Projections at the 57th 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 sixth edition, Projections presents 40 short and feature-length films, representing 21 countries. Among the highlights are features by Marwa Arsanios, whose formally audacious Who Is Afraid of Ideology? tracks the influence of the Kurdish Women’s Liberation Movement; Mariah Garnett, whose Trouble is an intimate essay film about her father and his past as a political activist in Belfast; Éric Baudelaire, who spent four years collaborating with students from a Parisian middle school on Un Film dramatique; Minh Quý Trương’s sci-fi ethnography The Tree House which explores conceptions of home in indigenous communities in Vietnam; Thomas Heise’s monumental essay film Heimat Is a Space in Time, utilizing both new material and archival footage to reflect on the fraught evolution of Germany’s national identity; a new 35mm restoration of avant-garde film pioneer Pat O’Neill’s 1974 film Saugus Series, a dazzling display of his groundbreaking work with the optical printer. 

Projections showcases a number of contemporary artists, including new work by the 2018 Turner Prize winner Charlotte Prodger, whose SaF05, featured in the 2019 Venice Biennial, marks the third entry in the artist’s autobiographical video trilogy; Beatrice Gibson, whose dream-logic thriller Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters is based on a 1929 Gertrude Stein play; Patrick Staff, whose The Prince of Homburg meditates upon contemporary issues of gender and queer resistance; Diane Severin Nguyen, whose video Tyrant Star is a musical tale of Vietnamese postwar emancipation and trauma; Pedro Neves Marques, who imagines an anxious future in his atmospheric, sci-fi tinged The Bite; Luke Fowler, who returns to NYFF with two short films, Mum’s Cards and Houses (for Margaret); and Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, whose Culture Capture: Terminal Adddition is made under the banner of their public secret society New Red Order.

Projections also includes filmmakers returning to the festival such as Nicolás Pereda (My Skin, Luminous), Dani and Sheilah ReStack (Come Coyote), Ben Russell (COLOR-BLIND), Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold (Black Bus Stop), Ryan Ferko (Hrvoji, Look at You From the Tower), and Peggy Ahwesh (Kansas Atlas). The lineup also features new work from several Film at Lincoln Center alumni: Miko Revereza (Distancing), whose No Data Plan screened in Art of the Real 2019; Akosua Adoma Owusu (Pelourinho: They Don’t Really Care About Us); Luise Donschen (Entire Days Together); and Burak Çevik (A Topography of Memory) and James N. Kienitz Wilkins (This Action Lies), both alums of New Directors/New Films 2019. 

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

Visit filmlinc.org/projections2019 for more program and ticket information.