Film at Lincoln Center announced that the 58th New York Film Festival (NYFF), taking place from September 25th through October 11th, will feature changes to the festival’s programming structure and new selection committee and advisory roles. The festival is also exploring a combination of both in-person and digital experiences, as circumstances allow.

Since 1963, the New York Film Festival has been a centerpiece of New York’s arts scene: an annual bellwether of the state of cinema that has shaped film culture in the city and beyond. Festival organizers will keep this tradition alive while adapting as necessary to the current health crisis. Film at Lincoln Center will determine the format of the festival this summer, maintaining its commitment and responsibility to films and filmmakers while ensuring that the safety and well-being of our audiences and guests remain our utmost priority. 

With new leadership in place, the festival’s offerings will be streamlined into five banner sections: Main Slate, Currents, Spotlight, Revivals, and Talks. The Main Slate selection committee has been expanded to five members. The festival is also bringing new voices into its overall curatorial team, which will now, with the goal of expanding and diversifying our reach, consist of Film at Lincoln Center programming staff and an international roster of programmers and advisors.

“Our goal in revising the festival’s structure was to clarify and strengthen the identity of this venerable event while also making room for discovery and surprise. We began the work of rethinking the festival before this public health crisis, and we believe that our new template is one we can adapt for this uncertain year,” said Dennis Lim, Director of Programming, New York Film Festival. “Our programming exists to champion the films we believe in and to bring those films to discerning audiences in New York City and beyond. The current situation compels us to think more deeply and imaginatively about what that can mean. I’m excited and grateful to be working with this exceptional team of programmers and advisors to put together a lineup we can share with our audiences this fall.”

The updated structure will be as follows:

• The MAIN SLATE, which is the heart and historic core of the festival, brings together the films that promise to define the year in cinema. The selection committee for this section will be Dennis Lim (Chair), Florence Almozini, K. Austin Collins, Eugene Hernandez (NYFF Director), and Rachel Rosen.
• A new section called CURRENTS will be added to the lineup and is designed to complement the Main Slate. The CURRENTS section traces a more complete picture of contemporary cinema, with an emphasis on new and innovative forms and voices. The section will present a diverse offering of short and feature-length work by filmmakers and artists working at the vanguard of the medium. The newly formed selection committee for this section will be Dennis Lim (Chair), Florence Almozini, Aily Nash, and Tyler Wilson.
• The new SPOTLIGHT section will be NYFF’s showcase of sneak previews, gala events, screenings with live or performance elements, guest-curated selections and other special evenings. This section will be programmed by Eugene Hernandez and Dennis Lim.
• The REVIVALS section connects cinema’s rich past to its dynamic present through an eclectic assortment of new restorations, titles selected by the festival’s filmmakers, rarities, and more. This section will be programmed by Florence Almozini and Dan Sullivan.
• The TALKS section will supplement NYFF’s screenings with a series of free and ticketed panel discussions and in-depth conversations with a wide range of guests. This section will be programmed by Eugene Hernandez, Devika Girish, and Madeline Whittle.

The new NYFF structure effectively consolidates many sections that previously existed in the festival. Documentaries, which have always been an important part of the program, will now be represented throughout the festival. Shorts programming will largely exist within the new Currents section, as will the experimental work and artists’ films previously shown in the Projections section. 

NYFF is also appointing a new team of five advisors: Violeta Bava, Michelle Carey, Leo Goldsmith, Rachael Rakes, and Gina Telaroli. The advisors collectively bring a breadth and depth of experience and expertise in film festivals, development and production, criticism and academia, moving-image exhibitions, and archival projects, and will work with festival programmers on film scouting and to facilitate connections and collaborations with various sectors of cinema. Additional information about festival programmers and advisors is available below.  

“Our city is enduring a devastating crisis right now and there is no question that the 58th New York Film Festival will be different as a result, but New Yorkers are resilient and constraints can inspire new ideas. In planning this year’s festival we’re taking an open-minded approach, and this fall we hope to share the best of cinema with audiences safely and securely, both in person and online. Our commitment to supporting the art and elevating the craft of cinema and enriching film culture is unwavering as we plan this year’s NYFF,” stated Eugene Hernandez, Director of the New York Film Festival.

As the festival dates approach, Film at Lincoln Center will share additional New York Film Festival programming updates. Submissions are now open for short films.

(Pictured above, L-R: Dennis Lim, Eugene Hernandez, Florence Almozini, K. Austin Collins, Rachel Rosen, Devika Girish, Aily Nash, Dan Sullivan, Madeline Whittle, Tyler Wilson, Violeta Bava, Michelle Carey, Leo Goldsmith, Rachael Rakes, Gina Telaroli)

The 58th New York Film Festival Programming Team:

• Florence Almozini is currently Senior Programmer at Large for Film at Lincoln Center, where she serves on the committees for the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, and oversees the programming of new releases. She has organized numerous retrospectives at FLC, including Walerian Borowczyk (2015), Anna Magnani (2016), Marcello Mastroianni (2017), Jiri Trnka (2018), Luchino Visconti (2018), The Female Gaze: Contemporary Women Cinematographers (2018), Agnès Varda (2019), and Wong Kar-wai (2020). As the Director of BAMcinématek, where she worked from 1999 to 2013, she presented retrospectives of Hong Sang-soo (2003), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2005), Manoel de Oliveira (2008), Arnaud Desplechin (2009), Nicolas Winding Refn (2009), Bong Joon-ho (2009), and Andrzej Zulawski (2012). In 2009, she launched the venue’s first ever film festival, BAMcinemaFest, where she served as Festival Director. She has served on juries for the Mar del Plata and Tribeca Film Festivals, as well as the Cinema Tropical and IFP Gotham Awards, and has been on the selection committee for Tournées Film Festival since 2012. She was awarded the Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture in 2013.
• K. Austin Collins is the film critic for Vanity Fair. He was previously the film critic for The Ringer, and his other writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Reverse Shot, and the Brooklyn Rail. He writes crosswords for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the American Values Crossword Club. He lives in Brooklyn.
• Devika Girish is the Assistant Editor at Film Comment. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Reverse Shot, BFI, The Village Voice, and other publications. She was one of the programmers for the Berlin Critics’ Week 2020 and currently serves on the selection committee for the India programme of the Mumbai Film Festival. 
• Eugene Hernandez is Director of the New York Film Festival and Publisher of Film Comment at Film at Lincoln Center, where he serves as Deputy Executive Director. His duties include strategic leadership, programming special events, and managing emerging artist, industry, and education initiatives. He joined Film at Lincoln Center in 2010 as Director of Digital Strategy to develop digital platforms and content. In 1996, Hernandez co-founded IndieWire, which he built over 15 years as it became the leading editorial publication for independent and international films, filmmakers, industry, and audiences. He was named on Out magazine’s OUT100 list in 2015 and has served as a juror at Sundance, SXSW, and the Film Independent Spirit Awards. He has also worked extensively as a consultant for nonprofits like the Creative Capital Foundation, written for major print and online publications, served on the board of advisors for SXSW, SeriesFest, and Art House Convergence, and worked as a programming consultant for the Key West Film Festival.
• Dennis Lim (Chair) has been the Director of Programming at Film at Lincoln Center since 2013. During his tenure, he has served on the New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films selection committees, co-founded the Art of the Real festival, and organized numerous programs, including retrospectives of Jane Campion, George Cukor, Christian Petzold, Raúl Ruiz, Agnès Varda, and John Waters. He was previously the film editor of The Village Voice and the editorial director of the Museum of the Moving Image, and was the programmer of the 2010 Flaherty Film Seminar. He has served on multiple festival juries, including Sundance, Cannes Critics Week, Locarno, and San Sebastián, and is an advisor for the Berlinale, the Mumbai Film Festival, and the Thessaloniki Film Festival. In 2018 he received the French Ministry of Culture’s Chevalier of the Arts and Letters. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, and Film Comment, and taught film studies at Harvard and arts criticism at NYU. His 2015 book David Lynch: The Man from Another Place has been translated into three languages; his monograph on the Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo will be published in 2021.
• Aily Nash is a curator based in New York. She is a programmer at the New York Film Festival, where she co-curated the Projections section from 2014–2019, and a program advisor to the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Short Film section. She served as a Biennial advisor and co-curator of the film program for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and was Head of Programming for the 2018 edition of the Images Festival in Toronto. She has curated programs and exhibitions for the Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York), MoMA PS1 (New York), Anthology Film Archives (New York), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Tabakalera Centre for Contemporary Culture (San Sebastian), FACT (Liverpool), Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (Tokyo), Ghost:2561 (Bangkok), and others. She curated five seasons of the Basilica Screenings series at Basilica Hudson (2012–2016). In 2015, she was awarded a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation.
• Rachel Rosen is a San Francisco Bay Area programmer and awards consultant. Previously, she was Director of Programming for SFFILM, which presents the annual San Francisco International Film Festival. She was Director of Programming for Film Independent and the Los Angeles Film Festival for eight years. Rosen also served as Associate Director of Programming for the San Francisco International Festival. She has worked in various capacities for New York’s Film Forum and TriStar Pictures and served as Directors Liaison for three editions of the New York Film Festival. She is a graduate of Stanford University’s Master of Arts program in Documentary Film.
• Dan Sullivan is an Assistant Programmer for Film at Lincoln Center and the Co-Editor of the film section of The Brooklyn Rail. He is a frequent contributor to Film Comment, Cinema Scope, and other publications. At FLC he has organized or co-organized retrospectives of Raúl Ruiz, David Lynch, Jacques Rivette, Germaine Dulac, Pedro Costa, Jane Birkin, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, among others, and various film series including “Going Steadi: 40 Years of Steadicam” (2017), “Heathcliff, It’s Me: Adapting Wuthering Heights” (2017), and “Make My Day: American Movies in the Age of Reagan” (2019, with J. Hoberman). He has also served as a programmer for NYFF and is currently a member of the New Directors/New Films selection committee.
• Madeline Whittle has been a member of the year-round programming team at Film at Lincoln Center since 2016. Her writing on film appears regularly in Film Comment, and she has worked extensively as a freelance translator with a specialty in French film criticism. Her translation of Alain Bergala’s The Cinema Hypothesis: Teaching Cinema in the Classroom and Beyond was published by BFI/Austrian Filmmuseum in 2016. In 2019 she served on the jury for the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.
• Tyler Wilson is an Assistant Programmer at Film at Lincoln Center. He has played a leading role in the organization’s shorts programming since 2017, serving on the selection committees for the New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films. He is a co-programmer of FLC’s new releases and has co-organized numerous programs including International Melodrama (2017) and retrospectives of Jane Campion (2017), Jacques Tourneur (2018), Agnès Varda (2019), and Wong Kar-wai (2020). His writing has appeared in Film Comment and The Brooklyn Rail.

The 58th New York Film Festival Advisory Team:

• Violeta Bava worked at the Buenos Aires International Film Festival (BAFICI) for 20 years, both as a programmer and the Co-Director of BAL, a leading co-production market for Latin American films. She has worked as a film consultant and production tutor for several funds, organizations, and festivals worldwide, and played a key role in the development of initiatives to support filmmakers and producers in the Latin American region. She was Professor of Cinema Aesthetics and Ethics at Centro de Investigación Cinematográfica (Buenos Aires) for more than 10 years. Since 2012, she has been the Latin American Consultant for the Venice International Film Festival and the Venice Market. She is also currently the Co-Head of Industry at Visions du Réel, Head of Studies at the Torino FeatureLab, International Guest Curator at the New Zealand International Film Festival, and part of the programming team of the Macao International Film Festival. She is a founder of Ruda Cine, which has produced films by Milagros Mumenthaler, Martín Rejtman, Dominga Sotomayor, and Eduardo Williams. 
• Michelle Carey is a Berlin-based film curator. She was the artistic director of the Melbourne International Film Festival from 2011–18. She is film festivals editor for the online journal Senses of Cinema and a co-founder of the group Parenting at Film Festivals. She serves as Q&A moderator for various festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Berlinale Forum. She previously worked for the Melbourne Cinémathèque, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and the Adelaide Film Festival. 
• Leo Goldsmith is a teacher, writer, and curator based in New York. He is a visiting assistant professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College, The New School, and has lectured on media and film at CUNY Brooklyn College, New York University, and Harvard University. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Agenda, Cinema Scope, and The Brooklyn Rail, where he was film editor from 2011 to 2018. He is a co-author of Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics (Wiley 2015), by Robert Stam with Richard Porton, and is currently writing a book about the filmmaker Peter Watkins (Verso Books). He has organized exhibitions and film programs with the Museum of the Moving Image, the Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, UnionDocs, and CAC/Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, Lithuania). He received his PhD from the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU in 2018.
• Rachael Rakes is a curator, writer, editor, film programmer, and educator. She is currently Curator of Public Practice at BAK basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht, Netherlands, an Editor at Large for Verso Books, and a Programmer at Large for Film at Lincoln Center, where she co-curates the annual festival Art of the Real. Recent exhibitions and programs include DECODERS/RECORDERS: Steffani Jemison and Samson Young (De Appel/Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam), Relational Capacities (Frame Contemporary/Amos Rex, Helsinki), On Watching Men (SAIC, Chicago), Dark Progress + Uncontained Energy and Contained Fear (Tabakerlara, San Sebastian), CAMP: In Cameras Res (De Appel), The Health Show II (A.I.R., NYC), In Between: Tacita Dean (Centre Pompidou, Paris). Rakes has taught on documentary aesthetics and socially engaged art at The New School and Harvard Summer School. She has advised for Sandberg Institute, and teaches a course on time-based essays at the New Centre for Research & Practice. 
• Gina Telaroli is a filmmaker, writer, and video archivist. For the past 10 years she has managed the video archive for Martin Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions, as well as consulting on and creating the series trailer for “Martin Scorsese Presents: Republic Rediscovered,” a 30-film series celebrating the Poverty Row studio in conjunction with The Film Foundation, MoMA, and Paramount Pictures. In the last year she published essays in two new books (Manny Farber: Paintings & Writings and The Sound of Fury: Hollywood’s Schwarze Liste) and programmed a series devoted to the Swedish documentarian Mikael Kristersson at the Museum of the Moving Image. Her feature and short film work has screened around the world, with her most recent film, Monte Verita, premiering at IndieMemphis. She is currently the co-editor of the film section of The Brooklyn Rail. 

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the 17-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema. The 58th edition will take place September 25–October 11, 2020, and continues a more than 50-year tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The New York Film Festival has been a centerpiece of New York film culture since 1963, introducing US audiences to the most essential new cinematic works from around the world. 

Details about festival passes and tickets will follow. Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) members at the Contributor level and above receive early access opportunities and ticket discounts to NYFF and FLC screenings year-round. Support of the New York Film Festival benefits Film at Lincoln Center in its nonprofit mission to support the art and craft of cinema.

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER

Film at Lincoln Center is dedicated to supporting the art and elevating the craft of cinema and enriching film culture.

Film at Lincoln Center fulfills its mission through the programming of festivals, series, retrospectives, and new releases; the presentation of podcasts, talks, and special events; and via its artist initiatives. Since its founding in 1969, this nonprofit organization has brought the celebration of American and international film to the world-renowned Lincoln Center arts complex, making the discussion and appreciation of cinema accessible to a broad audience and ensuring that it remains an essential art form for years to come.

Support for the New York Film Festival is generously provided by Official Partners HBO and Campari, Supporting Partner Radeberger Pilsner, Contributing Partners Harken Wine and Hudson New York-an SBE Hotel, and Media Partner WNET New York Public Media. American Airlines is the Official Airline of Film at Lincoln Center.

Film at Lincoln Center receives generous, year-round support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.