Iran’s first women’s newspaper, whose brief run in the late 1990s inspires two high school girls to propose a film of their own. Amid intensely saturated fields of amethyst, crimson, and amber, images of women emerge and dissolve, smothered in inscriptions quoting angry responses from male readers and words of support from women who dream of an impossible cinema.

Practice, Practice, Practice Kevin Jerome Everson, 2024, U.S., 10m North American Premiere Demonstrating his signature attention and economy, Kevin Jerome Everson finds a resonant frequency in the work of two subjects: Jerry Berritt, a telephone company lineman in Mansfield, Ohio, and Richard Bradley, whose political activism drove him to scale a government flagpole in San Francisco. Everson charts parallels between these men’s labors; their transmissions are shot through with the specificities of history, commingling gestures of labor and protest.

October Noon Francisco Rodríguez Teare, 2024, Chile/France, 12m Spanish with English subtitles U.S. Premiere “Everything is on fire.” Atop San Cristobal Hill, four friends overlook the city of Santiago and reflect on the events of the 2019 popular uprisings in Chile and the police violence that followed. Together, they inflate balloons, graffiti a friend’s torso, and discuss cinema, sustaining the reverberations of revolution as a collective memory, an echo in the street.

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