Taking place one year after 7 October 2023 and one month before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the 62nd New York Film Festival was received through a prism of high social tension. The festival, the largest and most well-respected annual offering of regional premieres in the country, heralded 59 feature films from 38 countries into a psychic space marked by an increasing sense of dislocation between political leadership and the masses. This dislocation was less a foreshadowing of the coming re-election of former president Donald Trump than the result of a general malaise that had begun seeping into the American psyche ever since the Israeli invasion of Gaza the previous autumn – an outrage at the hypocrisy of political leadership, the facetiousness of universal ideals, and the bitter sense that protests for the preservation of innocent lives were falling on deaf ears in all political contexts. It was through this lens that the power dynamics of both the presented films and the festival itself were often seen. 

These dynamics are not abstract. On the day I attended the press & industry screening of No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor), a documentary collaboration between Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers about Israel’s state-supported seizures of ancestral Palestinian land in the West Bank, the filmmaker Basel Adra’s father Nasser was kidnapped by IDF soldiers, blindfolded, and held for several hours without charge.1 Like his son, Nasser is an activist, but, as No Other Land makes painfully clear, his life is mostly dedicated to operating a single-pump gas station located at the bottom of his small house, attempting to subsist on almost no money in an aggressively disputed territory operated by the Israeli occupiers as a functional apartheid state. One of the parts that shocked me most from this brave, indelible film was the fact that, when the Palestinians staged a protest, even if it was merely a march down a barren road with a few dozen of their neighbours, they filmed themselves chanting slogans and holding up signs in English. Not Arabic. Not Hebrew. Their appeal is to us – Americans, specifically, and the broader anglophonic international order more generally – because we are the enablers of the regime that oppresses them. Only with the tacit approval of world leaders is the State of Israel allowed to continue its wanton violation of international law – charges that now include crimes against humanity, according to the International Criminal Court.2

New York Counter Film Festival Instagram

Despite the notably little attention it got as a political issue in the national elections, the continued enabling of Israel, especially with regards to its pursuit of total war in Gaza, has torn apart the social fabric of major American cities, especially in spaces where liberal values are most eagerly espoused. On the opening day of New York Film Festival, an open letter was drafted by a coalition of NYFF-affiliated filmmakers and film workers decrying the festival’s complicity with the ongoing destruction of Palestine through its acceptance of donations from Bloomberg Philanthropies.3 Elsewhere, anonymous programmers organized the New York Counter Film Festival that called for a boycott of NYFF and its host, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, until they dropped their ties with well-documented Revisionist Zionist donors and stopped policing Palestine demonstrations in their public spaces.4

Context matters here. Lincoln Center is not a university or corporation. The money given to it is used for facilities management, while Film and Lincoln Center and NYFF remain financially siloed organisations that receive much of their funding through ticket sales. Given the lack of public support for arts organisations in the U.S., neither entity is in much of a place to turn down philanthropic support from major donors who espouse unsavoury political views. The large and diverse group of filmmakers who were invited to share their work as part of this film festival all seem to have accepted this, because no one withdrew their work from NYFF in favour of NYCFF.5 for Palestinian filmmakers in the NYFF62 program who are interested in showing at both festivals.”] Behind the scenes, there was concerning hearsay about counter-programmers badgering and harassing filmmakers to withdraw their work, with the most persistent attention eschewing the bigger eminences to focus on marginal filmmakers whose political allegiances were assumed to naturally align with those of the counter-program. That even No Other Land opted to stay within the confines of NYFF is enough to make one stop and think about the utility and relevance of such inflexible demands.

In truth, it felt as though these protesters, unable to identify a direct chain of complicity between the film festival at home and the genocide abroad, sought less to leverage meaningful action (such that could actually help the poor people of Gaza and the West Bank) than to simply register their outrage at pretending that life could go on as usual. It’s a moral position I have complete sympathy for, even if the NYCFF demands were too aggressive and pointless to earn broad solidarity. Their movement represented the anguish of so many young Americans as we watch an entire people get torn to shreds with our tax dollars, in a two-party state where both sides espouse in full-throated support of this atrocity. 

It was perhaps inevitable, then, that I came away from this year’s festival with the strong sense of having witnessed generations talking past one another. This political dynamic is present not only in the American climate but in films made around the world by the young and old. At New York Film Festival, a stark generational gap could be observed within a slate of major cinematic endeavours. A group of films by directors from the Boomer generation proudly celebrate what can only be described as a “late” style of nostalgic reminiscence and self-homage, while, for the first time in a long time, I find myself witnessing the rise of a bold new generation of filmmakers that share not only political values but formal ones as well. 

The Old Guard

Of the year’s many offerings from the cinematic old guard, the most politically forthright, and solipsistic, was Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola) – a film notably omitted from NYFF’s Main Slate but smuggled into their program as a Special Event. Much ink has been spilled already concerning the formal incoherencies of Coppola’s self-financed epic; less often discussed is the fact that Megalopolis offers up a strikingly candid fantasy for a certain generation of liberal American man. Coppola, a longtime political maven who is outspokenly anti-Trump, may have unwittingly created the best explanation of his return to power.

Megalopolis

It’s striking that Megalopolis’s godlike protagonist, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), is quite obviously intended to be a sympathetic reimagining of Robert Moses, New York’s former city planner, who for most of the 20th Century ran a shadow government through the city’s Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. Moses’s protean endeavours took place largely outside the realm of public input, leading to the creation of the Lincoln Center arts complex, among other things, whose footprint was intentionally designed to displace the thriving and diverse working-class neighbourhood of San Juan Hill. In Megalopolis, Catalina is likewise an unelected official, though Coppola additionally grants him fawning sex appeal, the ability to stop time, and exclusive access to a miraculous new building material called Megalon. Coppola’s sympathy for his protagonist throughout is so obvious that the film utterly lacks dramatic tension – its main pleasure instead is trying to predict what happens next in a storyline so antically absurd. 

It’s not hard to understand why Coppola would identify with a megalomaniacal visionary going up against institutional dysfunction – he financed Megalopolis with $120 million of his own money, and his career reveals a persistent exasperation with the constraints of the major studios. But Megalopolis is damning in its political sympathies. A self-appointed public servant who claims to work for a citizenry he never interacts with, what else is Catalina but a benevolent dictator? Coppola’s film ends with a title card banally expressing his “allegiance to our human family…with long life, education and justice for all”, but his admiration for high-minded values enacted on, rather than with, the polity they’re meant to serve is its own form of wannabe fascism. Coppola has often spoken about his disdain for Donald Trump, and even created a clownish, cross-dressing character in his film to parody Trump’s specific flavour of plutocratic populism. But it’s actually Catalina’s brand of smug elitism, the wonkish belief that the well-positioned know how best to help a people unable to help themselves, that was most resoundingly rejected by the American populace at the polls this past November. Though it has no place in film studies courses, Megalopolis is worth watching for relevance to political science: it’s a portrait of every well-intentioned impulse that led directly to Trump’s re-election.

Such strident navel-gazing was a theme among the elder directors of this year’s program. Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, which reunited the director with Richard Gere, the star of his American Gigolo (1980) when they were both in their heyday, became by this extra-filmic fact a story about aging and the losses of dignity that attend it. Far from the smooth and vapid playboy he once portrayed, here Gere is aged up, largely confined to a wheelchair, and given to murmuring voiceovers in which he muses about lost sexual potency. The plot of Oh, Canada concerns Gere’s character, Leo Fife, a famous documentarian now forced in front of the camera by his former protégé (Michael Imperioli) to talk about his own life as the subject for a new project. (Schrader shot Oh, Canada with his own protégé, Andrew Wonder, the cinematographer and his former personal assistant.) These recollections lead to a series of flashbacks about various young women Fife seduced in his past life (portrayed, in flashback, by Jacob Elordi) before gradually giving way to the lucky breaks that led to fame.

Oh, Canada

The best scene in Oh, Canada concerns a classroom discussion of Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977), her discussion of the incomplete truth of images made that much more potent in a film constructed of them and concerning their construction. Both documentarians in the film – the flashback Fife and his present-day protégé – are quite content to bend the truth when it serves their best interests. But Schrader’s film, despite its candid and chimeric portrayal of personal themes, is likewise constructed around a political stance that damningly dates its aging director. Fife’s secret to success, which is revealed at length and only under much dramatic duress, is that he was a draft dodger during the Vietnam War – an American who crossed into Canada rather than fight. The film makes this out to be a shameful, almost delegitimising, fact of Fife’s career. But I don’t know any Americans under 35 who would not have proudly avoided participating in a war that was plainly an exercise in brutal futility. For my generation, American imperialism no longer has the same dutiful allure as it (clearly still) does to Schrader’s. 

Other films in the festival’s program balanced personal history with formal complexity, sometimes at the abandonment of plot altogether. The better of these is Jia Zhangke’s Feng Lui Yi Dai (Caught by the Tides), a piecemeal project that intercuts 22 years of footage to tell the story of a profound generational shift in coastal China. The film is framed around two characters, Qiao Qiao (Zia’s wife, Zhao Tao) and Bin (Li Zhubin, another mainstay of his films). In a mixture of new footage, as well as leftover cinematic experiments, documentary fragments, and sections culled from Jia’s Still Life (2006) and A Touch of Sin (2013), the two characters bounce between a rapidly urbanizing country in search of work, both legal and illicit; it ends in the near-present day with a highly automated China under lockdown. In the final scene, the two former lovers, just for a moment, reconnect, before, in a dramatically understated finale, the tides of progress pull them apart once again. Given the diversity of filmic styles, and the technological and temporal gulf that separates some of these fragments, the film can at times seem head-scratchingly hermetic. It achieves the basic success, however, of coming across as an internally integral document that, while deepened by a broader appreciation of Zia’s career, is at least somewhat intelligible to the newcomer.  

The same could not be said of Leos Carax’s C’est pas moi (It’s Not Me), another cinematic object that looks back on a director’s career with a combination of experimental footage and leftovers from previous films. Carax, who was apparently asked by the Centre Pompidou to make a film in response to the prompt “Who am I?”, produced an execrable 41-minute non-answer that is about what you’d expect from someone whose name is an anagrammatic pseudonym and who never appears in public without sunglasses on. Though Carax has made some of the most indelible films of the past half century, he tends to get the best results when he sublimates himself.

It’s Not Me

It’s Not Me features a slew of old and new footage carving up some of his greatest creations, from Monsieur Merde of Holy Motors (2012) and Tokyo! (2008) to the wooden doll Annette from Annette (2021), whose puppeteering dance sequence in the film’s closing credits is by far the best part. But this film essay makes no sense without a steeped understanding of the director’s oeuvre, and even then, it adds nothing new to it. The greatest insight of It’s Not Me may be that, in the film’s formal similarity to experimental essay films of Jean-Luc Godard’s late period, Carax establishes and deepens his affinity with that most audacious of French directors. But it’s an affinity that here seems about as superficial as their shared penchant for sunglasses. 

Of all the films in NYFF’s solipsistic Boomer showcase, my favourite was David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, the Canadian’s 23rd feature and quite possibly his most personal film to date. The Shrouds stars Vincent Cassel as Karsh, a man who bears a striking visual resemblance to Cronenberg and likewise lives in Toronto, where he operates a bespoke cemetery that allows visitors to view their loved ones’ decomposing bodies on video monitors installed in the headstones. These are swiftly vandalized by nefarious forces. Like Megalopolis, The Shrouds is strung up on an incoherent plot that seems less like a narrative than a series of political outbursts. Like Oh, Canada, the artificial construction of images and the unreliability of memory are kept on a low boil as vexing backdrop themes. But Cronenberg’s film is moving because it does not try to posit some grand moral articulation onto its audience. It is a purely personal project, constructed around the director’s grief at losing his wife, Carolyn, who passed away in 2017. The Shrouds is a poignant meditation on the inability to bring people back from the dead, as well as the hollow comforts of attempting to do so through various simulacra. Despite its madcap plot and swerving series of red herrings, it ultimately ends with the Cronenbergian character attempting to move on, and I hope it afforded the filmmaker the same sense of freedom.

The New School

Compared to the old, male, and largely white grouping described above, a new vanguard of filmmakers presenting work at this year’s film festival are young (in their late 30s and early 40s), diverse, and stylistically experimental. The biggest formal similarity they share is a contagious desire to adopt techniques of documentary into a narrative setting, and vice versa – a  deconstructive approach to convention that feels long overdue, and ultimately leads (like the Boomers) to mediations on the manufactured nature of images, narrative and documentary alike. But these filmmakers share a political language as well, and one that diverges sharply from the older generation. In pointed contrast to personal elegies and myopic political visions, the films of these young directors engage in a politics that is poignantly relational. All of them express varying degrees of political engagement through methods of solidarity, empathy, and friendship. The gregarious curiosity of their visions has been the one thing in the past few months that gives me real hope.

Nickel Boys

The best of these films, and possibly the best movie of the year, is RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (2024). Ross began as a still photographer before migrating to documentary, and his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel represents his first foray into studio filmmaking. In translating this historical fiction to the screen, Ross made the audacious choice to shoot the work entirely from a first-person perspective. This deeply unconventional move means that we follow the story’s protagonist, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) from behind his own eyes, a constraint that breaks only for brief moments of poetic, equally unexpected sequences of archival footage (which follow a free association of visual themes unique to Ross’s inimitable syntax) as well as a few key moments when the film’s perspective shifts to Turner (Brandon Wilson), Nickel Boys’ other principle character. 

The result is a deeply committed formal experiment with a booming political valence: tying our gaze to Elwood’s conjures empathy for his experience akin to living in his head, and when the POV flits to his best friend’s perspective, and the camerawork briefly returns to a conventional cinematic mode of shot/counter-shot dialogue, it brings the radical freedom of two equals really seeing each other. This bone-deep solidarity is needed for a place like Nickel Academy, a horrific juvenile reformatory Whitehead modelled off the real-life Dozier School in northern Florida, where over 100 students were believed to have been killed by their guards. For a fictionalised account that closely hews to real-life historical trauma, Ross’s choice to elide most of the violence and abuse in the school is admirable – he makes the gravity of the place clear without ever sensationalising it. Even more admirably, the film does not relegate its story to the past. The Dozier School was a product of American segregation, and the Jim Crow era, but it was not closed and investigated by the state until 2011. Likewise, Nickel Boys begins as a period piece but ends in the near-present, making plain the continuing relevance of social issues Americans often prefer to think are behind us.

Constructing a story of solidarity through similar means to Ross, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light draws a vivid portrait of fictional lives informed by the filmmaker’s documentary experience. Kapadia, now 38, came to international attention in 2021 for her nonfiction debut A Night of Knowing Nothing, which won the L’Œil d’or at Cannes. That film mostly documented student protests against the Modi government, but grafted to a fictionalised epistolary narrative about two estranged lovers. Similarly, All We Imagine As Light follows several characters working at the same clinic in Mumbai, whose empathetic interest in one another’s lives allows for illuminating insight into the city’s gender relations, religious divisions, and housing rights.

All We Imagine as Light

Having broken through a longstanding and informal exclusionary practice of Indian filmmakers in the international film scene, Kapadia seems committed to sharing her perspective with a deep and patient regard for national issues. It’s no surprise both of her recent feature-length films feature an absent lover, as India has the world’s largest population of citizens living and working outside of the country. India’s internal migration, and the various compromises of language and custom made to fit into a primarily Hindi urban environment, shines as another theme in this work. But all of these issues are built primarily around the relationships these characters have with one another, and the mutual enrichment and networks of resistance such friendships bring to their lives.

Going the opposite direction, from narrative to documentary, is French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, whose second feature length film Dahomey also arrived this year. It’s a documentary about the repatriation of premodern African art from France to Benin. Having previously worked in a mode of magical realism for Atlantics (2019), Diop continues her theme of supernatural spirituality in the nonfiction setting – in this instance, animating the works of art themselves, which speak from the crypt of their storage and shipping crates. The core of Dahomey revolves around several roundtable debates held by students from the University of Abomey-Calavi, and broadcast live on the radio in the surrounding city. This footage is vital for anyone caring about the status of looted artifacts held in European museums today – a major and ongoing subject of debate in the art world – and  is particularly profound for the lack of consensus the students arrive at in their discussion of its meaning. Some argue that the return of only 26 artifacts, out of the thousands held by the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris, is a slap in the face to African dignity. Others speak poignantly about the simple presence and effect of the individual works themselves, especially on children. They describe their sense of history as a matrix still partially obscured, which only careful ekphrastic study of the works themselves can unlock. This seems to have a dialectical relationship to the unseen, distorted voice of objects, which themselves narrate more questions than answers.

The Slow Burn

Movies are ultimately always an exploration of time. Perhaps my greatest takeaway from this festival and its generational gap was merely a recapitulation of the obvious: time is limited, and it’s unforgiving. It gnaws away at generous dignity and exposes sneering pride. It makes us all, eventually, abject in our decrepitude. But before all that we have some valuable time for ourselves, and one of the best parts about cinema is that is also shows us how to control time, offering us different paces at which we can watch it pass. One of the best films about the passage of time this year came from one of the festival’s youngest filmmakers – the cinematographer Carson Lund in his directorial debut Eephus. Playing out during the course of a single amateur baseball game in small town Massachusetts, during which day passes all too quickly into night, Eehpus is a perfect little eternity of a film, the kind you feel you could live in for much longer than it actually takes place.

The eephus is a kind of trick pitch, slow with a high arc, almost like a softball toss, which tends to throw a batter expecting a fast or curveball off guard. In the movie, it’s described as stopping in midair to hang suspended before the batter, making it impossible to hit before it slides past him. Much is made of this in the film, and its connection to what we’re watching is well indulged. Nonetheless, it’s hard to overstate Lund’s achievement here. He orchestrates two teams through nine innings, expertly coordinating the pitches and bats in addition to giving every one of the 26 characters a moment to express themselves. A good movie also seems to hang suspended in the air before you, a little eternity that’s gone before you know it. After watching so many films anxious to earn their political bona fides, this is the kind of cinematic experience I yearn for – one that offers nothing but the pleasure of its company.

New York Film Festival
27 September – 14 October 2024
https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2024/

Endnotes

  1. Basel Adra, Instagram, 20 September 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/DAI95KFNjST/?hl=en
  2. ‘Statement of ICC Prosecutor Karim A.A. Kahn KC: Applications for arrest warrants in the situation of the State of Palestine’, International Criminal Court, 20 May 2024
  3. Open Letter to the New York Film Festival to End Complicity in Israeli War Crimes’, Screen Slate, 26 September 2024. The open letter specifically called attention to one of the many programs sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Bloomberg-Sagol Center for City Leadership, which supports training and leadership skills for mayors and city officials in Modi’in Illit and Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, areas of illegal West Bank settlement such as the kind that were documented in No Other Land. Bloomberg Philanthropies is a major fiscal sponsor of both New York Film Festival and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts at large.
  4. New York Counter Film Festival, https://thenycff.wordpress.com The donors in question include Carlyle Group founder David Rubinstein, record executive David Geffen, real estate mogul Steven Ross, philanthropists Kathy and Mitchell Jacobson, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, and Hearst CEO and Lincoln Center board chair Steven Swartz.
  5. According to the NYCFF Instagram, the counter-programmers received “soft commitments to boycott from NYFF filmmakers who wish to remain anonymous, and will announce their withdrawals if enough others drop out with them to mitigate the risk,” and constructed the rest of their program from old films and premieres withdrawn from IDFA. The Palestinian-English artist Rosalind Nashashibi presented her short film The Invisible Worm at both NYFF and NYCFF because “NYCFF provides exceptions [to their boycott

About The Author

Nolan Kelly is a writer and filmmaker currently living in Brooklyn, New York.

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