The lineup for the 46th annual New Directors/New Films Festival (ND/NF) has been announced. A joint effort of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, ND/NF will screen 29 features and nine short films from “emerging and dynamic filmmaking talent” this year, a press release detailed. Twelve of the projects screening — or about 32 percent of the lineup — are directed or co-directed by women.
This year’s Opening Night film is “Patti Cake$,” which centers on Patricia “Killa P” Dombrowski (Danielle Macdonald, “The East”), a young woman in New Jersey pursuing her dream of a career in hip hop. The film recently premiered at Sundance to critical acclaim and was the subject of a bidding war between several interested studios. Fox Searchlight eventually acquired its worldwide rights for $10.5 million.
Among the women-helmed projects is writer-director Eliza Hittman’s “Beach Rats,” the fest’s centerpiece film. It tells the story of Frankie (Harris Dickinson), “an aimless teenager on the outer edges of Brooklyn.” As the film’s official synopsis reads, Frankie “struggles to escape his bleak home life and navigate questions of self-identity, as he balances his time between his delinquent friends, a potential new girlfriend, and older men he meets online.” Hittman won the U.S. drama directing award at Sundance for her work on the film. “Beach Rats” was acquired by Neon.
Other women-directed titles include Chloé Robichaud’s “Boundaries,” a portrait of three women balancing their personal lives with careers in politics, and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s “By the Time It Gets Dark,” a drama about a film director researching the 1976 Thamassat University massacre. “Happiness Academy,” co-directed by Kaori Kinoshita, blends fiction and documentary to explore the Raelian Church, which teaches that extraterrestrials created life on earth.
“Authenticity is an elusive thing these days, and without it we risk ruin. This is particularly true in cinema,” Rajendra Roy, the Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film at the MoMA, said in a statement. “The filmmakers selected for this year’s festival share a common commitment to honest personal vision and integrity in storytelling.”
Describing the films selected for ND/NF as “acts of resistance and renewal,” Film Society Director of Programming Dennis Lim agreed: “These are distinctive voices you will be hearing a lot from in the years to come.”
New Directors/New Films runs from March 15–26, 2017. Tickets will be available to the general public beginning March 2 at 12pm. Visit the festival website for more information.
You can find all of the women-directed and co-directed films screening at ND/NF below. Plot synopses courtesy of the MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
“Beach Rats”
Eliza Hittman, USA, 2017, 95m
New York Premiere
Eliza Hittman follows up her acclaimed debut It Felt Like Love with this sensitive chronicle of sexual becoming. Frankie (a breakout Harris Dickinson), a bored teenager living in South Brooklyn, regularly haunts the Coney Island boardwalk with his boys — trying to score weed, flirting with girls, killing time. But he spends his late nights dipping his toes into the world of online cruising, connecting with older men and exploring the desires he harbors but doesn’t yet fully understand. Sensuously lensed on 16mm by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, Beach Rats presents a colorful and textured world roiling with secret appetites and youthful self-discovery. A Neon release.
“Léthé”
Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2016, France/Georgia, 15m
Georgian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A lonely horseman wanders past the river of forgetfulness and through a rural Georgian village where both children and adults explore life’s more instinctual pleasures.
“Boundaries” / “Pays”
Chloé Robichaud, Canada, 2016, 100m
English and French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Chloé Robichaud’s sophomore feature centers on three women trying to square their political careers with complicated personal lives. Besco, a fictitious island country off the eastern coast of Canada, possesses vast natural resources that foreign companies would love to tap into, which occasions negotiations between Besco’s president (Macha Grenon) and Canadian government reps (including Natalie Dummar as a junior aide from the Ottawa delegation), mediated by a bilingual American (Emily Van Camp). As these three suffer through endless condescensions and mansplanations, they must also contend with an array of outside threats, from lobbyists, terrorists — and their own families. The performances are impeccable, and Robichaud stylishly renders the often absurd mundanity of her heroines’ political ordeal.
“By the Time It Gets Dark” / “Dao Khanong”
Anocha Suwichakornpong, France/Netherlands/Qatar/Thailand, 2016, 105m
Thai with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In the beguiling, mysterious second feature by Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong, the story of a young film director researching a project about the 1976 massacre of Thai student activists at Thamassat University is just the beginning of a shape-shifting work of fictions within fictions, featuring characters with multiple identities. Drifting across a dizzyingly wide expanse of space and time, By the Time It Gets Dark offers a series of narratives concerning love, longing, the power of cinema, and the vestiges of the past within the present. Asking quietly profound questions about the nature of memory — personal, political, and cinematic — this self-reflexive yet deeply felt film keeps regenerating and unfolding in surprising ways. A KimStim release.
“The Dreamed Path” / “Der traumhafte weg”
Angela Schanelec, Germany, 2016, 86m
English and German with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The Dreamed Path traces a precise picture of a world in which chance, emotion, and dreams determine the trajectory of our lives. In 1984 in Greece, a young German couple, Kenneth and Theres, find their romantic relationship tested after his mother suffers an accident. Thirty years later in Berlin, middle-aged actress Ariane splits with her husband David, an anthropologist. Soon, these two couples’ paths cross in unexpected ways, short-circuiting narrative conventions of cause and effect as well as common conceptions of the self. Angela Schanelec, part of the loose collective of innovative German filmmakers that came to be known as the Berlin School, puts her signature formal control to enigmatic and subtly emotional ends in a film of mesmerizing shots and indelible gestures.
“The Future Perfect” / “El Futuro perfecto”
Nele Wohlatz, Argentina, 2016, 65m
Spanish and Mandarin with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Winner of the Best First Feature prize at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival, Wohlatz’s assured debut is a playful, exceptionally idea-rich work of fiction with documentary fragments. Seventeen-year-old Xiaobin arrives in Argentina from China unable to speak Spanish. Employed at a Chinese grocery store, she saves up enough money to pay for language classes, and enters into a secret romance with a young Indian man, Vijay. As she begins to grasp the Spanish language’s conditional tense, she imagines a constellation of possible futures.
“Three Sentences About Argentina” / “Tres oraciones sobre la Argentina”
Nele Wohlatz, Argentina, 2016, 5m
Spanish and Mandarin with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Nele Wohlatz transposes archival footage of Argentinian skiers into prompts for language exercises in this short made as part of an omnibus feature for the Buenos Aires Film Museum.
“Happiness Academy” / “Bonheur Academie”
Kaori Kinoshita & Alain Della Negra, France, 2016, 75m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Uncannily melding fiction and documentary, Happiness Academy transports us to a hotel retreat for the real-life Raelian Church, a religious sect devoted to the transmission of knowledge inherited from mankind’s extraterrestrial ancestors. As the new candidates for “awakening” (two of whom are played by actress Laure Calamy and musician Arnaud Fleurent-Didier) spend time together at meals, out by the pool, at bonfires, and participating in new age-y group exercises, an unexpected humanism emerges amid the absurd spirituality. Humorous and moving, direct and enigmatic, this singular film meditates on the peculiar ways in which people strive to give their lives meaning.
“My Happy Family” / “Chemi bednieri ojakhi”
Nana Ekvtimishvili & Simon Gross, Georgia/France, 2017, 120m
Georgian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The second feature by Ekvtimishvili and Gross subtly and sensitively follows a middle-aged woman as she aims to leave her husband and escape from the multi-generational living situation she shares with her aging parents, the aforementioned husband, her son, her daughter, and her daughter’s cheating live-in boyfriend. Lacking both personal space and free time, she breaks out on her own, building a new life for herself piece by piece while contemplating the family structure she has left behind. My Happy Family is a funny, perceptive, and sociologically rich work about the myriad roles we play in life and the obligations we endlessly strive to fulfill.
“Pendular”
Julia Murat, Brazil/Argentina/France, 2017, 108m
Portuguese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A male sculptor and a female dancer live and work together in their big, barren loft, a mere strip of orange tape serving as the boundary between his atelier and her studio. Here, the stage is set for a low-key psychosexual drama centered around the couple’s erotic, artistic, and everyday rituals. This absorbingly intimate third feature by Julia Murat (her second, Found Memories, was a ND/NF 2012 selection) is a moving portrait of a couple caught between rivalry and the desire to build a future with each other.
Shorts Program 2:
“As Without So Within”
Manuela De Laborde, Mexico/USA/UK, 2016, 35mm, 25m
New York Premiere
This experimental meditation on the detailed surfaces of objects confronts representation in theater and cinema and forces the viewer to confront hierarchies of viewership.
“The Blue Devils” / “Los diablos azules”
Charlotte Bayer-Broc, France, 2017, 48m
Spanish with English subtitles
World Premiere
More than 3,000 miners of Chile’s La Pampa were shot down by the national army during a demonstration in Iquique, a massacre told in Luis Advis’s 1969 cantata Santa María de Iquique. In The Blue Devils, Charlotte Bayer-Broc wanders through one of the ghost mining towns — a remote outpost in the Atacama Desert — interpreting Advis’s lament across eerily abandoned landscapes and industrial vistas. Bayer-Broc upends cinematic convention in a beguiling adaptation that is entirely her own; this medium-length musical is at once personal and political, reverent and burlesque.
