Art of the Real returns for 6th edition

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces the sixth edition of Art of the Real, an essential showcase for the most vital and innovative voices in expanded nonfiction filmmaking and art, April 18-28. Co-programmed by Dennis Lim and Rachael Rakes, the 2019 lineup features a vibrant slate of new works by internationally acclaimed filmmakers and impressive, award-winning debuts from around the world. This year’s Art of the Real will also pay tribute to the late filmmakers Barbara Hammer, Jocelyne Saab, and Toshio Matsumoto, and include a selection of spotlight talks.

This year’s Opening Night selection is the North American premiere of Frank Beauvais’s intimate essay film Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream. Composed of excerpts from the 400-plus films the director watched during a period of seclusion in 2016, it’s a montage that reframes otherwise incidental images into an immensely moving reflection on life, love, and loss.

To commemorate the passing of pioneering experimentalist Barbara Hammer, Art of the Real presents a free program featuring one of Hammer’s most indelible works—the 1978 Double Strength—alongside two 2018 homages, Lynne Sachs’s triple-portrait Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor and Deborah Stratman’s Vever (for Barbara) (12m). Acknowledging her poetic vision and mastery of the essay film form, the festival will screen Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab’s impressionistic Beirut trilogy. Over a four-program sidebar, Art of the Real will also recognize the nonfiction works of Japanese avant garde filmmaker and critic Toshio Matsumoto, whose radical experimentation in documentary, narrative cinema, and video art produced a deeply rigorous, expansive, and electrifying body of work.

Each edition of Art of the Real features a selection of Spotlights that take a closer look at a range of practices in experimental documentary. This year, we collaborate with e-flux Bar Laika to present two off-site spotlight events with the artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire and the scholar and critic Erika Balsom.

Selected highlights of the festival premieres include Karelia: International with Monument, Andrés Duque’s exploration of the mysterious forests on the Finnish-Russian border where shamanic magic and historical trauma intermingle; Anand Patwardhan’s masterful Reason, which charts nearly a century’s worth of India’s ongoing violence against its own people; Paul Grivas’s Film Catastrophe, which revisits the 2012 sinking of the Costa Concordia cruise liner through a mix of on-set footage from Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme with civilian-shot footage from aboard the ship; Tamer Hassan & Armand Yervant Tufenkian’s Accession, a uniquely process-based reflection on rural American life that traces a collection of letters about the exchange of seeds; Sarah J. Christman’s Swarm Season, which ambitiously links the earthbound and the cosmic in its observation of a colony of endangered honeybees and a group of astronaut trainees in volcanic Hawaii; Kavich Neang’s reflection on Phnom Penh’s historic White Building, Last Night I Saw You Smiling, and Miko Revereza’s spare and personal meditation on undocumented immigrant life in the U.S., No Data Plan; Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė’s wry nature documentary Acid Forest and Nicole Vögele’s portrait of a working-class Taipei community, Closing Time.

For the full lineup, and ticket information, please visit filmlinc.org/AOTR.