ALPHA LIST OF ALL FILMS
THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Around the World in 17 Days
The New York Film Festival, which will celebrate its 40th year in 2002, continues its proud tradition of showing
the newest and most important cinematic works by directors from around the world. The 17-day Festival is an
unparalleled showcase of inspiring and provocative cinema by emerging talents and first-rank international
artists whose films are often recognized as contemporary classics.
The Festival was created in 1963 to bring to New York the best films from abroad and to highlight American
films "that might have otherwise passed unnoticed," wrote Richard Roud, who, along with Amos Vogel,
co-founded the New York Film Festival. Although any film of any length is eligible – as long as it has been
produced within the last year and has not been shown in the New York area – there has only been one factor in
choosing a film for the New York Film Festival. "The only criterion has been quality," declared Roud nearly 40
years ago. That tenet holds true today.
"In my opinion the NYFF has changed very little since I came aboard in 1988," observes Richard Peña, Chairman
of the New York Film Festival Selection Committee and Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
"The basic structure of the Festival--approximately 25 films, not limited or defined by categories or nationalities --
remains the Festival's signature feature. The NYFF is not a panorama, but a selection; you might not like or agree
with the selection, but it's clear that the films chosen offer a distinctive point-of-view on what's happening in
cinema today."
Called a boutique among film festival department stores like Toronto or Sundance, the New York Film Festival
focuses on only the best films of the year. No award has ever been associated with the NYFF, as inclusion into
the event is considered an honor enough to most filmmakers. Former NYFF Committee Member and New York
Times critic Roger Greenspun wrote, "The purpose of the Festival really is to discover and present masterpieces
or near masterpieces…Filmmakers have had to go elsewhere for their Golden Lions (Venice), Golden Bears
(Berlin), and Golden Boomerangs (Melbourne)."
The strong history of the New York Film Festival began with the very first film, Luis Buñuel’s EXTERMINATING
ANGEL. Since then, the NYFF has pioneered critical and popular awareness of the most significant trends in
international cinema: from the French and Czech New Waves of the 1960s to the New German Cinema of the
1970s, from the renaissance of American independent filmmaking in the 1980s to the emergence of Chinese
and Iranian cinema in the 1990s. (In fact, film production was virtually unknown in Taiwan and Iran 39 years ago.)
The list of filmmakers closely associated with the NYFF reads like a Who's Who of modern cinema: François
Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Varda, Milos Forman, R.W. Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Pedro
Almodovar, Jane Campion, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, Abbas Kiarostami, among others.
"If the films seem to be chosen from a wider spectrum of national cinemas today," says Peña, "that's simply
because of our awareness of world cinema has become in recent years that much richer." Former Committee
member Greenspun observed that the glory of the NYFF "lies with its willingness to take chances and to feature
again and again such brilliant and unrelenting films as Jean Eustache’s THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE or
Jacques Rivette’s L’AMOUR FOU." In the last decade Festival screenings of Bela Tarr’s SATANTANGO,
Lars von Trier’s THE KINGDOM, and Jia Zhang Ke’s PLATFORM have become almost legendary.
The Festival, hailed as one of the premiere American forums for groundbreaking films, has featured studio
stalwarts like Martin Scorsese (MEAN STREETS), Peter Bogdanovich (THE LAST PICTURE SHOW), Terrence
Malick (BADLANDS), and Woody Allen (CELEBRITY) alongside first- or second-time filmmakers. Over the last
decade the NYFF has introduced and launched the works of budding American auteurs like Paul Thomas
Anderson (BOOGIE NIGHTS), David Gordon Green (GEORGE WASHINGTON), Wes Anderson (RUSHMORE),
Todd Solondz (HAPPINESS), and, of course, Quentin Tarantino whose PULP FICTION opened the Festival in
1994.
PULP FICTION is one of many a star-studded Opening Night films that the Festival has celebrated. On that
occasion, John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis participated in the festivities.
A host of stars came out for Robert Altman’s SHORT CUTS in 1993, including newlyweds Lyle Lovett and Julia
Roberts, and CELEBRITY in 1998 opened the Festival with Leonardo DiCaprio, Charlize Theron, and
Kenneth Branaugh. Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline came for Ang Lee’s ICE STORM in 1997, while
Jacqueline Bissett -- and Lillian Gish and John Lindsay -- came for Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT in 1973???
Not to be outdone, Closing Nights are also events for star-gazing – and sometimes controversy. One of the
most notorious was LAST TANGO IN PARIS 1972. With all the "buzz" surrounding the film and with
Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider??? and director Bernardo Bertolucci in attendance, it was probably the
hardest ticket to come by in the Festival’s long history of hard-to-get tickets. With Milos Forman’s
PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT in 1996, Larry Flynt himself came with Woody Harrelson, Courtney Love and
Ed Norton. BADLANDS was a discovery in 1973, when Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek attended???, as was
last year’s CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, when two of China’s biggest stars Chow Yun Fat and
Michelle Yeoh came to New York to launch their film.
Starting in 1994, the Festival incorporated the "Festival Centerpiece" into its program. Showing on the middle
weekend of the Festival, the Centerpiece was inaugurated with Woody Allen’s BULLETS OVER BROADWAY
and has included STRANGE DAYS (Kathryn Bigelow), LES VOLEURS (André Techiné), THE SWEET
HEREAFTER (Atom Egoyan), BLACK CAT, WHITE CAT (Emir Kusturica), TOPSY-TURVY (Mike Leigh) and
last year’s POLLO-CK (Ed Harris).
In recent years, the NYFF has expanded to present special programs, as well as an acclaimed avant-garde
sidebar and retrospectives by cinematic masters – such as Jacques Tati, Youssef Chahine, Sacha Guitry,
Pietro Germi and Wojciech Has – at the Walter Reade Theater, the Film Society’s year-round venue.
But at its core, it has stayed true to its course of showing only 25 – 30 features and shorter films.
Each year some 70,000 audience members and close to 1,000 industry professionals attend the Festival.
Coverage in the press reaches more than 100 million readers and viewers. For the past six years, the Festival
has been sponsored exclusively by Grand Marnier.
Shaping a program culled from over 1500 annual submissions is the job of a five-person Selection Committee
headed by Peña. Throughout the years, the Committee has taken many forms, starting with four members and
sometimes ballooning to eight. The strength of the Committee and its choices are a reflection of the participants
that have been past members, including Susan Sontag, Andrew Sarris, Molly Haskell, Richard Corliss, Roger
Greenspun, J. Hoberman, Penelope Houston, Jack Kroll, Tom Luddy, Amos Vogel, Carrie Rickey, David Denby,
David Sterritt, and Stuart Klawans.
For the 2001 New York Film Festival, the Committee includes Richard Peña, Kathleen Murphy, Dave Kehr,
Manohla Dargis, and John Anderson. A minimum of three members of the Committee are film critics and
scholars, not members of the Film Society staff – a structure designed to assume maximum objectivity in
its choices.
