New York Film Festival sets main slate with movies by Pedro Almodóvar, Sean Baker and Mati Diop

The New York Film Festival on Tuesday unveiled the main slate for its 62nd edition, with selections including Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anora,” Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey.”

Thirty-three features will make up the central lineup of the annual festival presented by Film at Lincoln Center. The main slate is particularly international this year, with films hailing from 24 countries, and including 19 directors making their debut in the festival’s most prestigious section.

Announcing the official Main Slate selections of #NYFF62, featuring 32 of the most exceptional new films from around the world.

Explore: https://t.co/QowezgQvr6 pic.twitter.com/BFKqXOnBpd

— New York Film Festival (@TheNYFF) August 6, 2024

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The festival, as previously announced, will kick off Sept. 27 with RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys,” an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel. Almodóvar, making his 15th appearance in New York’s main slate, will present “The Room Next Door,” starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, as the festival centerpiece. Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” about the bombing of London in World War II, will be the closing night film.

A number of prize-winners from May’s Cannes Film Festival will be making their U.S. or North American premieres. Along with “Anora,” that includes “Grand Tour,” by Miguel Gomes, winner of Cannes’ best director; Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light,” winner of the Grand Prix; Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” a standout from Un Certain Regard; and “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” from the dissident Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof who fled his home country to unveil his film.

“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world,” said Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, in a statement. “The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality. They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in, and reimagine the world.”

Also are tap are Paul Schrader’s “Oh, Canada,” with Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides” and David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds,” as well as a pair of highlights from Cannes sidebars: Roberto Minervini’s American Civil War drama “The Damned” and Carson Lund’s baseball elegy “Eephus.”

Also coming to New York: Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths,” Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” starring Adrien Brody as an architect and Holocaust survivor, and the world premiere of Julia Loktev’s “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow,” a documentary about independent journalism in Putin’s Russia.

Two filmmakers have a pair of films in the main slate. Both “By the Stream” and “A Traveler’s Needs” from the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo will debut at the festival, while the Chinese documentarian Wang Bing will present the second and third entries in his “Youth” trilogy: “Youth (Hard Times”) and “Youth (”Homecoming”).

The New York Film Festival, running Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, takes place at Lincoln Center and a handful of other venues around the city.