We’re hoping the New York Film Festival (NYFF) follows in the footsteps of Cannes and Locarno and signs a gender parity pledge. The fest just announced its main slate, and it’s sorely lacking in films from female helmers. Of 30 titles screening, just four are directed by women, amounting to 13 percent of the lineup
Last year eight of 25 features in the program, or 32 percent, were helmed by women. This step backwards is especially disappointing given the rallying cries of #TimesUp.
The main slate includes Cannes standout “Happy as Lazzaro,” Alice Rohrwacher’s drama about an unlikely friendship between a peasant and a nobleman, and “High Life,” Claire Denis’ sci-fi story following criminals sent to space.
Also screening are Tamara Jenkins’ “Private Life,” a portrait of a middle-aged New York couple trying to have a child, and Dominga Sotomayor’s “Too Late to Die Young,” a 1990-set drama that follows a 16 year-old Chilean girl living off the grid in a remote community.
Check out complete synopses for the women-directed films screening in NYFF’s main slate below, courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter.
Happy as Lazzaro/Lazzaro felice
Dir. Alice Rohrwacher, Italy, 2018, 128m
North American Premiere
In the transfiguring and transfixing third feature from Alice Rohrwacher (The Wonders, NYFF52), we find ourselves amid a throng of tobacco farmers living in a state of extreme deprivation on an estate known as Inviolata, with wide-eyed teenager Lazzaro (nonprofessional discovery Adriano Tardiolo) emerging as a focal point. Although this all seems to be taking place in the past (as implied by the warm grain of Hélène Louvart’s 16mm cinematography), a stunning mid-movie leap vaults the narrative squarely into the present day and into the realm of parable. In a fable touching on perennial class struggle with Christian overtones, Rohrwacher summons the spirit of Pasolini, while also nodding to Ermanno Olmi and Visconti. A Netflix release.
High Life
Dir. Claire Denis, Germany/France/USA/UK/Poland, 2018, 110m
U.S. Premiere
Claire Denis’s latest film is set aboard a spacecraft piloted by death row prisoners on a decades-long suicide mission to enter and harness the power of a black hole. But as is always the case with this filmmaker, the actual structure seems to evolve organically through moods and uncanny spells, and the closest juxtapositions of violence and intimacy. High Life features some of the most unsettling passages Denis has ever filmed, as well as moments of the greatest delicacy and tenderness. With Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, and Mia Goth.
Private Life
Dir. Tamara Jenkins, USA, 2017, 123m
In Tamara Jenkins’s first film in ten years, Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti are achingly real as Rachel and Richard, a middle-aged New York couple caught in the desperation, frustration, and exhaustion of trying to have a child, whether by fertility treatments or adoption or surrogate motherhood. They find a willing partner in Sadie (the formidable Kayli Carter), Richard’s niece by marriage, who happily agrees to donate her eggs, and the three of them build their own little outcast family in the process. Private Life is a wonder, by turns hilarious and harrowing (sometimes at once), and a very carefully observed portrait of middle-class Bohemian Manhattanites. With John Carroll Lynch and Molly Shannon. A Netflix release.
Too Late to Die Young
Dir. Dominga Sotomayor, Chile/Brazil/Argentina/Netherlands/Qatar, 2018, 110m
U.S. Premiere
The year 1990 was when Chile transitioned to democracy, but all of that seems a world away for 16-year-old Sofia, who lives far off the grid in a mountain enclave of artists and bohemians. Too Late to Die Young takes place during the hot, languorous days between Christmas and New Year’s Day, when the troubling realities of the adult world—and the elemental forces of nature—begin to intrude on her teenage idyll. Shot in dreamily diaphanous, sun-splashed images and set to period-perfect pop, the second feature from one of Latin American cinema’s most artful and distinctive voices is at once nostalgic and piercing, a portrait of a young woman—and a country—on the cusp of exhilarating and terrifying change.
