I’m Still Here by Walter Salles
62nd New York Film Festival
September 27 - October 14, 2024
The 62nd annual edition of the New York Film Festival (NYFF) starts Friday, September 27, screening different films by Latin American filmmakers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico in its Main Slate, Spotlight, and Currents sections.
For tickets and more information visit: https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2024/
PEPE
A film by Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias
(Dominican Republic/Namibia/Germany/France Afrikaans, 2024, 123 min. In German, Spanish, and Mbukushu with English subtitles)
U.S. Premiere - Main Slate
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In 1993, after the death of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, the wild array of exotic pets he kept in his menagerie were shipped off to zoos and other preserves. His hippopotamuses, however, escaped, fending for themselves, reproducing, and becoming the target of government sterilizers and poachers. Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias (Cocote, New Directors/New Films 2018) takes a fascinating, highly unorthodox approach to this strange but true tale, which is told from the perspective of a sentient hippo, Pepe, at the moment of its death. We hear the animal’s thoughts as they’re spoken aloud by a raspy narrator, as the film skips across time and continents, from Pepe’s home country of Namibia to the Rio Magdalena in Colombia, where Pepe has escaped; shuffles modes of storytelling; and alternates between nonfiction and fantasy. In its sympathetic inquiry and aesthetic muscularity, Pepe poses provocative questions about the ever-shifting ecological stakes of life on earth and the nature of being.
Saturday, October 5, 9:30pm at Walter Reade Theater; Sunday, October 6, 6:15pm at EBM Film Center (FBT); Wednesday, October 9, 12:30pm at EBM Film Center (HGT)
TRANSAMAZONIA
A film by Pia Marais
(France/Germany/Switzerland/Taiwan/Brazil, 2024, 112 min. In English and Portuguese with English subtitles)
U.S. Premiere - Main Slate
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In the eerie quiet of the vast, verdant Amazon jungle, a young girl stirs to life. Rescued by a member of the local Indigenous tribe, the child, Rebecca, is the only survivor of a plane crash. Years pass, and Rebecca (Helena Zengel) has become something of a local celebrity after her father (Jeremy Xido), an American missionary, has cast the teenager as a faith healer capable of miracles. Just as Rebecca is beginning to have a will of her own, doubting her father and the role in which she’s been cast, another crisis emerges when illegal loggers encroach on the land, threatening the livelihoods of the local tribe, and forcing emotional, familial, and racial reckonings. South Africa–born director Pia Marais has fashioned a mesmerizing, entrancingly photographed moral tale with no easy answers that is also a singular coming-of-age fable.
Monday, October 7, 8:30pm at Walter Reade Theater; Tuesday, October 8, 9:15pm at EBM Film Center (FBT); Thursday, October 10, 1:30pm at EBM Film Center (HGT).
APOCALYPSE IN THE TROPICS
A film by Petra Costa
(Brazil, USA, Denmark, 2024, 110 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
U.S. Premiere - Spotlight
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In the follow-up to her Oscar-nominated documentary The Edge of Democracy, which examined Brazil’s increasingly polarized politics, Petra Costa dramatizes the chilling rise of the far right in her country. Apocalypse in the Tropics focuses on how the evangelical movement paved the way for the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro and continues to pose the threat of a national theocracy. Gaining remarkable access to major figures on both sides of the extreme political divide, including fire-and-brimstone televangelist Silas Malafaia, who was Bolsonaro’s right-hand man, and Bolsonaro’s liberal predecessor and successor President Lulu da Silva, Costa provides a gripping and urgent précis on the recent tumultuous events that have put Brazil in the international spotlight while painting an unsettling portrait of democracy’s fragility.
Sunday, September 29, 12:30pm at Walter Reade Theater; Monday, September 30, 9:15pm at EBM Film Center (FBT)
EMILIA PÉREZ
A film by Jacques Audiard
(France/Mexico, 2024, 132 min. In English and Spanish with English subtitles)
U.S. Premiere - Spotlight
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From the moment it introduces its titular antiheroine, a Mexican drug-cartel boss seeking gender-affirming surgery, this boldly genre-dissolving tour de force is predicated on the power of astonishing transformations. The most ambitious and exuberant film to date by Jacques Audiard, one of contemporary cinema’s most versatile filmmakers, Emilia Pérez is at once a darkly funny crime drama and a jaw-dropping musical, powered by a quartet of superb actors—Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz—whose fearless performances defy every expectation. Winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where its four leads also shared the Best Actress prize.
Monday, September 30, 5:15pm at Alice Tully Hall; Tuesday, October 1, 9pm at Alice Tully Hall
I’M STILL HERE / AINDA ESTOU AQUI
A film by Walter Salles
(Brazil/Spain, 2024, 135 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles)
U.S. Premiere - Spotlight
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One afternoon in 1971, Rubens Paiva, a former congressman and outspoken critic of Brazil’s newly instituted military dictatorship, was taken from his home in Rio de Janeiro by government officials, told nothing more than that he must give a “deposition” to authorities, and disappeared. Adapted from his son Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir, this overwhelming, richly realized political drama from Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) stays tightly wedded to the perspective of Rubens’s wife, Eunice (a shattering Fernanda Torres), whose indefatigable search for the truth about her husband would stretch out for decades. A devastating true story, I’m Still Hereis exhilarating in its portrayal of human tenacity in the face of injustice. Featuring a deeply affecting appearance from Fernanda Montenegro, Oscar nominee for Salles’s Central Station.
Wednesday, October 9, 8pm at Alice Tully Hall; Thursday, October 10, 9:15pm at Walter Reade Theater
MARIA
A film by Pablo Larraín
(Italy/Germany/USA, 2024, 122 min. In English)
U.S. Premiere - Spotlight
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Following his acclaimed historical biopics Jackie and Spencer, about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Diana, respectively, Chilean director Pablo Larraín has made his third entry in an unofficial trilogy about world-famous women dealing with the blinding glare of celebrity while at emotional crossroads. In an all-consuming performance at once poignant and imperious, Angelina Jolie becomes Maria Callas, the American-born, Greek opera singer whose voice and intensely dramatic life captivated millions before her death from a heart attack at the age of 53. Set in Paris, September 1977, during the final week of her life, Maria follows the legendary soprano as she negotiates her public image and private self and reckons with the increasingly blurred boundaries between the venerated “La Divina” and the vulnerable human being Maria.
Sunday, September 29, 6:30 pm at Alice Tully Hall; Monday, September 30, 2:15pm at Alice Tully Hall
LÁZARO AT NIGHT / LÁZARO EN LA NOCHE
A film by Nicolás Pereda
(Canada/Mexico, 2024, 76 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
U.S. Premiere - Currents
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Nicolás Pereda, whose films elegantly balance wry, naturalistic interpersonal comedy and surreal transcendence, returns with a marvelous inquiry into art-making, storytelling, and the fragile bonds of friendship that takes his blend of the theatrical and the mundane to a new level. The film centers on a trio of friends, connected by a writing workshop they attended years earlier. Today, as they navigate romance and infidelity, their bond is further complicated by the fact that they are all auditioning to be in the same low-budget movie. Connected by a complex sound design that occasionally collapses time and space, scenes of absurd mundanity give way to the fantasy of fiction, its triangle of poets, artists, and actors motivated equally by wishful dreaming and comic, everyday neuroses.
Sunday, September 29, 2:15pm at EBM Film Center (FBT); Monday, September 30, 9:30pm at EBM Film Center (FBT); Tuesday, October 1, 2:30pm at EBM Film Center (HGT)
THE SUIT
A film by Heinz Emigholz
(Germany/Mexico/Argentina/USA, 2024, 76 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
U.S. Premiere - Currents
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That loquacious cynic known only as “Old White Male,” played by John Erdman in Heinz Emigholz’s 2020 film The Lobby (NYFF58), returns in this delirious, sci-fi-comic follow-up in which our fearless, joyless monologist covers an even wider spectrum of human absurdity as he wrestles with the biggest question mark of all: The Future. Smarting from his last experience making a movie with “that nobody of a director,” which he’s told was “rejected by a once-famous film festival” for its alleged misanthropy, Erdman is this time joined by a caustic, endlessly philosophizing German filmmaker (Susanne Bredehöft) and a robot version of himself from the past (visualized as his own disembodied, portable miniature head). Shot in Berlin, Malta, and Mexico City, but set mostly in his bunker-like home, The Suit gives Erdman ample room to expound upon cinema, the corporeal vs. the digital, the apocalypse, architecture, health and nutrition, and what it means to see and be seen in a world that’s increasingly turning inward. Texts include everything from Walter Benjamin to Nelly Furtado, and nothing is sacred.
Sunday, October 6, 5:30pm at EBM Film Center (FBT); Monday, October 7, 9:15pm at EBM Film Center (FBT)
YOU BURN ME / TÚ ME ABRASAS
A film by Matías Piñeiro
(Argentina/Spain, 2024, 76 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
U.S. Premiere - Currents
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In his consistently generative films, Argentinian filmmaker Matías Piñeiro (The Princess of France, NYFF52; Isabella, NYFF58) finds compelling cinematic ways to express the eternal hold that classical texts have on the modern world. In his inventive You Burn Me, the tragic romantic relationship between ancient Greek poet Sappho and the siren goddess Britomartis, as described in “Sea Foam,” a chapter in Italian novelist Cesare Pavese’s 1947 book Dialogues with Leucò, becomes the starting point for an elegantly constructed exercise of research, performance, and interpretation by a group of contemporary women. Given to repetition and abstraction, Piñeiro’s film brings desire and myth to vivid life, reflecting the fragmented nature of what remains of Sappho’s poetry. A Cinema Guild release.
Thursday, October 3, 7:15pm at EBM Film Center (FBT); Friday, October 4, 9:15pm at EBM Film Center (HGT); Monday, October 7, 12:15pm at EBM Film Center (FBT)
