New York Film Festival

A4 members get $5 off select screenings via this private link or promo code NYFF61CP.

A4 is thrilled to announce our Community Partnership with the 61st New York Film Festival (NYFF61). Through this partnership, we are delighted to extend an exclusive $5 discount to our members for select films listed here. Please note that if tickets are no longer active, it means that the screening is sold out. We kindly request that you keep the private link and code confidential, as they are exclusively offered to the A4 community. For 61 years, the New York Film Festival has been a cornerstone of New York’s arts scene, serving as an annual barometer for the state of cinema and shaping film culture in the city and beyond. The festival is scheduled to take place from September 29 to October 15, featuring screenings at Lincoln Center and various venues across the city. Highlights include:

The Human Surge 3, 9/30
Q&A with Eduardo Williams
Armed with a 360-degree camera, Argentinean director Eduardo Williams returns to the bold, time-and-continent-skipping world of his 2016 film The Human Surge and constructs something even more immense, fearless, and breathtakingly beautiful, shooting in Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and Peru and achieving an unprecedented fluidity between spaces and feelings.

Jean-Luc Godard + Wang Bing + Pedro Costa, 10/2
Q&A with Wang Bing
Man in Black - An 86-year-old man prowls the proscenium of a crumbling theater, his naked body stretches and bends, illuminated under glaring lights or hidden by shadow, always heaving with the weight of history. This is Wang Xilin, one of China’s leading classical composers, who becomes the passionate narrator of his life, art, and political persecution against the dramatic backdrop of Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. Whether emotionally relating the abuse suffered at the hands of the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, describing how he translated personal and historical pain into the furious abstraction of his symphonies, or simply displaying his miraculously persistent flesh, the musician is at once witness to history, grand storyteller, and physical evidence of his own torment. With director Wang Bing’s tirelessly circling, endlessly compassionate camera and the striking use of Wang Xilin’s glorious music, which buffets, buoys, or sometimes drowns out the composer’s words, Man in Black is an overwhelming sensory experience that speaks to the power of creation amidst human deprivation. An Icarus Films release.

Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus, 10/11
Q&A with Neo Sora
When Ryuichi Sakamoto died in March 2023 at age 71, the world lost one of its greatest musicians: a classical orchestral composer, a techno-pop artist, and a piano soloist who elevated every genre he worked in and inspired and influenced music-lovers across the globe. As a final gift to his legions of fans, filmmaker Neo Sora (Sakamoto’s son) has constructed a gorgeous elegy starring Sakamoto himself in one of his final performances. Recorded in late 2022 at NHK Studio in Tokyo, this filmed concert is an intimate, melancholy, and achingly beautiful one-man show, featuring just Sakamoto and a Yamaha grand, as the composer glides through a playlist of his most haunting, delicate melodies (including “Lack of Love, “The Wuthering Heights,” “Aqua,” “Opus,” and many more). Shot in pristine black-and-white by Bill Kirstein and edited by Takuya Kawakami, this stirring film brings us so close to a living, breathing artist that it feels like pure grace.

World premieres in the Spotlight section are Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s genre-defying series The Curse starring Emma Stone; and Garth Davis’s superbly rendered science-fiction drama Foe, starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal.

Additional highlights in Spotlight are the long-awaited The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s first film in a decade; a late-night showing of Harmony Korine’s AGGRO DR1FT, shot entirely in infrared, preceded by David Cronenberg’s surreal short Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection; Richard Linklater’s cleverly existential comedy Hit Man, starring and co-written by actor Glen Powell; Sean Price Williams’s feature debut, the weird and wild The Sweet East; and Trân Anh Hùng’s sumptuous Cannes Best Director winner The Taste of Things, starring Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel.

Documentaries are a significant part of Spotlight, with Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson’s Sundance-awarded Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project; Steve McQueen’s sober and gripping Occupied City; Errol Morris’s riveting portrait of John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel; Frederick Wiseman’s sumptuous Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros; and Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus, Neo Sora’s heartfelt gift to his father’s fans.

One-of-a-kind events include Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bleat starring Emma Stone, presented in 35mm and featuring live musical accompaniment, and an extended conversation with Pedro Almodóvar following his 30-minute film Strange Way of Life.

Image credit: © 2023 Studio Ghibli