Film still from Daniel Eisenberg’s The Unstable Object II.

Daniel Eisenberg (2012 Grantee)
The Unstable Object II

Daniel Eisenberg’s Creative Capital Project, The Unstable Object II, will make its US premiere at Lincoln Center, after winning the Grand Prix of the International Competition at FIDMarseille Film Festival.

The film presents a dynamic triptych that patiently observes people working at three factories around the world: a prosthetics manufacturer in Germany, a glove maker in southern France, and a jeans plant in Istanbul. Each discrete section of the film presents a place with its own distinct process and scale of production, yet taken together, they create an indelible image of a global workforce, one that never loses sight of the humans at the center, despite the industrial machines they are often seen operating.

Nan Goldin’s photograph, Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston from Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and Bloodshed.

Laura Poitras (2008 Grantee)
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

After winning a Golden Lion Award at the Venice International Film Festival, Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed comes to the New York FIlm Festival as a Centerpiece Selection.

The essential, urgent, and arrestingly structured new documentary weaves two narratives: the fabled life and career of era-defining artist Nan Goldin and the downfall of the Sackler family’s pharmaceutical dynasty. Following her own personal struggle with opioid addiction, put herself at the forefront of the battle against the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic, both as an activist at art institutions around the world that had accepted millions from the family and as an advocate for the destigmatization of drug addiction.

Film still from Elisabeth Subrin’s Maria Schneider, 1983.

Elisabeth Subrin (2001 Grantee)
Maria Schneider, 1983

Actresses Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval recreate a 1983 French TV interview with Maria Schneider, which takes a turn when she’s asked about the traumatic filming of Last Tango in Paris with Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando a decade before. Taken together, they not only perform Schneider’s words and gestures, but inhabit them through their own identities—along with all those silenced, before and after.

Film still from Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica.

Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (2012 Grantees)
De Humani Corporis Fabrica

Making its US premiere, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica burrows deeper than ever, using microscopic cameras and specially designed recording devices to survey the wondrous landscape of the human body. More transfixing than clinical, the film, shot in hospitals in and around Paris, eschews the normal narrative parameters for medical documentation in favor of a rigorously detached, expressionistic look at our tactile yet essentially unknowable flesh and viscera.

Film still from Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso.

Cauleen Smith (2008 Grantee)
Drylongso

The new 4K restoration of Cauleen Smith’s 1998 film Drylongso makes its World Premiere at the festival. 

Pica, a woman in a photography class in Oakland, begins photographing the young black men of her neighborhood, having witnessed so many of them fall victim to senseless murder and fearing the possibility of their becoming extinct altogether. The film explores Pica’s relationship with her family, as well as her relationship with a friend who becomes the victim of an enigmatic and elusive serial killer lurking in the background.

The New York Film Festival takes place at Lincoln Center, September 30–October 16, 2022. Single tickets are on sale now.