Projections at the 56th New York Film Festival

The New York Film Festival’s Projections section presents an international selection of film and video work that expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be. Drawing on a broad range of innovative modes and techniques, including experimental narratives, avant-garde poetics, crossovers into documentary and ethnographic realms, and contemporary art practices, Projections brings together a diverse offering of short, medium, and feature-length work by some of today’s most vital and groundbreaking filmmakers and artists.

In its fifth edition, Projections presents 36 films, more than half of them U.S. or North American premieres, and opens with Diamantino, a delirious and slyly topical satire by longtime collaborators Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt. Five other feature-length works are included in the lineup: Roi Soleil, Catalan iconoclast Albert Serra’s follow-up to The Death of Louis XIV, again re-enacts the Sun King’s final breaths, this time in the gallery space. Your Face, Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang’s latest digital experiment, radically rethinks film portraiture and the talking-heads template. Spanish artist Dora Garcia’s first feature, Second Time Around, explores the intersection of politics, psychoanalysis, and performance through reconstructions of Argentinian theorist Oscar Masotta’s “happenings,” and vignettes based on Julio Cortázar’s writings. Ted Fendt’s second feature, Classical Period, is a cinephilic treatises on language, literature, and theology. And Jodie Mack’s all-analog travelogue The Grand Bizarre traces the industrial cogs of fabric production and consumption.

Projections will also present two historical programs: James Benning’s 1977 debut feature 11x14, in a new restoration by the Austrian Film Museum, and Ericka Beckman’s pioneering short films Cinderella and You The Better, restored by the Academy Film Archive.  

A number of contemporary artists are featured in Projections, including Jeremy Shaw, whose vérité-style science fiction series Quantification Trilogy imagines a dystopian social order; Lawrence Abu Hamdan, whose film Walled Unwalled finds in a former GDR state radio station a perfect conduit for his ongoing cinematic interrogation of the political dimensions of sound; Ben Thorp Brown, studying Walter Gropius's shoe warehouse in Gropius Memory Palace; Beatrice Gibson, intimately reframes the current political climate in I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead; Andrew Norman Wilson, whose Kodak imagines a dialogue between George Eastman and a blind former film technician; Jon Wang, whose From Its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances meditates on Hong Kong high-rise architecture and the desire for queer futures; and James Richards, collaborating for the second time with Steve Reinke for their mid-length film What Weakens the Flesh Is the Flesh Itself.

Filmmakers making their first appearance at NYFF this year include Laura Huertas Millán (The Labyrinth), Akosua Adoma Owusu (Mahogany Too), Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela (Luminous Shadow), and Helena Wittmann (Ada Kaleh). The program also showcases works by artists and filmmakers returning to the festival: Laida Lertxundi (Words, Planets), Ben Rivers (Trees Down Here), Faraz Anoushahpour, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko (Chooka), Sylvia Schedelbauer (Wishing Well), Sky Hopinka (Fainting Spells), and Mary Helena Clark (The Glass Note).

Projections is curated by Dennis Lim and Aily Nash. Sponsored by MUBI.

Visit filmlinc.org/projections56 for more program and ticket information.