The 62nd New York Film Festival (NYFF) begins on September 27, bringing new films from around the world to New York City through October 14. Though anchored at Lincoln Center, the festival continues to partner with venues in each of the city’s five boroughs, with Museum of the Moving Image representing Queens. Listed below, with descriptions quoted from the festival programmers, is our selection of the festival’s science or technology-related films.
Highlights include HAPPYEND, the fiction feature film debut of Neo Sora, whose acclaimed concert documentary RYUICHI SAKAMOTO | OPUS premiered at last year’s New York Film Festival. Set in a near-future Tokyo, the drama explores Japanese youth culture’s evolution in the face of mounting political and environmental threats.
For cinephiles seeking a respite from anxieties around technology and the future, two of our selections from the festival’s Currents program – both featuring scientists devoted to nature – might appeal. In Jem Cohen’s LITTLE, BIG, AND FAR, a septuagenarian astronomer seeks the ideal mountaintop from which to stargaze, while Pierre Creton’s 7 WALKS WITH MARK BROWN follows the titular paleobotanist to seven French locales in his search for plants native to Normandy’s Pays des Caux region.
Sloan Science & Film will be covering the festival citywide, so stay tuned.
MAIN SLATE
HAPPYEND. Dir. Neo Sora. U.S. Premiere. “ . . . best friends since childhood, Kou (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), run afoul of their disciplinarian principal (Shiro Sano), who has installed a draconian surveillance system after being the target of an elaborate prank. As the boys try to figure out how to align themselves within the increasingly oppressive education system, larger external forces summon further threats, including constant looming natural disasters.”
Still from HAPPYEND. Courtesy of New York Film Festival.
THE SHROUDS. Dir. David Cronenberg. U.S. Premiere. “In David Cronenberg’s sly and thought-provoking latest, techno-entrepreneur Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger), Karsh uncovers a potentially vast conspiracy.”
STRANGER EYES. Dir. Yeo Siew Hua. North American Premiere. “A young married couple’s baby daughter goes missing and suspicion falls on their voyeur neighbor (Lee Kang-sheng, the star of Tsai Ming-liang’s films) in Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua’s riveting and unsettling thriller about contemporary surveillance culture and the mysteries of the human heart.”
Still from STRANGER EYES. Courtesy of New York Film Festival.
CURRENTS
LITTLE, BIG, AND FAR. Dir. Jem Cohen. World Premiere. “In the meditative and expansive new film from Jem Cohen (MUSEUM HOURS), an Austrian astronomer named Karl, who has been re-evaluating his work and life after turning 70, travels to a mountaintop on a Greek island in search of the darkest sky against which to view the cosmos.”
Still from LITTLE, BIG, AND FAR. Courtesy of New York Film Festival.
7 WALKS WITH MARK BROWN. Dir. Pierre Creton, Vincent Barré. U.S. Premiere. “Accompanied by a small filming crew, Pierre Creton and Mark Barré follow paleobotanist Mark Brown across the Pays des Caux region in Normandy as he seeks out native plants from which an ancient garden could be created and explains, with the loving tenderness of a true expert, the etymology, beauty, and scientific properties of the region’s flora.”
THE SUIT. Dir. Heinz Emigholz. North American Premiere. “That loquacious cynic known as ‘Old White Male,’ played by John Erdman in Heinz Emigholz’s 2020 film THE LOBBY returns in this delirious, sci-fi-comic follow-up [. . . ] THE SUIT gives Erdman ample room to expound upon cinema, the corporeal vs. the digital, the apocalypse, architecture, health and nutrition, and what it means to see and be seen in a world that’s increasingly turning inward.”
CURRENTS SHORTS
TRACK_ING. Dir. Chanyeol Lee, Hanna Cho, Samgar Rakym, Ali Tynybekov. North American Premiere. “The emerging field of computer vision turns its powers toward one of cinema’s earliest subjects: the train journey. With surprising insights and occasional poetry, software follows the human along old routes of imperial expansion, across borders of landscape and language.” (Currents Program 2)
EFFORTS OF NATURE. Dir. Morgan Quaintance. “In EFFORTS OF NATURE, a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa, a skewed Bach aria, and throbbing electronics are set against the oceanic oozing pixels of digitized video images, monochromatic aurorae seen from space, and a disjointed inner monologue haunted by the language of wellness. This seemingly disparate corpus of material is composited into an affecting whole [. . . ] a paranoid meditation on chronic pain, recovery, and physical, mental, and planetary states of dissolution.” (Currents Program 2)
GRANDMAMAUNTSISTERCAT. Dir. Zuza Banasińska. “Assembling communist-era propaganda from the Educational Film Studio in Łódź, Poland, the playful and sinister GRANDMAMAUNTSISTERCAT recasts Baba Jaga, the fabled witch of Slavic folklore, as a prehistoric, matriarchal goddess and anti-anthropocentric icon. Collecting, collaging, and warping a vivid bounty of archival images, filmmaker Zuza Banasińska exposes their patriarchal ideologies and representational strictures and detonates them in the name of liberation.” (Currents Program 3)
JIZAI. Dir. Maiko Endo. North American Premiere. “The imaginative powers of the child are augmented by Maiko Endo’s near-future fabulations. Reverberations of Chris Marker’s LA JETÉE can be felt as technologists test ocular and robotic instruments real or imagined, in the lab and in the field. They whisper about ‘the third eye’ as their young subjects grope toward a livable future for humanity among terrestrial elements or the stars.” (Currents Program 3)
Still from JIZAI. Courtesy of New York Film Festival.
LIKE AN OUTBURST. Dir. Sebastián Schjaer. World Premiere. “Microorganisms float against a desert landscape, the lights from cellphone towers blink like fireflies, and a mysterious dialogue between two minds adjusting to a new beginning. In Sebastián Schjaer’s LIKE AN OUTBURST, animals, humans, and machines seek a tenuous coexistence and different ways of seeing and living in the world.” (Currents Program 3)
REVOLVING ROUNDS. Dir. Christina Jauernik, Johann Lurf. U.S. Premiere. “Synchronized cameras trace a stereoscopic crawl through fields and greenhouses in early morning sunlight. An early-century 3-D device projects footage of a pea plant that shatters into a throbbing mass of particles to reveal the vibrant materiality of the film strip. In REVOLVING ROUNDS, Christina Jauernik and Johann Lurf lead the eye on a journey beyond dimensions of Cartesian space and familiar states of matter, an odyssey to the limits of perception and back.” (Currents Program 4)
THE LAND AT NIGHT. Dir. Richard Tuohy, Dianna Barrie. “Against a dense, sinister soundtrack of drones, bells, night creatures, and electric hum, flashes of illumination reveal a trembling crepuscular landscape in Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie’s THE LAND AT NIGHT. It’s a nocturnal ramble through dry grasslands, empty roads, and the skeletal remains of deserted dwellings.” (Currents Program 4)
ARCHIPELAGO OF EARTHEN BONES — TO BUNYA. Dir. Malena Szlam. U.S. Premiere. “The luminous flora, volcanic geographies, and plunging horizons of the Gondwana Rainforest in the eastern ranges of Australia metamorphose into an imaginary landscape in Malena Szlam’s ARCHIPELAGO OF EARTHEN BONES, in which 16mm in-camera editing and superimpositions suggest a lithic temporal scale, deconstructing and reforming desert, mountain, and sky in a dazzling palette of orange, black, and viridescence.” (Currents Program 4)
VIBRANT MATTER. Dir. Pablo Marín. U.S. Premiere. “A city, at once ancient and modern, emerges from among the brush. As wind works at the leaves, the grass, the microphone, the image is subject to its viewer’s hand, which sets snarls of traffic askew, flips a building like a coin, shakes the trees until they splinter. Pablo Marín sketches a suspension of the laws of physics, his compositions offer an idiosyncratic view of a metropolis in flux.” (Currents Program 5)
Still from VIBRANT MATTER. Courtesy of New York Film Festival.
SINKING FEELING. Dir. Zachary Epcar. World Premiere. “In Zachary Epcar’s SINKING FEELING, human bodies and voices are counterposed with the shimmering abstractions, ambient fizzle, and rigid linearity of corporate architecture. A disquieting glimpse into a post-post-modernity of dread and torpor, SINKING FEELING peels back the surfaces of these Ballardian non-places to release pent-up fluids, a stifled longing, a hidden radiance.” (Currents Program 5)
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