New York Film Festival 62 (NYFF 2024) Wrap Up – Margaret Barton-Fumo Reports
This year’s New York Film Festival boasted an impressive roster of features, with an array of talented women both behind and in front of the camera. The coveted Main Slate was stacked, with eight films directed by women and nearly as many women-centric titles directed by men. Several women directors went out on a limb, performing bold experimentations in style and genre. Mati Diop’s Dahomey, for example, is a documentary like no other, tracking the repatriation of 26 African artifacts. The treasures are given literal voices in this hypnotic film, speaking of their historic journey back to a radically changed home. Diop has also included plenty of debate, as university students discuss the political implications of the move. Featuring a magnificent score by Dean Blunt and Wally Badarou, Dahomey effectively merges disparate genres into one, newfound type of film.
Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili also experimented with style, in her greatly anticipated sophomore feature April. Like her previous film, Beginning (2020), April incorporates numerous long takes, testing the patience of some audience members. Kulumbegashvili has an eye for nature and lingers often on striking images of Georgia’s springtime landscape. It’s a confident gesture, to focus on natural expanses in a film that is essentially about women’s bodies, following an OBGYN (Ia Sukhitashvili) who performs illegal abortions on the side. Some reviewers were split on this one, due to its unconventional style, but those who appreciated Beginning found much to admire in April.
Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light was more of a crowd pleaser, depicting a nuanced portrait of three women navigating life in Mumbai. Making ends meet while working in a busy hospital, they struggle to assert themselves in spite of a restrictive culture. Kapadia directs the film with a delicate touch, allowing her actresses’ elegant performances to shine.
Several actresses gave truly powerhouse performances within the festival Main Slate, in films that were directed by men. Mikey Madison, for example, really knocked it out of the park in Sean Baker’s Anora. Her portrayal of a Russian-American exotic dancer runs the gamut from subtle to amplified as she holds her own in Baker’s rapidfire screwball dramedy. Also remarkable is Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh’s heartbreaking Hard Truths, a fine-tuned showcase for the actress’ talents. Reuniting with Leigh decades after Secrets & Lies (1996), Jean-Baptiste proves her mettle as Posy, a woman suffering from deep depression and anxiety who exerts her troubles on everyone around her. And finally, in The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar directs Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in a touching drama about friendship and mortality, in which the two actresses are at the height of their game.
Programmed within the “Spotlight” slate of the festival, Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend, like The Room Next Door, is based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez. Starring Naomi Watts as a writer who inherits a Great Dane from her late friend, the film is sweet and poignant, if a bit slight. It certainly pales in comparison with other Spotlight selections, like Pablo Larraín’s Maria (starring Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas), Walter Salles I’m Still Here (starring the luminous Fernanda Torres), or Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard’s overly ambitious musical extravaganza.
Two women directors were included in the Spotlight slate, Petra Costa and Brett Story. The former directed Apocalypse in the Tropics, a searing analysis of the evangelical movement in Brazil, while Story co-directed Union with Stephen Maing, which depicts the unionization struggle of Amazon workers in Staten Island. While both Costa and Story directed documentaries, the women in the “Currents” slate skewed more abstract. Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is one such example, as an actress breaks the fourth wall and reads through excerpts of the writer’s work while preparing for a performance. Marta Mateus’ Fire of Wind, along with Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky’s bluish also bend the rules of filmmaking, each of them impressionistic reveries.
It is difficult to establish a theme within such a varied international festival, but in general I was taken with several women’s performances in male-directed films and by the bold choices made by many of the women directors. In either case, women are occupying center stage in a still male-dominated festival, in which the majority of the films are directed by men. It’s a promising step forward, to see so many inspiring women both in front of and behind the scenes, and one can only hope that next year will bring even more to the forefront.
