Film at Lincoln Center Announces 61st NYFF Talk Series with Sandra Hüller, Todd Haynes, Conversations with Annie Baker & Raven Jackson and More

Film at Lincoln Center has announced Talks for the 61st New York Film Festival (September 29–October 15), in-depth conversations between moderators, filmmakers, and audiences. The series, presented by HBO, is a parallel section that complements the previously announced film program and is free and open to the public.

The lineup includes career-spanning Deep Focus talks with Todd Haynes (May December), who will present the U.S. premiere of his short Image Book, which explores the making of his new feature; legendary poet and activist Nikki Giovanni (Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project), moderated by award-winning author Edwidge Danticat; Sandra Hüller (star of Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest); and Catherine Breillat (Last Summer; Abuse of Weakness, NYFF51), who returns to NYFF after a decade.

The third edition of the Amos Vogel Lecture features writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado, whose debut film Orlando, My Political Biography is a NYFF61 Main Slate selection. 

Crosscuts conversations focus on unique and inspired pairings of filmmakers and artists across NYFF sections, genres, and styles. This year’s lineup includes talks between Wang Bing (Youth (Spring) and Man in Black) and Eduardo Williams (The Human Surge 3), who will discuss their inspirations and influences among other subjects; Sandra Adair (editor of Hit Man) and Jonathan Alberts (editor of All of Us Strangers), who will look at the craft of editing; Annie Baker (Janet Planet) and Raven Jackson (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt), two artists whose first features are debuting in NYFF61; and Nancy Savoca (Household Saints) and Joanna Arnow (The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed), two independent New York filmmakers whose films—made three decades apart—screen, respectively, in this year’s Revivals and Currents sections.

Film Comment, FLC’s award-winning publication, will lead two special NYFF roundtables, recorded live for the Film Comment Podcast: Trust Issues, produced in collaboration with World Records, which brings together filmmakers Rosine Mbakam (Mambar Pierrette), Frederick Wiseman (Menus-Plaisirs les Troisgros), and Kleber Mendonça Filho (Pictures of Ghosts) for a conversation about the slippery nature of truth in cinema; and the annual Critics’ Wrap, which enlists a group of critics in a lively wrap-up discussion with Devika Girish and Clinton Krute, co-deputy editors of Film Comment, about the NYFF61 lineup.

Cinephile Game Night returns to NYFF, hosted by Cinephile: A Card Game creator Cory Everett and Cinephile Game Night co-hosts Jordan Raup and Conor O’Donnell.

NYFF will also host IndieWire Presents: Screen Talk Live with Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson and Deputy Managing Editor Ryan Lattanzio for a special live edition of Screen Talk, the independent news site’s weekly podcast. 

Talks are organized by Devika Girish and Madeline Whittle, in collaboration with Dennis Lim.

Here is the full lineup:

THE 2023 AMOS VOGEL LECTURE: Paul B. Preciado
2021 marked the birth centenary of Amos Vogel, the pioneering film programmer, author, and co-founder of the New York Film Festival. To celebrate this occasion and honor Vogel’s path-blazing legacy, the festival inaugurated the Amos Vogel Lecture, to be delivered annually by an artist or thinker who embodies the subversive spirit of Vogel’s cinephilia and brings it into conversation with the present and future of cinema.

For the third edition of the Amos Vogel Lecture, we are proud to welcome writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado, whose debut feature, Orlando, My Political Biography, screens in the NYFF61 Main Slate. Known for his pioneering 2006 “body-essay” Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, Preciado brings his maverick combination of autobiography and analysis to filmmaking with Orlando, My Political Biography. Playfully ventriloquizing the experiences of an ensemble of trans and non-binary participants (including the director) through the gender-nonconforming narratives of Virginia Woolfe’s 1928 novel Orlando, the movie stakes an exuberant claim for trans autonomy while also ushering in a fearlessly original new voice in cinema.
Wednesday, October 4, 6:00pm, Amphitheater

DEEP FOCUS
In-depth dialogues with festival filmmakers and their creative collaborators

Todd Haynes
With NYFF61 Opening Night selection May December, director Todd Haynes brings together his career-long preoccupations—with the nature of performance, the revelatory possibilities of melodrama, and the inner lives of women—to a thrilling, masterful crescendo. Drawing from a real-life, tabloid-fodder tale of a middle-school teacher’s affair with her much younger student, May December is a prism-like narrative about celebrity, power, and the deceptions we inflict on each other and ourselves in the name of desire.

To celebrate the North American premiere of May December at NYFF61, we are thrilled to present the U.S. premiere of Image Book, a short film by Haynes exploring the making of his new film, made as part of a commission by the Centre Pompidou for its collection “Où en êtes-vous?” The screening will follow an extended conversation with Haynes and will end with an on-site display of the director’s actual image book for May December, featuring reference images and location shots.
Saturday, September 30, 4:00pm, Amphitheater

Nikki Giovanni
In NYFF61 Spotlight selection Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Story, directed by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, the acclaimed poet and activist Nikki Giovanni—a driving force in the early years of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and a leading figure of the American literary landscape over the last half-century—acts as our guide and narrator through an intimate, disarmingly frank account of her life. The film details the evolution of Giovanni’s Afrofuturist-feminist philosophical outlook and celebrates her political audacity, poetic eloquence, and poignant relationship with her family. Join us for a lively, career-spanning discussion with Giovanni about her writing practice, her creative and political trajectories, and the experience of transmuting her life story into cinema. Moderated by author Edwidge Danticat.
Sunday, October 1, 1:00pm, Amphitheater

Sandra Hüller
With her starring turns in two of the year’s most audacious films, Sandra Hüller has cemented her place as Europe’s leading—and perhaps most fearless—actress. In Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Hüller offers a tightly wound performance of manicured evil as the wife of a Nazi officer; in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes, Hüller is at once vulnerable, intractable, and mysterious as a writer of autofiction accused of her husband’s murder. The two roles demonstrate both the breadth of the actress’s range and the depth of her craft, and follow a two-decade oeuvre of complex, original, and indelible portrayals. We’re thrilled to welcome Hüller for an extended conversation about her illustrious career and the making of her latest bravura performances. Deep Focus: Sandra Hüller is sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter.
Sunday, October 8, 6:00pm, Amphitheater

Catherine Breillat
A decade after premiering the provocative Abuse of Weakness, a searing adaptation of her own nonfiction book, the inimitable French auteur Catherine Breillat returns to NYFF with Main Slate selection Last Summer. The incendiary, compelling new drama continues and complicates a body of work that has fearlessly interrogated the social and psychological contradictions of sexual morality, and laid bare the combustive ways in which the normative framework of the nuclear family comes into conflict with the unruly forces of female desire. We’re honored to host Breillat for a wide-ranging conversation exploring her rigorous formal approach, the abiding thematic interests of her filmography, and her unflinching commitment to probing the repressed tensions that underlie myriad cultural taboos.
Thursday, October 12, 6:00pm, Amphitheater

CROSSCUTS
Conversations between filmmakers across festival sections, genres, and styles

Wang Bing & Eduardo Williams
If there are two films from 2023 that might be remembered in the years to come as time capsules of life as we live it today, they are Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring), an NYFF61 Main Slate selection, and Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3, which opens this year’s NYFF Currents lineup. Williams follows up on The Human Surge with a playfully misnumbered sequel that captures the ambulations of a group of young people in three countries—Peru, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka—using a 360-degree camera, giving resonant form to the virtual, cacophonous, and borderless (yet bounded) texture of our contemporary existence. In Youth (Spring), Bing returns to his project of documenting a China transformed by the vagaries of industrialization: Shot across five years within privately run textile workshops in Zhili, which employ swathes of underpaid twentysomethings, Youth (Spring) accumulates a monumental portrait of life shaped by the temporality of ruthless, relentless production. This talk will bring together these two masterful chroniclers of the present for a conversation about their inspirations and influences, their form-bending play with the cinematic medium, and their radical approaches to time and space. Moderated by Devika Girish.
Sunday, October 1, 6:00pm, Amphitheater

Joanna Arnow & Nancy Savoca
With this year’s NYFF Revivals selections Household Saints (1993) and Renata (1982), New York native Nancy Savoca casts a playfully incisive eye on the ways in which familial, social, and cultural expectations shape the lives of her lovingly drawn characters. Likewise, in the Currents section, Joanna Arnow’s feature debut, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, limns the humor inherent in interpersonal relationships by charting the personal and professional indignities borne by its thirtysomething Brooklyn-based protagonist. We’re excited to convene Arnow and Savoca for an expansive conversation about their respective experiences navigating the New York indie filmmaking landscape across decades; their wry approaches to dialogue, direction, and mise-en-scène; and their shared interest in depicting independent women finding their ways in a world that remains stubbornly skeptical of women’s desires. Moderated by Madeline Whittle.
Monday, October 2, 6:30pm, Amphitheater

Sandra Adair, ACE & Jonathan Alberts, ACE
Across genres, styles, and modes of production, the work of the film editor remains one of the least visible but most essential elements of cinematic storytelling. In this year’s NYFF lineup, Main Slate selection All of Us Strangers and Spotlight selection Hit Man are exemplary showcases for the range of expressive effects made possible by the film editor’s contributions, demonstrating how pacing, rhythm, and punctuation can amplify or obscure meaning, accentuate performances, and synthesize precise interactions between comedy, drama, suspense, and eroticism. Join Sandra Adair (Hit Man) and Jonathan Alberts (All of Us Strangers)—both members of American Cinema Editors—for an in-depth conversation about the craft and profession of film editing, their collaborations with directors Richard Linklater and Andrew Haigh, and the complex ways in which the editor’s creative labor comes into contact with the work of cinematographers, actors, and others. Moderated by Joseph Krings of American Cinema Editors.
Tuesday, October 3, 6:30pm, Amphitheater

Annie Baker & Raven Jackson
Breaking onto the scene with two of the most original and assured feature debuts in recent memory, NYFF61 Main Slate filmmakers Annie Baker (Janet Planet) and Raven Jackson (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt) have each crafted tone poems of breathtaking delicacy. With stories that weave together themes of motherhood and coming-of-age with a lush, exquisitely detailed sense of place, Baker and Jackson distill and transpose the singular qualities of their literary work—the eloquently understated naturalism of Baker’s plays; the sensuous yet vibrant lyricism of Jackson’s poetry—to the cinematic medium. We’re pleased to host Baker and Jackson for a discussion exploring the evolution of their artistry from the page or the stage to the screen, and their respective approaches to crafting idiosyncratic women characters. Moderated by Kameron Austin Collins.
Tuesday, October 10, 6:00pm, Amphitheater

ROUNDTABLES
Panel discussions that connect the festival to the themes of the moment

Film Comment Live: Trust Issues
“Every film is a documentary of its own making,” Jacques Rivette famously said, pointing to the mix of fabrication and truth that lies at the heart of every movie. As images increasingly permeate our lives, these questions are ever more complex. What constitutes truth when the camera intervenes? How do we decide to accept—or question—what we see? This roundtable will explore the ways in which filmmakers engage both documentary and narrative techniques to invite and challenge viewers’ trust in images. Join Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute, World Records editor Jason Fox, and NYFF61 filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho (Pictures of Ghosts), Rosine Mbakam (Mambar Pierrette), and Frederick Wiseman (Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros) for a discussion about the slippery nature of truth on the screen. This panel expands on the ideas in Trust Issues, a new audio series by World Records.
Monday, October 9, 12:30pm, Amphitheater

Film Comment Live: Festival Report
Every year, as the festival draws to a close, a group of critics gathers together for a spirited wrap-up discussion with Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute about the movies they’ve seen in the NYFF lineup. This year, Molly Haskell, Adam Nayman, and Kelli Weston will join as panelists for this end-of-fest ritual.
Saturday, October 14, 6:00pm, Amphitheater

SPECIAL EVENTS

Cinephile Game Night: NYFF61 Edition
The New York Film Festival is proud to welcome back Cinephile for our second year of Cinephile Game Night events during the festival at the EBM Amphitheater! Featuring a mix of movie trivia and other popular Cinephile games like Six Degrees, Filmography, and Inglorious Basterd, Cinephile Game Night is a trivia night like no other. Featuring Cinephile: A Card Game creator Cory Everett and Cinephile Game Night co-hosts Jordan Raup and Conor O’Donnell, along with other special guests to be announced, the events will feature multiple trivia rounds including NYFF history and beyond, with chances to win tickets to this year’s edition and more prizes. Come meet and mingle with your fellow movie buffs for an evening of festival fun. There’s no need to bring Cinephile to participate––only your movie-loving brain is required.

Saturday, September 30, 7:30pm
Sunday, October 1, 8pm
Tuesday, October 3, 8:30pm
Tuesday, October 10, 8pm

IndieWire Presents: Screen Talk Live
Join IndieWire’s Editor-at-Large Anne Thompson and Deputy Managing Editor Ryan Lattanzio for a special live edition of Screen Talk, the independent news site’s weekly podcast. In what promises to be an animated conversation, the hosts and a special guest will discuss the fall film festival season, new releases, awards buzz, and industry news.
Wednesday, October 11, 3pm