The director of the New York Film Festival on choosing his 2024 schedule and why he doesn’t prioritize world premieres

Like many fall film festivals, the 2023 edition of the New York Film Festival had to take place during the actors’ strike and without stars such as Emma Stone (“Poor Things”), Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore (“May December”) and Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal (“All of us strangers”), who promoted their films.

That’s why NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim is relieved that the annual celebration of cinema will return in 2024 unchanged. This year’s festival will last from September 27 to October 14. “We are very happy that we don’t have to work under those restrictions this year,” he says. “And we have many, many actors appearing in some of the bigger films.”

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He’s referring to films like Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” starring Moore and Tilda Swinton; director Sean Baker for the Palme d’Or-winning film “Anora”; Steve McQueen’s historical drama “Blitz” starring Saoirse Ronan; Sort of like Pablo Larraín’s biopic “Maria” with Angelina Jolie; and Luca Guadagnino’s romantic drama “Queer,” starring Daniel Craig. This year’s lineup also includes David Cronenberg’s sci-fi thriller “The Shrouds,” Alain Guiraudi’s black comedy “Misericordia,” Mike Leigh’s slice-of-life “Hard Truths,” Paul Schrader’s elegiac drama “Oh, Canada” and the historical film Brady’ Corbet’s ego epic “brutalist”.

Lim’s ambition to curate the film festival program – his core selection committee includes Film at Lincoln Center programmer Florence Almozini, New Yorker critic Justin Chang, film critic K. Austin Collins and film programmer Rachel Rosen – tries to “sum up the year in cinema.” His team also strives to ensure that films and creators represent a mix of geographic origins, genders and artistic styles.

“There is no thematic program. We don’t try to cover certain topics. But once the team comes together, we make films that talk to each other,” says Lim. “This year it was clear to us that cinema reflects the state of the world. So we are indirectly creating a picture of the state of the world, which is not very cheerful at the moment, given the wars, conflicts and unrest.”

Several films scheduled to be shown at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, home to many NYFF screenings, had already been featured at other fall film festivals before coming to New York. “As we try to summarize the year, premieres are not our guide,” says Lim. “We produce films from Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Sundance. To reflect what is exciting, relevant and relevant in film today, we need to review the entire year.”

However, NYFF will host two world premieres. One of them is “My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow” directed by Julia Loktev, a fact-based portrait of independent journalists in Putin’s Russia in the run-up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The second is “Suburban Fury” by Robinson Devor – a documentary about Sarah Jane Moore, who in 1975 tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford. This latter case is unintentionally topical, given that former President Donald Trump was recently targeted for an attack during his speech at a rally in Pennsylvania this summer, as well as a separate incident at a golf course in Florida – although that’s not why the film was included in this year’s schedule.

“It’s fascinating to see how ‘Suburban Fury’ deals with this really difficult, complicated and difficult topic,” says Lim. “We saw this video before the recent Trump assassination attempt that has been in the news for the last few months. We saw the film in the spring or early summer and already had the impression that the film speaks to a time in which political violence is a huge threat.”

“Nickel Boys,” a historical drama directed by RaMell Ross based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two black teenagers who end up in the care of a barbaric reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida, will open the festival on Friday. This is the coveted spot that in previous years was occupied by Todd Haynes’ “May December,” Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Steve McQueen’s “The Lover’s Rock,” Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” and Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Favourite.”

“The premiere film sets the tone,” says Lim. “We could have chosen as many films as we wanted. But it was something that delighted us. RaMell Ross is interested in how we see the world and expanding the visual possibilities of the language of cinema.”

During the festival, Lim can often be seen on the balcony of Alice Tully Hall, which seats around 1,000. This is a vantage point that allows him to get an idea of how the audience likes the film. There, he was often reminded that cinema was a big screen, a shared experience.

“There were a few moments last year, one of them was ‘Interest Zone,’ where I was standing there and I could feel how engrossed the audience was in the film. You can’t see or hear it, but you can feel it,” he says. “For us, the programming is already done, but the work only comes to life when we are in the rooms with the audience and the filmmakers.”

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