The Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art today announced seven official selections for the 2014 New Directors/New Films Festival (ND/NF) (March 19–30). The 2014 edition marks the 43rd year of the festival, which is dedicated to the discovery of new works by emerging and dynamic filmmaking talent.
Representing eleven countries from around the world, the initial seven selections are Richard Ayoade’s THE DOUBLE (UK), Benedikt Erlingsson’s OF HORSES AND MEN (Iceland), Abdellah Taïa’s SALVATION ARMY (L'Armée du salut) (France/Morocco/Switzerland), Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (Estonia/France), Roberto Minervini’s STOP THE POUNDING HEART (Belgium/Italy/USA), Albert Serra’s STORY OF MY DEATH (Història de la meva mort) (Spain/France), and Vivian Qu’s TRAP STREET (Shuiyin Jie) (China).
THE DOUBLE, which will be screening at the Sundance film festival, is Richard Ayoade’s follow-up to his indie comedy SUBMARINE, a darkly stylistic take on Dostoevsky’s novella about a worker drone who is suddenly confronted with a more aggressive and popular version of himself. Albert Serra’s STORY OF MY DEATH (Història de la meva mort), a Golden Leopard winner at the Locarno Film Festival, pits Casanova against Dracula in a philosophical and cinematic tussle, and Chinese producer Vivian Qu (NIGHT TRAIN, KNITTING) makes her directorial debut with the noirish TRAP STREET, about a naïve young man whose pursuit of a mysterious, beautiful woman leads him down a dark road. The film received a Dragons & Tigers Award Special Mention at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Also making their directorial debuts are Abdellah Taïa, with the screen adaptation of his own novel about a young gay man’s awakening in the world with SALVATION ARMY (L’armée du salut), and Icelandic stage director Benedikt Erlingsson with his film, OF HORSES AND MEN, a humorous and mythical story of the integral relationship between the two species. OF HORSES AND MEN won director’s awards for Erlingsson at the San Sebastian and Tokyo International film festivals.
Roberto Minervini’s STOP THE POUNDING HEART, about a young girl who upsets the calm status quo when she begins to question the traditional path laid out for her by her rural community, is the third in Minervini’s series of films set in Texas. A Cannes selection, the stunning narrative/documentary hybrid receives its US premiere at ND/NF. Frequent presences at NYFF’s Views from the Avant-Garde over the past few years, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell team up for the first time on the second feature film for both directors with A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS. The film chronicles a quixotic journey by Robert A.A. Lowe, the celebrated musician behind Lichens and Om.
For more than four decades, New Directors/New Films has been a beacon for emerging directors eager to make their mark on contemporary cinema. The festival has introduced or cemented the status of some of the world’s most celebrated filmmakers, including Chantal Akerman, Pedro Almodóvar, Darren Aronofsky, Ken Burns, Agnieszka Holland, Wong Kar Wai, Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, and Steven Spielberg. The past few years have featured the work of J.C. Chandor (MARGIN CALL), Shane Carruth (UPSTREAM COLOR), Gareth Huw Evans (THE RAID), David France (HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE), Terence Nance (AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY), Joshua Oppenheimer (THE ACT OF KILLING), Sarah Polley (STORIES WE TELL), Dee Rees (PARIAH), and Denis Villeneuve (INCENDIES), among others.
The seven official selections include:
THE DOUBLE (2013) 93 min
Director: Richard Ayoade
Country: UK
Richard Ayoade has built a loyal following with his hilariously off characters, notably the one he plays in the TV series The IT Crowd and those that inhabit his 2010 directorial debut, SUBMARINE. His cerebral, visually arresting follow-up, THE DOUBLE, based on Dostoevsky’s 1846 novella, enters slightly darker territory, and recalls the stylizations of Terry Gilliam. Starring Jesse Eisenberg as both Simon James, a humdrum worker drone, and James Simon, his gregarious doppelgänger, the film is set within both the claustrophobic confines of Simon’s bureaucratic workplace and his paranoid mind. Aided by a stellar supporting cast (including Wallace Shawn, Mia Wasikowska, Sally Hawkins, Paddy Considine, and Chris O’Dowd), THE DOUBLE firmly establishes Ayoade as a leading voice in contemporary cinematic comedy. A Magnolia Pictures release.
OF HORSES AND MEN (2013) 80 min
Director: Benedikt Erlingsson
Country: Iceland
The debut feature by celebrated stage director Benedikt Erlingsson announces the arrival of an innovative new cinematic voice. Set almost exclusively outdoors amid stunning Icelandic landscapes, the film features in equal parts a cast of exquisite short-legged Icelandic horses and human characters—including the terrific Ingvar E. Sigurdsson and Charlotte Bøving as meant-for-each-other but put-upon lovers—illuminating with great inventive flair the relationship between man and beast. Several narrative strands defined by the way each character relates to their horse recount a variety of situations according to the particulars of the seasons, resulting in a surprising and sometimes humorous symbiosis between horses, humans, and nature.
SALVATION ARMY (L'Armée du salut) (2013) 81 min
Director: Abdellah Taïa
Countries: France/Morocco/Switzerland
Like the book it’s based on—Abdellah Taïa’s own 2006 landmark novel—the Moroccan author’s directorial debut is a bracing, deeply personal account of a young gay man’s awakening that avoids both cliché and the trappings of autobiography. First seen as a 15-year-old, Abdellah (Saïd Mrini) habitually sneaks away from his family’s crowded Casablanca home to engage in sexual trysts with random men in abandoned buildings. A decade later, we find Abdellah (now played by Karim Ait M’hand) on scholarship in Geneva, involved with an older Swiss professor (Frédéric Landenberg). With a clear-eyed approach, devoid of sentimentality, this wholly surprising bildungsfilm explores what it means to be an outsider, and with the help of renowned cinematographer Agnès Godard, Taïa finds a film language all his own: at once rigorous and poetic, and worthy of Robert Bresson in its concreteness and lucidity.
A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (2013) 98 min
Directors: Ben Rivers and Ben Russell
Country: Estonia/France
As collaborators, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, two intrepid and nomadic talents of experimental film and art, have created one of the most bewitching cinematic experiences to come along in a great while. In A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS, Robert A.A. Lowe, the celebrated musician behind Lichens and Om, gives a strangely affecting, perhaps even trance-inducing performance as the film’s Parsifal figure, a quixotic man who embarks on a quest for utopia—the holy grail of infinite truth, self-knowledge, and spiritual connectedness. He finds some measure of it in three seemingly disparate contexts: in a small collective community on a remote Estonian island, in isolation in the northern Finnish wilderness, and onstage fronting a black metal band in Norway. While his experience seems to be a perpetual one of home, exile, and return, for us, it is purely magical.
STOP THE POUNDING HEART (2013) 100 min
Director: Roberto Minervini
Countries: Belgium/Italy/USA
Sara (Sara Carlson, playing herself) is part of a devout Christian goat-farming family with 12 children, all home-schooled and raised with strict moral guidance from the Scriptures. Set in a rural community that has remained isolated from technological advances and lifestyle influence—no phones, TVs, computers, or drunken teen brawls—the subtly narrative film follows Sara and Colby, two 14-year-olds with vastly different backgrounds who are quietly drawn to each other. In Minervini’s intimate documentary-style portrait—the third in the Italian-born filmmaker’s Texas trilogy—Sara’s commitment to her faith is never questioned. It’s the power of the director’s nonintrusive handheld-camera style that reveals his protagonist’s spiritual and emotional inner turmoil about her place in a faith that requires women to be subservient to their fathers before becoming their husbands’ helpers. By also presenting an authentic, impartial portrayal of the Texas Bible Belt, Minervini allows for the humanity and complexity behind the stereotypes to show through.
STORY OF MY DEATH (Història de la meva mort) (2013) 148 min
Director: Albert Serra
Countries: Spain/France
No one else working in movies today makes anything remotely like the films of Catalan maverick Albert Serra, a cerebral oddball and improbable master of cinematic antiquity. Known for his unconventional adaptations of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (HONOR OF THE KNIGHTS) and the Biblical parable of the Three Kings (BIRDSONG), Serra here stages the 18th-century passage from rationalism to romanticism as a tussle between two figures of legend, Casanova and Dracula. Against a backdrop of candlelit conversation and earthy carnality, Serra sets in motion contrasting ideas about pleasure and desire, alternating between winding philosophical dialogue and wordless passages of savage beauty. Winner of the top prize at the 2013 Locarno Film Festival, the film is both a painterly feast for the eyes, abounding with art-historical allusions, and an idiosyncratic, self-aware revamping of the costume melodrama.
TRAP STREET (Shuiyin Jie) (2013) 94 min
Director: Vivian Qu
Country: China
Notions of surveillance and observation are turned inside out in TRAP STREET, producer Vivian Qu’s first turn as a director. While surveying city streets for a digital-mapping company, engineer Qiuming catches sight of Lifen, a beautiful young woman. Immediately smitten, he follows her to a street that doesn’t appear on any map or even a GPS. In between his other gigs—installing security cameras, sweeping hotel rooms for electronic bugs—he tries to get to know this alluring stranger. And he does—sort of. But things take a disturbing turn when Qiuming is accused of stealing secrets from the lab where Lifen works, and the mystery, as well as the paranoia, deepens from there. Noir in tone, and a great representation of the newest generation of Chinese filmmakers, TRAP STREET is a bold story about who is really watching whom that, while firmly embedded in the current cultural context of China, could happen to any one of us.
About New Directors/New Films
Dedicated to the discovery and support of emerging artists, New Directors/New Films has earned an international reputation as the premier festival for works that break or re-cast the cinematic mold. The New Directors/New Films selection committee is made up of members from both presenting organizations: from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Dennis Lim, Marian Masone, and Gavin Smith; and from The Museum of Modern Art, Jytte Jensen, Rajendra Roy, and Joshua Siegel.
About The Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility and understanding of the moving image. The Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year's most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, LatinBeat, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-vous With French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment Magazine, The Film Society recognizes an artist's unique achievement in film with the prestigious Chaplin Award. The Film Society's state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year round programs and the New York City film community.
The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Film was established as the Film Library in 1935, and presented its first series as circulating exhibitions in 1936. The Film Department organizes over 50 film exhibitions every year, including annual programs such as To Save and Project: The MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation, Documentary Fortnight, and The Contenders. The Department also organizes exhibitions in MoMA’s galleries, including Tim Burton (2009–10) and Dante Ferretti : Design and Construction for the Cinema (2013–14). The department also has an extensive archive of over 27,000 film and video works, including the world’s largest institutional collections of the works of D. W. Griffith, Andy Warhol, and Stan Brakhage. Rajendra Roy is the current Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, appointed in May 2007.
Sponsorship
New Directors/New Films is presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art and is supported by The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art, the New Wave Young Patrons of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, The New York Times, American Airlines, and Stella Artois.
