The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and the Film Society of Lincoln Center will host the 48th annual New Directors/New Films (ND/NF), March 27 – April 7. Throughout its rich, nearly half-century history, the festival has celebrated filmmakers who represent the present and anticipate the future of cinema, daring artists whose work pushes the envelope in unexpected ways. This year’s festival will introduce 24 features and 11 short films to New York audiences.
The Opening, Closing, and Centerpiece selections are the New York premieres of three Sundance award-winners: opening the festival is Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency, which won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and features a masterful performance from Alfre Woodard as a prison warden grappling with her role in the justice system; Centerpiece is Alejandro Landes’s Monos, a contemporary reimagining of Lord of the Flies and winner of a World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Prize; and closing ND/NF is Pippa Bianco’s Share, a powerful portrait of a sexual assault victim, which took home U.S. Dramatic prizes for Breakthrough Performance and Screenwriting.
Opening Night – Clemency
Director/Writer: Chinonye Chukwu
Producers: Bronwyn Cornelius, Julian Cautherley, Peter Wong, Timur Bekbosunov
Executive Producers: Kathryn Bostic, Johnny Chang, Emma Lee, Alfre Woodard
Cast: Alfre Woodard, Aldis Hodge, Richard Schiff, Wendell Pierce, Richard Gunn, Danielle Brooks
Composer: Kathryn Bostic (“Dear White People”)
Winner of the Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Chinonye Chukwu’s sophomore feature is an enthralling drama anchored by a powerhouse performance from the great Alfre Woodard. Bernadine (Woodard) is a prison warden whose psychic toll has been wrought by years working on death row, and which has caused tensions with her husband Jonathan (Wendell Pierce). After a harrowing botched procedure, her growing investment in the inmate who is next to be executed, Anthony (a mesmerizing Aldis Hodge), encourages her to take a long overdue look in the mirror… Clemency is an immersive, atmospheric film as well as a haunting, tough-minded inquiry into the dignity of work and the morality of capital punishment.
Centerpiece – Monos
Colombia/Argentina/Netherlands/Germany/Sweden/Uruguay, 2018, 102m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
Director: Alejandro Landes
Writer: Alexis dos Santos, Alejandro Landes
Producers: Fernando Epstein, Alejandro Landes, Cristina Landes, Santiago A. Zapata
Executive Producers: Andrés Calderón, Charles De Viel Castel, Jorge Iragorri, Duke Merriman, Gustavo Pazmin, Josef Rebalski, Gloria Maria Restrepo
Cast: Julianne Nicholson, Moises Arias, Jorge Román, Sofia Buenaventura, Laura Castrillón, Deibi Rueda, Paul Cubides, Karen Quintero, Wilson Salazar, Julian Giraldo
Monos, which won a Special Jury Award at Sundance is sure to be one of the most hotly debated films of 2019—one critic called it “Apocalypse Now on shrooms.” In Alejandro Landes’s intensely thrilling twist on Lord of the Flies, Julianne Nicholson plays a terrorized American engineer held captive by teenage guerilla bandits in an unnamed South American jungle. Leaderless and rootless, the child soldiers puff themselves up with names like Rambo, Smurf, and Bigfoot (the latter a brutal Moises Arias), and survive the tedium and predation of the wilderness through sexual games and cult-like rituals. As they wage physical and psychological warfare on perceived enemies—and, inevitably, among themselves—they are reduced to a state of desperate barbarism. The film’s sense of surreal menace is amplified by Mica Levi’s discordant soundscape and Jasper Wolf’s cinematography.
Closing Night – Share
Director/ Writer: Pippa Bianco
Producers: Carly Hugo, Matthew Parker, Tyler Byrne
Executive Producers: Andrés Calderón, Charles De Viel Castel, Jorge Iragorri, Duke Merriman, Gustavo Pazmin, Josef Rebalski, Gloria Maria Restrepo
Cast: Rhianne Barreto, Charlie Plummer, Poorna Jagannathan, J.C. Mackenzie, Nicholas Galitzine, and Lovie Simone
A double prizewinner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Pippa Bianco’s unnerving feature debut is a profound and powerful examination of sexual assault and the increasingly volatile role the Internet plays in contemporary American society. Sixteen-year-old Mandy (a brilliant Rhianne Barreto) wakes up on her parents’ lawn with no recollection of where she’s been or how she got there. She is soon shown a cell-phone video in which she is undressed by a stranger while passed out at a party; the uncertainty of whatever followed (and produced the large bruise on her back) weighs on her as she struggles to figure out what to do next. A stylistically assured, engrossing mystery with real political and moral stakes, Share establishes Bianco as a bold and incisive new voice in American cinema. An HBO Films/A24 release.
Angelo
Markus Schleinzer, Austria/Luxembourg, 2018, 111m
French and German with English subtitles
Cast: Alba Rohrwacher, Christian Friedel, Michael Rotschopf, Gerti Drassl, Dominic Marcus Singer, Marisa Growaldt, Makita Samba, Lukas Miko, Éric Gigout, & Daniel Hoesl
Based on historical fact, Angelo charts the career of an African slave sold into 18th-century Viennese court society.
Captured as a young boy, Angelo becomes the pet project of a wealthy countess (Alba Rohrwacher), who carries out what she believes is her Christian duty to civilize him. As the years progress, Angelo rises to become her surrogate prodigal son and the beloved Court Moor of the Habsburg empire: the projection of every European fantasy of the noble savage. When an astonishing secret is exposed, Angelo is banished, leading to a horrifying, dehumanizing fate. Markus Schleinzer traces Angelo’s life with a clinical sobriety, but also with an artifice (painted sets, blackface, exoticizing costumes and dioramas, sudden contemporary intrusions) that serves to reinforce the idea of race as a persistent prejudicial construct.
Joy
English, Nigerian Pidgin, and German with English subtitles
Director/ Writer: Sudabeh Mortezai
Producers: Carly Hugo, Matthew Parker, Tyler Byrne
Executive Producers: Andrés Calderón, Charles De Viel Castel, Jorge Iragorri, Duke Merriman, Gustavo Pazmin, Josef Rebalski, Gloria Maria Restrepo
Cast: Rhianne Barreto, Charlie Plummer, Poorna Jagannathan, J.C. Mackenzie, Nicholas Galitzine, and Lovie Simone
A staggering work of compassionate realism, Sudabeh Mortezai’s second fiction feature follows Joy (Joy Anwulika Alphonsus), a young Nigerian sex worker living in Vienna, struggling to simultaneously create a better life for her family and pay off her madame. Joy finds herself increasingly implicated in the vicious cycle of human trafficking, and when she is tasked by her madame with mentoring a teenage Nigerian girl, she begins to understand her role within this dehumanizing machine and consider the possibility of a life outside of it. Sensitive yet unsentimental, intelligent and viscerally affecting, Joy is a politically incisive work and a moral act. A Netflix release.
SHORTS PROGRAMS
Program 2 (TRT: 79m)
Featuring The Golden Legend by Chema García Ibarra and Ion de Sosa, Past Perfect by Jorge Jácome, Altiplano by Malena Szlam, and America by Garrett Bradley
America
Garrett Bradley, USA, 2019, 29m
Inspired by the recent release of Lime Kiln Field Day, a once-lost feature film from 1913 featuring a predominantly black cast, America masterfully captures moments of black artistry in sublime black-and-white 35mm.
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 48th New Directors/New Films selection committee is made up of members from both presenting organizations: from The Museum of Modern Art, Rajendra Roy, Josh Siegel, La Frances Hui, and Brittany Shaw, and from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Dennis Lim, Florence Almozini, Dan Sullivan, and Tyler Wilson. For more information about the festival, visit newdirectors.org and follow the festival on Facebook (facebook.com/newdirectors) and Twitter (@NDNF, #NDNF).
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