Now in its 43rd year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors/New Films festival continues its commitment to bringing exciting new discoveries from around the world
New Directors/New Films runs from March 19—30. This year no less than 29 countries are represented in the 27 features and 13 shorts that make up the program.
Opening night on March 19 is a screening of Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, dubbed the first Iranian vampire film, which received its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, in January.
Closing night on March 30 is Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 20,000 Days on Earth, which follows a day in the life of musician Nick Cave during the writing of Cave & the Bad Seeds album Push the Sky Away.
This goal of the prestigious series is to show “new works by emerging and dynamic filmmaking talent.”
To that extent, this year’s U.S. premieres include Robert Minervini’s Stop the Pounding Heart, a documentary-style portrait of a goat farmer’s 14-year-old daughter.
Albert Serra’s Story of My Death is an eccentric riff on the historical costume drama that pits Casanova against Dracula.
Tom Shoval’s Youth depicts a foolhardy kidnapping scheme by two Israeli brothers.
Abdellah Taïa’s Salvation Army, based on the director’s own 2006 novel, concerns the awakening of a young gay.
This year’s lineup also shows Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, who in 2010 showed their film Amer.
Hupert Sauper’s We Come As Friends, an exploration of modern colonialism, is the second film in a planned trilogy that began with his Oscar-nominated Darwin’s Nightmare of 2005.
Among this year’s selections are two psychological thrillers: Alejandro Fernández Almendras’s To Kill a Man and Benjamín Naishtat’s History of Fear.
There is a moody scare flick in Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, a satire about race relations in Justin Simien’s Dear White People, a darkly comic modern take on a Dostoevsky classic in Richard Ayoade’s The Double, a seriocomic romance about reproductive rights in Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child.
The diverse documentaries include the enraged drma by Talal Derki, Return to Homs, and the heady feature by Gilles Deroo and Marianne Pistone, Mouton.
