Sergei Polunin film to be shown

[Dale]

A release (scroll down for ballet offering):

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER ANNOUNCES SUMMER NEW RELEASES LINEUP

Dear Colleagues:

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced its full lineup of new releases for the 2016 summer season, featuring films by Ira Sachs, Ivy Meeropol, and Werner Herzog; a documentary about Norman Lear; an exclusive run of the restoration of the late Andrzej Żuławski’s sci-fi epic On the Silver Globe; and more. Please see below for the complete list of films with run dates and synopses, as well as a sneak peek into the fall.

We would also like to let you know that the Walter Reade Theater will be closed from July 8 – September 8, to undergo much-needed renovations in advance of its 25th anniversary this fall. (You can read more about it on our recently launched Kickstarter campaign.)

If you have any questions, please let us know.

Best,

Rachel & Lisa

Opening July 1

Private Property – New Restoration!
Leslie Stevens, USA, 1960, 79m
Warren Oates stars in this slow-burning, sweat- and sun-drenched psychosexual thriller—newly restored in stunning 4K by Cinelicious Pics and created from the original film elements rediscovered and preserved by UCLA after more than 50 years of being thought lost! This California noir centers on Duke and Boots (played with menacing, barely sublimated rage by Corey Allen and Oates), who set their sights on Ann Carlyle (Kate Manx), a sweetly alluring but neglected housewife who spends long, lonely days at home in her husband’s Beverly Hills villa. When the two men take up residence in an abandoned house that overlooks the Carlyles’ swimming pool, the setting becomes a stifling, and ultimately explosive, pressure cooker of sexual frustration, manipulation, and aggression. Directed on a shoestring budget by Leslie Stevens (three years before creating The Outer Limits), Private Property was denied MPAA approval under the Production Code upon its release, and even today, the film’s broodingly sinister depiction of sexuality gone awry is startling in its frank, unflinching intensity. The return of this classic, which had its world premiere at the TCM Classic Film Festival in April, also occasions our Oates retrospective, taking place July 1-7. A Cinelicious Pics release.

Opening July 8

Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You
Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady, USA, 2016, 91m
Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp, 12th & Delaware, and Detropia) reteam for this lovingly made documentary about Norman Lear—the legendary, influential mind behind 1970s sitcoms like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and Maude. Touching on the many facets of his life, from growing up Jewish on the East Coast, to serving in World War II and returning to America to work in TV, to his eventual shift toward activism, Ewing and Grady reflect on Lear and the extraordinary impact he had on the national discourse during his television heyday. The film also captures the now 93-year-old subject as he reacts to his shows’ unforgettable moments, and features appearances by fans like George Clooney and Amy Poehler to discuss his legacy. Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You is a celebratory portrait of the fearless creative who addressed divisive issues with intelligence, sensitivity, and humor. A Music Box Films release. Norman Lear, Heidi Ewing, and Rachel Grady in person opening weekend!

Indian Point
Ivy Meeropol, USA/Japan, 2015, 94m
Indian Point Energy Center, an aging nuclear power plant in Buchanan, New York, looms just 45 miles north of Midtown Manhattan. Despite millions of people living in close proximity to a potential nuclear disaster, the facility’s continued operation has the support of the plant’s operators and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—but a large opposition in the surrounding community, including a vocal anti-nuclear group alarmed by Japan’s Fukushima accident, worry about a catastrophe occurring in the U.S. Capturing the debates for clean energy and the dangerous risks of government complacency, congressional-speechwriter-turned-filmmaker Ivy Meeropol presents a revelatory film about the uncertainties of our nuclear future and our insatiable demands for energy. A First Run Features release. Ivy Meeropol in person opening weekend!

Opening July 22

Summertime / La Belle saison
Catherine Corsini, France/Belgium, 2015, 105m
French with English subtitles
Acclaimed director Catherine Corsini has made melodramas that range in tone from the bleak and violent to the tender and emotionally warm. At first glance, her new film, a prizewinner at last year’s Locarno Film Festival, is one of her brightest and most bucolic. Soon after Delphine (Izïa Higelin) moves from her conservative parents’ farm near Limoges to Paris in 1971, she meets the older Carole (Cécile de France), a feminist organizer with whom she embarks on a passionate, mutually invigorating love affair. When a family sickness pulls Delphine back to the farm, Carole has to decide whether to follow her into hostile territory—and Summertime becomes something more complicated and fraught than its seductive, luminous visual palette initially suggests. A Strand Releasing release.

Opening July 29

On the Silver Globe / Na srebrnym globie – New Restoration!
Andrzej Żuławski, Poland, 1988, 166m
Polish with English subtitles
After a 16-year absence, Andrzej Żuławski returned to Polish cinema with On the Silver Globe, which proved to be the most ambitious and difficult project of his career. The largest Polish production of all time when shooting began in 1976, it was halted by the Ministry of Culture for two years due to its alleged subversiveness, before finally being reconstituted and completed after the fall of communism over a decade later. The resulting sci-fi epic follows a group of astronauts who, after crash-landing on the moon, forge a new society. As the first generation dies off, their children devise new rituals and mythologies to structure the emergent civilization, until a politician from Earth arrives and is hailed as the Messiah… An inexhaustibly inventive and absorbing film maudit that quite literally creates a new cinematic world, On the Silver Globe is perhaps the grandest expression of Żuławski’s visionary artistry. This very rarely screened film returns in a new digital restoration—personally approved by Żuławski and DP Andrzej Jaroszewicz—courtesy of the Polish Film Institute. A Film Studio KADR release.

Opening August 5

Little Men
Ira Sachs, USA/Greece, 2016, 85m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
Much like his previous film, Love Is Strange, director Ira Sachs’s Little Men captures the modern New York City landscape with a tender and intelligent relationship portrait, this time through the life-defining friendship of two teens caught in the middle of familial tumult. When his grandfather dies, 13-year-old Jake (Theo Taplitz) moves with his family from Manhattan back into his father’s old Brooklyn home, where he meets Tony (Michael Barbieri), whose single mother, Leonor (Paulina Garcia), runs a dress shop downstairs. Soon, Jake’s parents Brian (Greg Kinnear) and Kathy (Jennifer Ehle) ask Leonor to sign another, more expensive lease for the store, which kindles a feud between the adults. The friendship struck by Jake and Tony forms the heart of the film, with Sachs observing this connection with humanism and insight to ultimately craft a timely, sophisticated story of displacement and class. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Neither Heaven Nor Earth / Ni le ciel ni la terre
Clément Cogitore, France/Belgium, 2015, 100m
French and Persian with English subtitles
The ingenious conceit of Neither Heaven Nor Earth, a critical success at Cannes (where it was titled The Wakhan Front), is to transform the Afghan battlefield—dust and boredom and jolts of explosive violence—into the backdrop for a metaphysical thriller. Jérémie Renier stars as a French army commander who begins to lose the loyalty of his company, as well as his sanity, when soldiers start mysteriously disappearing one by one. Rarely is the madness of war conveyed on screen with such simmering tension and existential fear. Rarely, too, is the ignorance and mistrust between cultures—are the shepherd villagers innocent civilians or Taliban spies?—limned with such poetic insight. A 2016 New Directors/New Films selection. A Film Movement Release. Clément Cogitore in person opening weekend!

Opening August 19

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World
Werner Herzog, USA, 2016, 98m
From the brilliant mind of Werner Herzog comes a new exploratory documentary, which looks at the intricacies and unsettling omnipotence of technology—and society’s rapidly growing dependence on it. Structured in chapters that cover the birth of the Internet, self-driving cars, athlete-robots, and beyond, the film shows us captivating and bizarre stories from eclectic people, whose experiences with technology at once charm and sober. The bigger picture of our brave new world looms behind Herzog’s authorial voice as he threads together these stories that imagine the revolutionary, otherworldly, and often dangerous nature of our wired lives. But while the future of humanity’s relationship to technology remains up in the air, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World wrestles with the profound and intangible questions that all of us should be asking. A Magnolia Pictures release. Werner Herzog in person opening weekend!

Opening August 26

Fatima
Philippe Faucon, France, 2015, 79m
French and Arabic with English subtitles
Middle-aged single mother Fatima (Soria Zeroual) lives with her two teenage daughters in France and works cleaning jobs to pay their way through school. Inspired by a true story and the poetry of the North African writer Fatima Elayoubi, who emigrated knowing very little French and slowly taught herself the language, Faucon’s eighth feature—winner of the prestigious Louis Delluc Prize for Best Film and three César Awards for Best Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Most Promising Actress—is a patient, reflective study of a woman pressured by her children and her neighbors alike to assimilate into a culture of which she’s wary. Despite the display of everyday racism, both veiled and overt; internal domestic disputes; and external gestures of inhospitality, Fatima offers an uplifting experience and one of recent French cinema’s most trenchant and moving portraits of immigrant experience. A Kino Lorber release.

Opening September 9

Author: The JT LeRoy Story
Jeff Feuerzeig, USA, 2016, 110m
Author: The JT LeRoy Story unravels the notorious, utterly fascinating tale of JT LeRoy, the literary sensation who turned out to be a hoax. “JT Leroy,” revealed in a 2005 exposé as the invented male persona of Laura Albert, a punk rocker and freelance writer from Brooklyn, published numerous, tough-prose memoirs about a life of prostitution and drug addiction; meanwhile, telephonic relationships with figures like Tom Waits, Courtney Love, and Gus Van Sant contributed to the author’s global allure and mystery. Director Jeff Feuerzeig, who profiled another troubled artist in The Devil and Daniel Johnston, lets Albert recount the infamous ruse in her own words, alongside reenactments, animated sequences, home movie footage, and recorded phone conversations. The result is a gripping story about creative desire, authorship, and deception. An Amazon Studios/Magnolia Pictures release.

To Sleep with Anger – New Restoration!
Charles Burnett, USA, 1990, 102m
Charles Burnett became known to world cinema when his 1978 UCLA thesis film, Killer of Sheep, won the Critics’ Prize at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. His legendary reputation among cinephiles never quite segued into mainstream recognition, even though his 1990 drama To Sleep with Anger—novelistic in its narrative density and rich characterization—is one of the finest films about the black experience in modern America. Danny Glover (also the film’s executive producer) stars as Harry Mention, a mysterious drifter from the South who visits an old acquaintance (Paul Butler), now leading a middle-class life with his family in South Central Los Angeles. Though imbued with charm and traditional manners, Harry has a knack for mischief that creates powerful rifts throughout the family. Burnett’s overlooked masterpiece connects the past to the present in emotionally resonant ways, making this film as imaginative and insightful as his debut feature. To Sleep with Anger returns to the Film Society in a beautiful digital restoration. A Sony Pictures release.

A sneak peek into the fall:

Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales – New Restorations!
September 16-29
In 1950, leading French publisher Gallimard rejected a manuscript of a short-story collection called Moral Tales, submitted by a 30-year-old fiction writer. More than a decade later, the writer in question—by then an influential critic and a late-flowering movie director—resolved to adapt the stories for the screen, each inspired by F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, in which a man, committed to one woman, is tempted by another. The resulting series of works, which took a decade to complete, established Eric Rohmer’s international reputation as a filmmaker. Thrillingly intelligent portraits of self-centered, articulate, often foolish men and the women they belittle, idolize, long for, and stalk, staged with offhand visual imagination and full of electrifying high-stakes verbal showdowns, the six Moral Tales represented an entirely new way of handling male-female relationships on screen. Occasioned by our revivals of La Collectionneuse and Chloe in the Afternoon, the Film Society is pleased to present all six Moral Tales—newly restored—in September! Courtesy Janus Films and Films du Losange.

Dancer
Steven Cantor, UK, 2016, 82m
English, Russian, and Ukrainian with English subtitles
Opens September 16
Ukrainian-born “bad boy of ballet” Sergei Polunin became the Royal Ballet’s youngest ever principal dancer at age 19. But two years later—at the height of his success—he walked away from it all, resolving to give up dance entirely. Steven Cantor’s Dancer tracks the life of this iconoclastic virtuoso, from his prodigal beginnings in the Ukraine to his awe-inspiring performances in the U.K., Russia, and eventually the U.S., where he went viral after David LaChapelle filmed him dancing to Hozier’s “Take Me to Church.” Yet beyond celebrating the raw talent and wild ambition of Polunin, whose sights are now set on Hollywood, Dancer considers how wealth and success may not be enough when it comes to finding personal and professional identity. A Sundance Selects release.

The 54th New York Film Festival
September 30 – October 16
Press accreditation for the 54th New York Film Festival will open soon. In the meantime, check out the exclusive poster here, designed by NYFF alum Apichatpong Weerasethakul.