Dispatches From the Very Long Lines at New York Film Festival

Last week, New York’s cinephiles swarmed the Upper West Side for the 62nd annual New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. They suffered through long lines in the rain for the Criterion Closet van and snuck lunch at the halal cart outside Alice Tully Hall in between double features. They saw Isabelle Huppert in the flesh and full-frontal Omar Apollo on the screen. Four Cut writers shuttled back and forth between Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (where the festival screened a few films this year) to participate in the NYFF festivities for two weeks. We watched a sampling of movies, from the sobering West Bank documentary No Other Land to the latest feature films from Hong Sangsoo and Pedro Almodóvar. We chatted with attendees (and pro-Palestinian boycotters protesting the festival’s ties to Bloomberg Philanthropies) about their tastes, style, and politics. Here’s what we saw.

During the New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center is a prime people-watching playground, and if you pass through at just the right time you might see Tilda Swinton signing autographs on West 65th Street or Amanda Seyfried buying a bag of pretzel sticks between movies. The festival was extra crowded during its opening weekend, thanks to the Criterion Closet van, an 18-foot mobile version of the Criterion Collection’s closet. Typically, the closet is only accessible to famous directors or actors, but at this year’s NYFF, any cinephile willing to stand in line for up to seven hours could have their moment. (If you didn’t make it in this time, don’t worry: Criterion is partnering with St. Ann’s Warehouse to bring the van to Brooklyn Bridge Park for two days starting October 26.)

It was gray and drizzly on the Criterion Closet van’s first day, but that didn’t stop an army of umbrella-toting film enthusiasts from lining up outside Alice Tully Hall a full three hours before the van’s doors even opened. At 11 a.m. — just as people were shepherded inside the theater for The Brutalist’s three-and-a-half-hour premiere — the queue snaked around the corner. A few girls toward the front had gotten there early, giving themselves plenty of time to mull over what they wanted to buy: Y Tu Mamá También and the Gregg Araki Teen Apocalypse box set for Diana, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and “an Almodóvar” for her friend Harper. Their other friend, Lauren, who wore a low-slung miniskirt, collared crop top, and held a Festival de Cannes tote, announced that she’s “just here to kiki” before she ducked into The Brutalist premiere herself. Further down the line, Mel, a producer wearing a periwinkle coat and sunglasses, said she wanted Brazil, the 1985 dystopian sci-fi comedy starring Jonathan Pryce, because “every time I want to talk about the horrors of bureaucracy, I want to reference that movie and no one knows what I’m talking about.” Does she have a DVD player she can whip out to explain it to them? “I have a PlayStation 4,” she said.

A trio huddled together with lattes said they’re very into international cinema and rattled off a long list of treasures they hoped to find inside: Touki Bouki, House, The Battle of Algiers, Saint Omer, Mississippi Masala, and an Ousmane Sembène box set. They also mentioned they were planning to attend the New York Counter Film Festival, which is showing films withdrawn from other festivals in solidarity with Palestine, as well as raising mutual aid funds for Gaza and Lebanon. By 3 p.m., those about to enter the van had been in line since 10 a.m., meaning they had plenty of time to review the overwhelming brochure of films they could select inside, where they’d have three minutes to grab up to three films. Many ended up choosing classics like Mulholland Drive, In the Mood for Love, and the Before trilogy.

The neighborhood was dotted with totes and film tees — there were outfits honoring Laura Dern and Greta Gerwig, an “I TOLD YA” straggler, and a Bong Joon Ho “BONG HITS” number. But most festival attendees were simply dressed for a nice day out in the city, especially the audience leaving The Brutalist’s premiere during that first weekend. The film was long, but nearly everyone leaving it looked revived, including a few notables. Fred Hechinger, who was at the festival to promote his role in Nickel Boys, paired his shiny black loafers with no socks and some black sweatpants, a subtle way of saying “I just sat through an almost-four-hour movie.” Filmmaker Celine Song and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes also trailed behind the crowd, waving at familiar faces.

Generally, the line’s interest in the festival unfolding behind them seemed low. Three friends wearing matching bootleg merch from the summer’s M. Night Shyamalan camp thriller, Trap, said they were not there for the festival but would see “an adjacent film, Megalopolis, later. It’s gonna be a hot time.” What was it about Trap that compelled them to purchase tees? “It stars our favorite pop star, Lady Raven. We love stan culture,” they said. Further down the line, Jet, a freelance director who was there to film his own “Closet Picks” video for YouTube, said he and his friends had “just been looking at the wall over there” and realized there are “some good movies playing.” Would he try his luck on any standby lines? “Maybe next year.”

Those who did make it into the theater to watch this year’s slate of films experienced a full range of emotions. The festival formally opened with Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’s experimental adaptation of the popular Colson Whitehead novel, about an abusive reform school in the Jim Crow South. It was a gutting watch that made for a tense transition into the opening night party at Tavern on the Green. Emilia Pérez, a film that involves a drug lord, a small-time Mexico City lawyer, and a top-secret surgery, should come with a complimentary facial massage for how hard it might make you cringe. (Just imagine Zoe Saldana belting out “Vaginoplasty! Largyngoplasty! Chondrolaryngoplasty!”)

Coming off Challengers’ success and working with the same core team consisting of writer Justin Kuritzkes, costume designer Jonathan Anderson, and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, audiences expected a moving romance in Luca Guadagnino’s highly anticipated Queer. But it was mainly just a few hot sex scenes mixed into a meandering plot. Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, about a cantankerous documentary filmmaker’s last interview before death, came off too stuffy and stylized, even as it prodded at the self-seriousness of the documentary form. And The Friend filmmakers Scott McGehee and David Siegel did their best with the conceptually twee premise of “woman adopts dead friend’s pup,” but in the last 30 minutes, it started feeling like a Nicholas Sparks rom-com.

The writer Sigrid Nunez, whose 2018 novel, The Friend, was adapted by Siegel and McGehee, also wrote the source material for The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language film and the festival’s biggest hit. It’s a meticulously crafted seven-course prix fixe for the pupils, and a quietly funny gem of a story, executed by two performers in top form. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton holding hands during the film’s initial press conference just felt right. Also excellent were Mati Diop’s Dahomey, a documentary about the restitution of 26 royal artifacts to modern-day Benin, Sean Baker’s stripper-comedy Anora, and Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, which tracks a love affair across two decades with a rapidly modernizing China as the backdrop. No NYFF would be complete without Hong Sangsoo, and his film, A Traveler’s Need, starring Isabelle Huppert as a silly, awkward French teacher in South Korea, is a delight.

But by and large, the most moving film shown at NYFF was No Other Land, a sobering documentary that follows the brutal Israeli destruction of Palestinian homes in Masafer Yatta, a group of villages in the southern West Bank. Made by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers over five years, it has yet to receive distribution, though it will continue at Lincoln Center for an exclusive one-week run starting November 1. Escalating violence at home forced the filmmakers to cancel their Q&A and leave New York, which filmmaker Yuval Abraham explained before the October 1 screening of the film, where he gave an urgent speech that set the tone for what would be a grim, emotional viewing experience. “I don’t think I’ve ever left a screening with as much silence as there was for that. I don’t think I heard a word until we hit fresh air,” said Caleb Kierum, a 25-year-old software engineer who saw the film at the Elinor Bunin theater right across the street from Alice Tully Hall. “My biggest takeaway was the appreciation for the filmmakers showing us what Palestine looks like. So much of what I’ve seen previously was just the destruction and bombings in cities. I had no idea that it snowed in Palestine.” San Martin Garcia, a 28-year-old hospital worker, said he could feel the thickness of the air. “I don’t think I’m gonna be able to shake that for … ever.”

The festival saw its fair share of activism both in and out of the screening rooms this year. Just as the festival began, Screen Slate published an open letter signed by some participating filmmakers urging the festival to end its partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has connections to Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Climate activists silently walked onto the stage during a screening of Oh, Canada to unfurl a banner that read “No film on a dead planet,” and pro-Palestinian protesters later interrupted a The Room Next Door Q&A with Almodóvar and Swinton, who gave them a moment to speak. At a screening of Happyend, director Neo Sora called for a free Palestine. Two filmmakers, who asked to remain anonymous, spoke of their dissatisfaction with the festival, which has not publicly supported a cease-fire or made any reference to the ongoing boycott. “Overall, it’s very disappointing that nothing has been said acknowledging the fact that some of the funders that host this festival are complicit in the genocide happening in Palestine right now,” one said. The filmmakers compared NYFF’s relative silence on the matter to other festivals’ willingness to speak up. (We also reached out to Film at Lincoln Center for comment on the boycott but did not receive a response.) “The clarity in the mission statement of the festival makes all the difference in the world, because otherwise it makes it just as extractive as any other colonial practice,” the filmmaker said. “Yeah, we’re not going to acknowledge you, however, we do need your film. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.”

Back on West 65th Street, three Lincoln Center employees mentioned they had been waiting in line for the Criterion van for six hours, two of them taking turns based on their breaks to save their spot in line. They had their movies picked out, and one of them, Walter, even pulled out a heavy tote filled with Criterion laserdiscs. While the van was easily their personal highlight of the festival, their other key moments included seeing Elton John sing during a screening of his documentary, Elton John: Never Too Late, and watching catching a glimpse of Angelina Jolie during the premiere of Pablo Larraín’s Maria. It was like nothing they’d ever seen before at the festival, they said.

What we realized after two weeks of shuffling around the Upper West Side is that it’s actually not that easy to point out the average New York Film Festival attendee from the folks who just live in the neighborhood. They mostly look the same, albeit a little on the younger side. And while the Criterion Closet may have drawn more of the extra-wide-pants crowd than the neighborhood was expecting, we noticed that people of all ages and backgrounds arrived this year to start conversations, make new friends, and celebrate cinema. When writer Delia Cai emerged from the Criterion van with a friend, she said she started feeling “existential” while she was inside. “What am I doing with my life if I’m not constantly watching films?”

Related

• Gift of the Day: The Best Streaming Movies, in One Place
• 5 New York City Dance Companies, Brought Together