Pop Stuff: NYFF at 60: Asking the Tough Questions

When Martin Scorsese and James Gray took to the stage last month at the mid-point of the 60th New York Film Festival (NYFF) to introduce their films – Scorsese’s Personality Crisis: One Night Only, a docu-musical centered on New York Dolls’ frontman David Johansen, and Gray’s Armageddon Time, a fictionalized account of his own childhood – they both harkened back to one thing. These titans of cinema, native New Yorkers from Queens themselves, had grown up on the NYFF. Scorsese was all of 20 in 1963 when he watched Bunuel and Bresson grace the big screen at the festival’s home, Lincoln Center. It would be another five years before he would screen The Big Shave, his own six-minute short film, at NYFF as a young director-to-watch. Gray, a child of a different era, a quarter of a century younger than Scorsese, similarly equated the NYFF with a sense of home. After making films that had taken his imagination as far as the Amazon rainforest (The Lost City of Z) and the moon (Ad Astra), he noted that screening Armageddon Time, a film set in the city blocks he had roamed as a child, at NYFF was a special kind of homecoming. 

In fact, the NYFF has been home, parent and family to generations of filmmakers, serving as an artistic refuge to showcase their works and moving, often ahead of the times, to address pressing issues through film. As long-time festival director Eugene Hernandez noted in his 60^th anniversary address, “The NYFF has pushed and stretched definitions of cinema… showcasing the most significant films and filmmakers from around the world, from Agnes Varda and Satyajit Ray to Fassbender and Cassavetes.” At 60, the festival continues to grow and stretch itself, not least because this year will see Hernandez head west to take over the reins as Director of the Sundance Film Festival, strengthening a crucial bridge to debut filmmakers, and NYFF will continue its stewardship under Artistic Director, Dennis Lim, President Lesli Klainberg and the fantastic team of programmers, producers and others. While change is part of the festival’s DNA, if this year’s lineup of films is anything to go by, one thing the NYFF will continue to do is throw up the tough questions, while remaining a haven for filmmakers who engage with them.  

Amongst the themes teased in myriad ways at NYFF 60, socio-politics, race and gender held an unflinching mirror to our world. 

Humanity seems to be moving through a tumultuous moment and in that spirit, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. and Indian director Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes succeeded in drawing food for thought out of chaotic times by taking the specific and making it universal. R.M.N. centers on the activity in a multi-ethnic town in Romania as a Transylvanian man returns home from Germany, whilst the town is contending with hostilities towards Sri Lankans who are legally there to work. The small town is a refracted echo of many European cities seeing an influx of migrants and refugees. Mungiu captures the uncomfortable debate unfolding in these areas in one incredible 17-minute take of a town hall discussion in R.M.N. Likewise, Sen’s All That Breathes is ostensibly about two Muslim brothers in Delhi who are attempting to rescue Black Kites (birds) that are falling from the sky due to pollution. As we absorb glimpses of the family’s environment, we see that what appears to be a documentary about bird rescue, is at once a treatise on what good citizens owe and are owed.  

Other movies, such as documentarian Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the festival’s centerpiece, advance our dialogue by taking the big issues and making them deeply personal. Poitras’s film is an unsparing look at the devastating role of the Sackler family’s company, Purdue Pharma, in the U.S. opioid epidemic, as told through photographer Nan Goldin’s fight to hold the Sacklers accountable. The narrative is driven by Goldin’s photographs and her own harrowing fight against an Oxycontin addiction. Similarly, Margaret Brown’s documentary, Descendant, uses power in specificity to explore the entwined narratives of the last known ship, the Clotilda, carrying enslaved Africans to America, and the descendants of those people, now living in Africatown, Alabama.  

In feature films, too, the festival championed filmmakers with a true proximity to their subjects, particularly in the areas of race and gender, and in doing so elevated films that sparkled with authenticity. Till, Nigerian-American filmmaker Chinoye Chuwku’s drama, is such a lens on the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Black teenager, Emmet Till, as told through his mother Mamie’s fight for justice. Danielle Deadwyler’s searing performance as Mamie, in a powerful, if at times uneven, film was undoubtedly buoyed by a team that relied on years of research. Keith Beauchamp, one of the film’s writers, along with Chuwku and Michael Reilly, had spent years researching Till’s death, research which lead to the reopening of Till’s case by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2004. Likewise, The Inspection, the rare directorial debut to close the festival, revisits well-trodden ground of the military training film, through the rarely seen perspective of a queer Black recruit – a vivid account based on writer-director Elegance Bratton’s personal experience.  

Films that center on women were also served by a focus on who does the storytelling. She Said, Maria Schrader’s film, adapted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, from the book by journalists Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey about their months-long investigation of Harvey Weinstein, seamlessly weaves in Ashley Judd as herself, playing her pivotal role in exposing the disgraced movie mogul’s history of sexual harassment and coercion. And Women Talking, Sarah Polley’s drama based on Miriam Toews’s novel about the aftermath of a series of rapes within an isolated religious community, bristles with the energy of an almost all-female cast and crew.  

Ironically, two films that held expansive space to ask questions came from filmmakers who are, on the surface, poles apart from their protagonists, suggesting that it is possible to thoughtfully craft stories that are outside our direct experience. In American director Todd Field’s Tár, Cate Blanchett sets every frame alight as Lydia Tár, a self-described ‘U-haul lesbian’ virtuoso conductor of a classical orchestra. In EO, Polish director Jerry Skolimowski’s film, the hero is a donkey, in what could be categorized as a road movie, but in actuality defies all categorization. Many of us have found ourselves reflecting more and more deeply on questions of our own power, and the way that power is propped up and manipulated by our institutions, whether bastions of the arts, factory farms or governments. In Tár and EO it is the combination of this messy soup of rethinking power structures and a distance from their subjects that has allowed Field and Skolimowski to stew in uncomfortable questions. The result is a donkey as riveting, bending his ears towards us onscreen, as Blanchett is as she circles and stabs the air with her baton.  

Tár is the notoriously press-shy Field’s first film in 16 years and one that he wrote specifically for Blanchett, who cuts a remarkable fictional figure as the first female chief conductor of a Berlin-based orchestra – a genius who has risen to the highest ranks of classical music. What unfurls over the course of the film is Tár’s use and abuse of power to deftly climb the ranks and ensure she stays at the top. Lydia Tár quietly absorbs sexist and classist comments from her older male mentor one day, as she vociferously ridicules a student’s identity politics the next; a moment that comes back to haunt her later, in the form of a viral video. It is suggested that she groomed and then blacklisted a former female member of her fellowship program, who subsequently names Tár in a suicide note. Undeterred, Tár proceeds to lavish undue attention on another hopeful. In her personal life, Tár’s behavior is equally appalling; she gaslights her frail, concert-master wife and is callous with a neighbor caring for a sickly mother. The film throws up questions we are still walking on eggshells about, even as we are quick to virtue-signal and denounce or applaud decisions when the personal stakes are lower. Tár asks us whether we can, or should, separate the art from the artist, who gets to decide what art is ‘great’ anyway, why we condemn abuse differently depending on its wrapper, and what cancel culture truly cancels – the actions or the debate around them.  

The film has its critics, some of whom have called out its ending – where Tár experiences a moment of self-realization – for having a kind of Eat, Pray, Love-era condescension towards the East and for landing on an insinuation about what makes some culture low-brow. I can’t decide whether Field is being intentionally ironic or tone-deaf here, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Other critics have found fault with Tár for presenting an incomplete and unbelievable portrait of a woman prowling the halls of power and to them I would posit; how can such a portrait hope to achieve credibility until such figures are visible enough in our real lives for us to have something to hold them up against?  

EO’sdonkey is unbelievable for much the same reasons as Lydia Tár. It is a mental leap to accept an animal’s emotion or agency when animal farming rests on denying it. Skolimowski repeatedly asks us to suspend disbelief as EO, the donkey, travels from a circus to a farm to a cargo truck, and eventually to a palatial villa. With every new pit-stop, EO enters the climax of a different genre as protagonist, leaping from romance to thriller to sci-fi, in a hero’s journey that involves near-death, murder and even an Isabelle Huppert cameo where she has a love affair with her stepson-priest. But not even that tidbit could spoil this film, which is the kind of surprising filmmaking that leaves festival-goers elated. Skolimowski noted that part of being able to bring such magic into EO was encouraging his three young DOPs (Skolimowsi is well into his eighth decade) to shoot the wildest footage they could, and cutting that with unconventional music choices. In fact, EO’s greatest spell is in leaving us haunted by the question of what we owe those who can’t speak for themselves. 

Perhaps fittingly, as it strode into its sixtieth decade, in a nod to the wisdom of aging and the passage of time, NYFF found the most heart and tension in questions of inheritance. Stories that dealt head on with legacies of all kinds, nations, leaders and ordinary people surfaced as the festival’s most provocative and glorious thread.

Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra cemented his place in contemporary cinema with his fever dream of a film, Pacifiction, set in Tahiti and featuring Benoit Magimel as De Roller, the High Commissioner for French Polynesia (still one of France’s ‘overseas territories’). De Roller is captured in the film’s every frame in a white suit that is a lurking metaphor for Empire. The film is equally a mood, poem and painting, capturing the dark heart of colonization as our protagonist negotiates a casino opening, supervises a surfing contest, swans around a nightclub offering unsolicited advice to dancers, and welcomes an admiral, all in a sort of color-soaked reverie that becomes ever more dangerous and fanciful as it gathers steam, much like colonialism itself.  

In contrast, Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage uses a similar dream-like quality to different ends. Corsage – for which Vicky Krieps took the best actress award in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival for her evocation of Sissi (one-time Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary) – turns legend on its head. We witness a woman who, corseted by her clothes and by her role as a leader, mother and wife, throws these titles off in an enchanting reclamation of a story that has been told countless times, but scarcely ever as imaginatively.  

The gems of the festival came in stories that deal with legacies at their most intimate, concerning themselves with the bond between parent and child. Two documentaries represented remarkable collaborations between parents that loom large in their children’s lives and in our imaginations. The Super Eight Years, from Nobel Prize-awardee Annie Ernaux and her son David Ernaux-Briot, is an expansion of the author’s self-reflective oeuvre, as she superimposes her voice over home-video footage of her family from the 1970s. In Sr. Robert Downey Jr. captures his father’s final years on film, in a look back at a life that veers from the zany to the poignant in a single frame. These two films could not be further apart in tone and yet both capture something of the spirit of their subjects that decades of books in Ernaux’s case, and films in Downey Sr.’s, have not given us – a child’s insight into the maternal and paternal.  

These insights are also at the center of several feature films that echo memoir by relying heavily on the personal. Real-life mother-and-daughter relationships are at the core of British filmmaker Joanna Hogg’s Eternal Daughter and French filmmaker Alice Diop’s Saint Omer. Eternal Daughter’s lead, the perennially fascinating Tilda Swinton, is positively sphinx-like in the dual role of parent and adult childwho visit a former family manor-home-turned-hotel, in a foggy and remote part of the English countryside. The film toys with the conventions of gothic horror to explore how we perceive and misperceive our parents, how they can in fact remain ghosts to us to the very end. Hogg deftly turns over the eternal and uncomfortable truth that we may never truly know our parents, despite our keenest efforts.  

In Saint Omer, the ghostly is both more and less overt. While Hogg uses the genre to embellish her own life, Diop’s Saint Omer takes a horrific real-life account and gives it a different power by stripping it bare. Diop’s film is based on a court case that rocked France in 2016, concerning a woman named Fabienne Kabou, who was accused of murdering her 15-month-old daughter by leaving her on a beach to be swept away by the tide. Kabou said at her trial that witchcraft had influenced her actions. Diop’s lightly fictionalized retelling uses court transcripts for much of her film (Diop attended the actual trial), in which a Senegalese immigrant woman (both Diop and Kabou have Senegalese family heritage) named Laurence Coly (Kayije Kagame) is tried and provides testimony for the same crime.  

Diop, in her comments, noted that the French press made constant pointed referrals to Kabou being a highly educated Black woman from a well-to-do background, without truly probing the nuances of her situation, layers that Kabou clearly struggled with herself. Diop turns a story that made easy headline fodder into a stark examination of a woman whose mental and emotional health is compromised and goes unnoticed, who is repeatedly minimized in a mixed-race relationship, and who is dealing with contentious family dynamics that leave her isolated. Diop furnishes neither excuses nor easy explanations as she forces us to look at the complex ripple effects of familial trauma, the aftereffects of colonialism, racism, mental health issues, and uneasy motherhood that run through this story.  

Father-daughter relationships are depicted with as keen an eye in Mia Hansen Løve’s return to the festival with One Fine Morning, and debut filmmaker’s Charlotte Wells’s devastating Aftersun, which won the Jury Prize after premiering in the Critic’s Week selection at Cannes.  

Hansen-Løve, no stranger to explorations of modern love and heartbreak – topics which anchor many of her films includinglast year’s wonderful Bergman Island – turns her eye from the romantic to the paternal and channels her own recent experience caring for an aging father with a neurodegenerative disease. In One Fine Morning, Lea Seydoux is Sandra, a widowed single mother, who falls in love with a married former admirer in the midst of transitioning her sick father to a care home. Hansen-Løve traffics in reality over sentimentality in presenting a woman caught between two emotionally unavailable men. This honesty of experience is what makes the film most poignant as we travel with Sandra on an unlikely filmic tour of Paris, to one disappointing care home after another. We watch as Sandra, who it seems has been waiting for her professor father to pay her attention all her life, must on the One Fine Morning of the title – a winking allusion to the once-upon-a-time stories children are fed – switch roles and play parent. It is a day that comes for each of us, and instead of providing a happy-ending palliative, Hansen-Løve hands us the comfort of shared experience.  

One Fine Morning is a lighter pill than the devastating gut-punch of Aftersun, which spears something I have rarely, if ever, seen told with such resonance on screen; the particular feeling of remembering our younger parents as adults ourselves, and the grief of re-remembering our loved ones when they are gone and can no longer create or validate memories with us. Canadian American writer Saul Bellow once said, “Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces – down to the last glassy splinter.” Aftersun is Wells’s glassy splinter on screen; her father died when she was 16. The film takes place over a few days as a young father, Calum, and his adolescent daughter, Sophie, exquisitely rendered by Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio, vacation together at a Turkish coastal resort. Calum’s depression and his struggle with fatherhood is quietly palpable to us from the first moment. We feel him from the inside, while also seeing him from the outside as Sophie does – aware of his presence, his love, but not his sadness. As an older Sophie remembers and reinterprets the holiday, so does Calum recall his younger self and we are left to imagine who the two are without each other, in a space that only remembrance and imagination together can create. This is a film that transcends time, by leading us inside memory. 

It was parents looming large in memory but markedly absent in their children’s lives, which crafted the NYFF selection, that had me most riveted to my seat. Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All was one of the festival’s most hotly anticipated screenings, not least because of a record-breaking almost 10-minute standing ovation when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival. This adaptation of Camille D’Angelis’s novel of the same name, from David Kajganich’s screenplay, stars Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalemet in mesmerizing performances as young drifters, Maren and Lee. Described as a mash-up of genres colliding in a coming-of-age-romance-horror-road-movie, it reveals itself as something far deeper.  

Bones and All opens by introducing us to Maren, a shy, bright kid, living in near poverty with her father (Andre Holland). Maren shockingly bites off another girl’s finger at a high-school sleepover. When she flees and returns home, we learn that father and daughter have been leading a disruptive pattern of having to pick up and run after these incidents, which Maren cannot control. Soon after, on her 18^th birthday, Maren is abandoned by her father, who leaves her with a cassette-diary of sorts, recanting what he can about her history. Maren sets off on a journey to find her mother (Chloe Sevigny), who we learn was an ‘eater’ too, and has been institutionalized. On the road, Maren meets a creepy older ‘eater’, Sully (Mark Rylance), who educates Maren on their kind; that they can sniff each other out, that the compulsion to ‘eat’ grows, that their ethos is never to eat their own, that the ultimate experience is to eat ‘bones and all’.  

While Sully hangs in the shadows, Maren encounters and falls in love with Lee, who helps her locate her mother in one of the film’s most harrowing scenes. The subsequent rupture and healing of Maren and Lee’s relationship is driven by a breaking open of familial wounds, literal and metaphorical. The movie’s premise rests on cannibalism; Maren and Lee are ‘eaters’ whose savage appetites are vividly drawn against the blue-sky, purple-dusk landscapes of the American Midwest to gorgeously incongruous effect. They are animals in the wild, thirsty for blood. That is, until the film’s themes creep up on us and we see that it is the landscape that is blood-thirsty, leaving Maren and Lee to contend with harsh histories, homelessness and life on the margins. 

Bones and All transcends genre by probing how we carry trauma, what survival looks like in the extreme, and askingwhether we can (literally) digest the memories and actions that taint, harm and indeed sustain us. The final frames of the movie were some of the more euphoric and gruesome moments I have seen onscreen; violence and beauty, love and hurt, braided together provocatively and originally in a fundamental human question: How much pain will we suffer for those we love? It proved too much for some, eliciting shrieks, gasps, eye-rolls and even a few walk-outs from the audience.  

It wouldn’t be the NYFF without that; the film kept rolling, the questions kept coming.  

Soleil Nathwani is a New York-based Culture Writer and Film Critic. A former Film Executive and Hedge Fund COO, Soleil hails from London and Mumbai. Twitter: @soleilnathwani