50 Years of the New York Film Festival Jun 01 – Oct 02

NYFF ‘93: The Piano

Skype Q&A with director Jane Campion!

Holly Hunter won a richly deserved Oscar for her revelatory performance as a mute Scotswoman torn between a loveless marriage and a passionate erotic affair in 19th century New Zealand.

NYFF ‘94: Hoop Dreams

Director/editor Steve James, producer/editor Frederick Marx and producer/cinematographer Peter Gilbert in person!

An epic study of race, class and the high price of the American dream, as framed by the competing destinies of two inner-city Chicago youth basketball stars.

NYFF ‘95: Lamerica

A pair of Italian huckster brothers have their eyes opened to the harsh realities of post-Communist Albania in director Amelio’s moving, darkly comic neorealist triumph.

NYFF ‘96: Irma Vep

Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours, Carlos) made his first NYFF appearance with this latter-day Day for Night about the chaos that erupts on a film set before "action" and after "cut."

NYFF ‘97: Taste of Cherry

A suicidal man traverses the Iranian countryside looking for a volunteer to throw dirt on his grave in Abbas Kiarostami’s remarkable paean to the small miracles of everyday life and the elusive nature of happiness.

NYFF ‘98: Flowers of Shanghai

Hou made his seventh festival appearance with this ravishingly beautiful chamber drama that follows the intertwined fortunes and intrigues of four “flower girls” serving in the opulent brothels of fin-de-siècle 19th-century Shanghai.

NYFF ‘99: Topsy Turvy

Mike Leigh’s lavish backstage musical about the making of The Mikado is one of the great, uncannily perceptive films on the subject of artistic creation.

NYFF ‘00: The House of Mirth

Gillian Anderson is magnificent as an ill-fated woman of means in 1890s New York in this brilliant adaptation of Edith Wharton’s perceptive class drama.

NYFF ‘01: I’m Going Home

An actor (Michel Piccoli) tries to put his life back together after the loss of his daughter and son-in-law in this crowning achievement from 103-year-old director Oliveira.

NYFF ‘02: Talk to Her

In this triumphantly bizarre romantic drama—winner of the Best Original Screenplay Oscar—Almodóvar weaves together the destinies of two men in love with comatose women.

NYFF ‘03: Dogville

Beautiful fugitive Nicole Kidman takes refuge in a Depression-era mountain town in Lars von Trier’s spellbinding deconstruction of sacred American values, one of the essential films of the 21st century.

NYFF ‘04: The World

A global village theme park is the setting for this remarkable fourth feature by Jia Zhangke, about provincial Chinese youth looking for love and meaning in the big city of Beijing.

NYFF ‘05: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

The film that ignited the Romanian New Wave, Cristi Puiu’s extraordinary black comedy traces the odyssey of one dying man through a public health system that resembles the nine circles of hell.

NYFF ‘06: Offside

A group of Iranian women attempt to infiltrate a men-only football stadium during a World Cup qualifying game in director Jafar Panahi’s sharply observed social comedy.

NYFF ‘07: Silent Light

A farmer in the Mennonite community of Chihuahua, Mexico enters into an affair with a neighbor woman while his wife suffers in silence in Reygadas’ enormously affecting drama of marital and spiritual crisis.

NYFF ‘08: Gomorrah

Director Matteo Garrone rebuilt the modern Mafia film from the ground up with this blisteringly intense, panoramic portrait of the Neapolitan underworld.

NYFF ‘09: The White Ribbon

In its broadest sense a portrait of the formative years of the Nazi generation, Michael Haneke’s meticulous social drama—shot in stunning black-and-white and featuring an extraordinary cast of nonprofessional child actors—continues its maker’s career-spanning fascination with the brutality lurking beneath society’s placid facades, while taking his artistry to a new level of accomplishment.

NYFF ‘10: Black Venus

A brilliant and unsparing bio-pic of Saartjie "Sarah" Baartman, the indigenous South African infamously exhibited as the "Hottentot Venus" in the traveling carnivals and bourgeois salons of 19th-century Europe.

NYFF ‘11: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

A police caravan searches the Turkish countryside for a dead man buried in a shallow grave in Ceylan’s visually stunning, existential procedural.

NYFF ‘78: Gates of Heaven

Errol Morris in person for a Q&A following the screening!

Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’s uncanny debut feature—hailed by critic Roger Ebert as one of the 10 greatest films ever made—follows the shifting fortunes of two Bay Area pet cemeteries.

NYFF ‘79: The Black Stallion

Special family matinee! Only $6 for kids!

Initially the object of indifference from its distributor, United Artists, first-time director Carroll Ballard’s intensely lyrical film of Walter Farley’s classic children’s novel was buoyed by its inclusion in NYFF (and the good reviews that followed) to become a major hit and and one of the most beloved family films of all time.

NYFF ‘80: The Last Metro

Catherine Deneuve gives one of her greatest performances as the wife of a Jewish theater director in Nazi-occupied Paris in François Truffaut’s classic wartime melodrama.

NYFF ‘81: Man of Iron

Legendary Polish director Andrzej Wajda made his fourth NYFF appearance with this epic chronicle of the birth of the Solidarity labor movement.

NYFF ‘82: Moonlighting

Five Polish construction workers (led by foreman Jeremy Irons, in one of his first major roles) renovate a London flat while Solidarity collapses back home in Skolimowski’s lyrical, darkly funny, altogether remarkable political allegory.

NYFF ‘83: Nostalghia

A melancholic Russian poet journeys through Italy while researching an 18th-century composer and forms an unexpected bond with a local madman in Tarkovsky’s hypnotically beautiful paean to the death of culture and tradition.

NYFF ‘84: Three Crowns of the Sailor

A student who has just committed a brutal murder is persuaded by a drunken sailor to listen to his macabre life story in Ruiz’s dazzlingly surreal dream narrative, shot by legendary Buñuel and Resnais cameraman Sacahe Vierny.

NYFF ‘85: A Year of the Quiet Sun

An American GI (Scott Wilson) and a Polish war widow fall in love in post-WWII Poland in Zanussi’s haunting, timeless story of love’s ability to transcend all personal and cultural barriers. Winner, Golden Lion, Venice Film Festival.

NYFF ‘86: Police

Gérard Depardieu stars as a jaded police inspector who finds himself drawn to a Tunisian drug dealer’s seductive moll (Sophie Marceau) in Pialat’s brutally efficient genre film cum searing, Cassavetes-style drama.

NYFF ‘87: Police Story

Co-presented by New York Asian Film Festival.

Jackie Chan’s personal favorite among his more than 100 films features the action superstar in several of his most crazily balletic, duly celebrated set-pieces, including dangling from a speeding bus with just an umbrella for support.

NYFF ‘88: Bird

Forest Whitaker gives a standout performance as jazz legend Charlie “Yardbird” Parker in Clint Eastwood’s hugely ambitious, personal and evocative bio-pic—the first of Eastwood’s many NYFF appearances.

NYFF ‘89: Roger & Me

Director Michael Moore in person!

Moore’s explosive--and explosively funny--debut feature, follows the filmmaker to the decimated auto town of Flint, Michigan as he surveys the economic damage and strives to interview elusive GM chairman Roger B. Smith.

NYFF ‘90: Ju Dou

Gong Li stars as the third wife of a sadistic dye factory owner in Zhang Yimou’s controversial, Oscar-nominated tale of forbidden passion.

NYFF ‘91: My Own Private Idaho

Hustler buddies River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves drift through the Pacific Northwest and the Italian countryside in Gus Van Sant’s landmark American indie.

NYFF ‘92: Dream of Light

The Spanish realist painter Antonio López García works meticulously on a still-life canvas in Victor Erice’s masterful, one-of-a-kind study of artistic creation.