Sean Baker’s Anora and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light will feature in the main lineup of the 2024 New York Film Festival (NYFF), scheduled to run from September 27 to October 14, announced the organisers on Tuesday.
While Anora clinched the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May, All We Imagine As Light, was the grand prize winner at the prestigious French festival.
The 62nd edition of NYFF will open with RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys and close with Steve McQueen’s Blitz. Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut The Room Next Door will be the festival’s centrepiece 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 NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim in a statement after sharing the main slate of the festival.
“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 emphasise 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,” he added.
The lineup of NYFF also includes US premieres of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds and Roberto Minervini’s The Damned, which also received accolades at Cannes. Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour, which won Best Director at Cannes, will also be screened at NYFF.
Other main-slate films feature Hong Sangsoo’s By the Stream, Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, and the remaining parts of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy: Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming).
The festival will also showcase Berlin winners such as Mati Diop’s Dahomey (Golden Bear selection), Hong Sangsoo’s A Traveler’s Needs (Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize), Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land (Panorama Audience Award and Berlinale Documentary Award), and Philippe Lesage’s Who by Fire (Generation Grand Prize).
World premieres at the festival include Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury, a documentary on Sara Jane Moore’s assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford set against the political turmoil in the 1970s, and Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, a film about independent journalism in Russia leading up to the invasion of Ukraine.
