New York Film Festival goes live Sept 28th

The 45th New York Film Festival runs through: September 28 – October 14, 2007

The 45th New York Film Festival will premiere 28 films when it runs September 28 - October 14 at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center. The festival, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and sponsored by Sardinia Region Tourism and The New York Times, also features three showcases, three music documentaries and six retrospective films.

Opening Night
This year’s festival opens on Friday, September 28 with Wes Anderson’s new film, The Darjeeling Limited. Featuring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman, the films follows three brothers as they re-forge family bonds on a train ride across India. Anjelica Huston is also featured in the Fox Searchlight release, co-written by Anderson, Roman Coppola and Schwartzman.

Centerpiece
On Saturday, October 6, Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men will be honored as the festival’s Centerpiece. Based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner Cormac McCarthy and adapted by the Coens, the film is a mesmerizing thriller about the violent chain reaction that follows a hunter’s discovery of several dead bodies, a major stash of heroin and $2 million in cash. Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson and Kelly MacDonald star.

Closing Night
Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis has been selected as the festival’s Closing Night film. The animated coming-of-age story, based on Satrapi’s popular graphic novel about her own childhood in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, won a Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. It features the voice talents of Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, Danielle Darrieux and Simon Abkarian, several of whom are expected to attend the festival’s Closing Night screening at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday, October 14. Sony Pictures Classics is releasing the film.

American Titles
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.

International Titles
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.

Retrospectives
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).

Music Documentaries
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.

Showcases
This year’s festival honors director and screenwriter Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, a renowned member of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. He solidified his place as a master filmmaker with his 1969 classic, Macunaima for which he won Best Film at the Mar del Plata Film Festival. Favoring a hard-edged expressionism meant to capture the realities of his nation’s poverty, de Andrade established himself in 1965 with The Priest and the Girl, nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. Three times de Andrade has won Brazilian cinema’s highest honor, the Candango Trophy. "Tropical Analysis: The Films of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade", will run September 29-October 9 at the Walter Reade Theater.

For the eleventh year "Views from the Avant-Garde" premieres the latest work from the frontiers of cinematic possibility during the second weekend of the festival, October 6-7, at the Walter Reade Theater. This experimental film showcase brings together new and rediscovered work by past masters, established luminaries and emerging artists from near and far. The 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region will be celebrated at the Walter Reade Theater with "Chinese Modern: A Tribute to Cathay Studios", October 10-16, screening films from the Hong Kong production house that, more than any other, introduced a distinctly modern lifestyle to Chinese culture.

New Line Cinema Gala
On Friday, October 5, the Film Society will salute New Line Cinema’s 40 years of extraordinary moviemaking at a black-tie gala to benefit the Film Society’s the In Motion capital building campaign for the new Elinor Bunin-Munroe Film Center. New Line Cinema’s Co-Chairmen and Co-CEOs Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne will be honored during a star-studded evening at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center in the Time Warner Center. The gala event — which will include a sneak peek of New Line’s highly anticipated winter release, The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, and directed by Chris Weitz — marks the biggest benefit in the history of the Film Society. All proceeds will go to the capital building campaign.

Venue & Ticket Information
Due to ongoing renovations at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, this year’s New York Film Festival screenings will be held at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, in the Time Warner Center. The Opening and Closing Night screenings will be held at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. Tickets to all events except the showcases in this year’s New York Film Festival will go on sale to the general public on Sunday September 9 at 10am at the Frederick P. Rose Hall box office, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at 60th Street. Online ticket sales to all events, subject to availability, will begin on Monday, September 10 on this website.

Selection Committee
The 45th New York Film Festival’s selection committee includes Richard Peña, committee chairman and program director at the Film Society; Scott Foundas, film editor and critic, L.A. Weekly; J. Hoberman, film critic, The Village Voice, and visiting lecturer at Harvard University; Kent Jones, associate director of programming at the Film Society and editor-at-large of Film Comment magazine; and Lisa Schwarzbaum, film critic, Entertainment Weekly.