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Founded in 1963 and presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival is one of the longest-running and most renowned film festivals in the U.S. Each fall, the festival showcases work by both established filmmakers and rising new talent from around the world, bringing together a bold and eclectic mix of cinematic treasures. Over the years, the festival has screened films by some of the most celebrated directors in cinema history, from Luis Buñuel to Yorgos Lanthimos. Kino Film Collection is proud to be teh streaming home to dozens of films that have premiered at NYFF. In celebration of the festival's 62nd installment this fall, we’re spotlighting eight standouts of the last half century.
Want to explore NYFF even further? Check out our entire NYFF playlist on Kino Film Collection.
Be sure to also check out our Toronto International Film Festival highlights for the full fall festival experience!
Bacurau
Premiered at the 2019 New York Film Festival
It’s hard to put your finger on Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film Bacurau. Is it a Western? Is it sci-fi? Is it funny or gut-wrenching? Dornelles and Filho have achieved all of these things, with aplomb. Set in the near future, the story centers around a small Brazilian town and its eclectic residents, who start to experience strange occurrences. An overturned truck is discovered filled with empty coffins. The town disappears from Google Maps. Cell service ceases. While the first half of the movie introduces and emotionally attaches you to the various townspeople, the second half will have you cheering them on with gritted teeth, as they fight back against invading forces in a no-holds-barred bloodbath of resistance and survival. The film is a wild, weird, and wholly entertaining allegory for colonialism, inequality, and political corruption, and boasts a stellar cast that includes the inimitable Sônia Braga and everyone’s favorite German villain-actor, Udo Kier.
Synonyms
Premiered at the 2019 New York Film Festival
In Nadav Lapid’s film Synonyms, protagonist Yoav (played by Tom Mercier in his astonishing screen debut) flees Israel for France in an aggressive effort to erase his identity and be reborn. The film opens with him walking fast down a damp Parisian street and going straight into an empty apartment. Shortly after his arrival, his belongings are stolen and he’s left naked and shivering. Luckily, a French couple come to his rescue and become his first friends in France (and later on, more than friends). The opening scene could be a metaphor for the whole film, which sees Yoav trying to assimilate with a frenetic sense of purpose, but faltering often. At times the film is a wild and comical ride, at others it’s a sobering reminder of what it means to be alone in a foreign land with no real identity. A nod to the film’s title, Yoav spends much of his time learning French words to describe his rejected homeland—méchant (nasty), hideux (hideous), fétide (fetid). Taking a page out of Yoav’s pocket dictionary, the film could also be summed up in a few words: bold, fearless, unpredictable, and completely unmissable.
Fire at Sea
Premiered at the 2016 New York Film Festival
Fire at Sea is both a pressing documentary about one of the largest and most critical crises of our time and a tender, hyper-realist human story. Director Gianfranco Rosi examines the migrant crisis through one central focal point: the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, a common docking point for migrants escaping Africa and the Middle East. The film exposes the horrific conditions migrants endure at sea through their state upon arrival, as the Italian Coast Guard receives the boats. Some do not survive the journey, and some arrive drenched in diesel. Rosi zooms in further to follow a few local residents, including a young boy named Samuele and his doctor, who juggles routine checkups with autopsies of migrants who died at sea. Bringing the migrants’ unthinkable existence into close proximity to the mundanities of small town life, Fire at Sea is a reminder that global crises are not always far away. Sometimes they’re in your own backyard.
Neptune Frost
Premiered at the 2021 New York Film Festival
You won’t have seen anything like Neptune Frost. Musician Saul Williams and artits Anisia Uzeyman’s Afrofuturist sci-fi musical defies every cinematic and storytelling boundary in the book. Set in an alternate Burundi, the film follows Neptune, an intersex hacker, and Matalusa, a fugitive coltan miner and head of the hackers’ village collective. United in love and revolution, the two lead a band of hackers and rebels to fight against the Authority, a totalitarian regime that exploits both locals and the natural resources they mine. Neptune Frost explores themes like sexual identity, anti-colonialist politics, and technology through hypnotic musical numbers nodding to Williams’ signature sound fusing hip-hop and poetry. But the real dazzle is the film’s visual style, which blends cyberpunk tech renderings, voluminous and colorful costumes, and acid-trip-like dream sequences into a creation that is truly beyond comparison.
Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq
Premiered at the 2013 New York Film Festival
Tanaquil Le Clercq was one of the greatest ballet dancers of all time. With a statuesque figure unseen in her profession before her and a magnetic personality that shone through on stage, Le Clercq broke new ground for the art of ballet. She also became a muse to legendary choreographers Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine. Though both were in love with her, Tanny (as her friends called her) would go on to marry the latter. Nancy Buirski’s documentary explores all this while tracing the trajectory of Tanny’s rise as a dancer at the New York City Ballet followed by the unthinkable tragedy that cut her career short. Through archival dance clips, home videos, photos, kinescopes, and interviews, Buirski paints a full portrait of Tanny’s professional and personal life. But the film’s highlight is her breathtaking performance of Afternoon of a Faun, which immortalizes her as one of the most enchanting and otherworldly ballerinas in history.
Duet For Cannibals
Premiered at the 1969 New York Film Festival
Susan Sontag, the ultimate intellectual multi-hyphenate (essayist, novelist, critic, and filmmaker) made her film debut with Duet For Cannibals. The film follows two couples in Stockholm who become entangled in a psychological power struggle. When German political exile Dr. Arthur Bauer retires to Sweden with his younger Italian wife Francesca, he hires Tomas to edit his correspondences and moves him in along with his naive girlfriend Ingrid. Soon the older couple is pressuring the younger duo into sexually charged, sometimes dangerous, dares. While the enigmatic characters and their lurid behavior certainly invite conversation, trying to interpret the film would defeat its purpose. In her seminal essay, “Against Interpretation,” Sontag writes, “In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.” True to her multi-hyphenate form, Sontag didn’t stop at the argument; she made a film to prove her point. Given how the film has confounded critics, it’s clear she’s succeeded.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Premiered at the 2003 New York Film Festival
Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a tender and captivating tribute to the cinema experience. The film follows moviegoers attending the last screening at the Fu-Ho Grand Theater in Taipei. The final picture on the marquee is Dragon Inn, a groundbreaking martial arts film from 1967. Tsai’s film observes the movie watchers with stillness and minimal dialogue, allowing the actions to truly come to life on screen(s). Though the actions of the patrons are minimal—they watch, they sleep, they get up to use the restroom—there is a sense of rich history in the theater’s seats. At one point, one moviegoer asks another, “Did you know this theater is haunted?” Among the audience are two of the stars of Dragon Inn, playing themselves and watching their younger versions on screen with heartbreaking nostalgia. A film within a film featuring two real-life actors of said film within a film? Only Tsai can turn a premise so dizzyingly meta into something so poetic.
L'Age d'Or
Premiered at the 2019 New York Film Festival
Belonging firmly in the surrealist canon, Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or is a masterpiece of the genre. A collaboration between Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, who is credited as a co-writer, the film explores Buñuel’s disdain for the middle class and the Roman Catholic Church while unabashedly celebrating the power of human sexuality. The predominantly silent film follows couple Lya Lys and Gaston Modot as they try to consummate their passion only to be thwarted by various bourgeois or religious forces. One of the film’s more notorious moments involves Lya fellating the toe of a garden statue when her lover is pulled away by a phone call during their lovemaking. Buñuel’s audacious vision and ability to shock stand the test of time, but one can only imagine how many jaws he dropped in 1930.