NYFF Spotlight and TIFF Additions

The half dozen includes one more world premiere, & Sons, an adaptation of David Gilbert’s novel written by Sarah Polley and directed by Pablo Trapero. Bill Nighy stars as a reclusive novelist who calls a meeting with his estranged sons after he wakes up one morning convinced that he is about to die. The other four additions—Olivier Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin, Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, Cédric Jimenez’s Dog 51, and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice—will all arrive fresh from their premieres in Venice.

The NYFF describes its Spotlight program as a “complement” to its Main Slate, and this year’s gala presentation is Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) and starring Jeremy Allen White (The Bear) as Bruce Springsteen at a crucial moment in his life and career. The songs he’s writing and capturing on a four-track recorder in his New Jersey bedroom will be collected on his 1982 album Nebraska.

The festival will launch Rebecca Miller’s five-part documentary portrait Mr. Scorsese in its entirety. Besides Martin Scorsese, interviewees include Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Isabella Rossellini, Thelma Schoonmaker, Steven Spielberg, and Miller’s husband, Daniel Day-Lewis. The star of Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993) and Gangs of New York (2002) returns to the screen for the first time in eight years in Anemone, the story of a fraught relationship between two brothers. Ronan Day-Lewis, the son of Daniel and Rebecca Miller, directs from a screenplay he cowrote with his father.

Spotlight’s third world premiere is Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, Ben Stiller’s tribute to his parents, comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. This year’s program also features both of the films Richard Linklater has completed this year, Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague, well-received in Berlin and Cannes, respectively.

Geeta Gandbhir won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition at Sundance for The Perfect Neighbor. Relying almost exclusively on police bodycam footage, Gandbhir reconstructs a Floridian white woman’s murder of a Black neighbor, and for the Hollywood Reporter’s Lovia Gyarkye, the film is “a propulsive and often nauseating account of racist paranoia, police inertia, and the consequences of America’s self-defense legislation.”

The day after the Cannes sidebar ACID announced that it would premiere Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, an Israeli airstrike killed director Sepideh Farsi’s subject, Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, along with nine members of her family. Unable to enter Gaza herself, Farsi constructed her film from a series of video calls with Hassona. “Even through the pinhole of a phone’s glitchy portrait, Hassona comes across as a force of nature,” writes Nicolas Rapold for Documentary Magazine. “What makes Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk an even tougher watch is that it’s now a memorial, and the fact that Hassona feels so indomitable, so alive, says all you need to know about the cynical and cowardly killing before more of the world met her.”

Two more Spotlight titles first premiered in Cannes. In Harry Lighton’s debut feature, Pillion, Harry Melling’s reserved Colin falls for—and submits to—Alexander Skarsgård’s leather-clad biker, Ray. Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson finds that Pillion “deftly balances squirmy comedy with gentle pathos, social suspense with offbeat warmth.” Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life stars Jodie Foster, Daniel Auteuil, Vincent Lacoste, Virginie Efira, and Mathieu Amalric, and at the Film Stage, Zhuo-Ning Su writes that “this up-tempo comedic murder mystery is a breezy, fun means of showcasing delicious chemistry between legendary actors.”

Paolo Sorrentino’s La gracia will open Venice in a couple of weeks. Toni Servillo stars as a fictional Italian president sewing up his legacy while mourning the loss of his wife. The NYFF notes that “Sorrentino’s film does the unexpected for our moment, infusing a tale of government affairs with a refreshing dose of humanity.” A second title from Venice is Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet, which the festival calls “a phantasmal riff on Hamlet.” Spotlight’s two shorts programs will feature new work from Alice Diop, Gabriel Abrantes, Radu Muntean, and Nathan Silver.

Anyone looking for a leisurely summer browse while waiting for the fall festival season to take off will find a rich one in the NYFF’s new online archive. All sixty-two previous editions get a page featuring that year’s lineup and poster—many of them by renowned artists—as well as photos of attendees ranging from Roberto Rossellini and Susan Sontag in the 1960s through Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Bernardo Bertolucci in the 1970s, Werner Herzog and Akira Kurosawa in the 1980s, and so on, right on up to a shot snapped last year of the NYFF selection committee in the Criterion Closet.