The 45th New York Film Festival Public Screening Schedule is available here in calendar format. Please note: Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to download the festival schedule.
The festival’s Opening Night and Centerpiece selections headline a strong American contingent in the 2007 slate. Noah Baumbach, Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, Sidney Lumet all return to the festival with American productions; Julian Schnabel and Abel Ferrara come back with international co-productions; and Brian De Palma, John Landis and Ira Sachs each make their festival debuts.
Baumbach will screen his follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, the very funny and very true Margot at the Wedding. Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh star as contentious sisters thrown into a disastrous family weekend caused by Pauline’s (Leigh) engagement to the underwhelming Malcolm (Jack Black). Scott Rudin produces the film, a Paramount Vantage release.
Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, based on the novel by Blake Nelson, details the unraveling of a skateboarder’s life after he is involved in the death of a security guard. Newcomer Alex Nevins stars in the film, for which Van Sant won Cannes’ special 60th Anniversary Prize. IFC First Take will release the film.
The other American titles include Haynes’ I’m Not There — a rumination on the life of Bob Dylan, with actors Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Wishaw and Marcus Carl Frankin each representing elements the famed musician’s mystique — De Palma’s trenchant vision of the Iraq war, Redacted, and Ira Sachs’ taut melodrama Married Life. Lumet returns to the New York Film Festival for the first time in 43 years (Fail-Safe, 1964) with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a crime story starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney and Marisa Tomei. Two documentaries — Landis’ Mr. Warmth, The Don Rickles Project and Ed Pincus and Lucia Small’s The Axe in the Attic — round out the festival’s new U.S. productions.
The 45th New York Film Festival honors worldwide film production with more than half of its slate taken from other countries. Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells the story of magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, paralyzed by a stroke, blinks out a memoir that eloquently captures his vibrant interior life. Mathieu Amalric stars as Bauby in the Miramax release, which won Cannes’ Best Director award and Technical Grand Prize.
Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona will screen his feature film debut The Orphanage, a supernatural drama about a woman who re-opens the orphanage in which she was raised, only to discover terrible secrets as her seven-year-old son, Simón, begins making imaginary friends. The Picturehouse release is presented and produced by last year’s Closing Night director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth).
Among the other international titles in the festival are Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, which shared with Persepolis the Jury Prize at Cannes; Abel Ferrara’s Italy/U.S. co-production Go Go Tales; Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress; Claude Chabrol’s A Girl Cut In Two; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon; Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon; Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra; Béla Tarr’s The Man from London; and Jia Zhang-ke’s documentary Useless; Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu; and Lee Chang-dong’s Korean feature, Secret Sunshine, which stars Cannes’ Best Actress prize recipient, Jeon Do-yeon.
Six films will be featured as special retrospectives of the 45th New York Film Festival: the long-awaited Blade Runner: The Final Cut by Ridley Scott, honoring the landmark
science fiction film’s 25th anniversary; the premiere of a new score by the Alloy Orchestra to accompany Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 film Underworld, winner of the Best Writing Oscar® at the first Academy Awards®; John Ford’s first major film The Iron Horse (1924), a massive production about the building of the transcontinental railroad; Sven Gade and Heinz Schall’s 1920 German production of Hamlet, starring actress Asta Nielsen in the title role; and "In Glorious Technicolor: Martin Scorsese Presents", screening John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945).
Three music documentaries will play at the Walter Reade Theater. We will screen Carlos Saura's Fados, an exploration of the celebrated Portuguese musical style. Acclaimed rock documentarian Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965 features footage of Bob Dylan’s infamous Newport performances, where the musician first used electric amplifiers. Peter Bogdanovich will complete the set with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream, an in-depth look at the legendary American rock band to be screened at its full 238 minutes, with a 15-minute intermission.
