The 54th New York Film Festival will be including a new program called Explorations, a selection of six exploratory and adventurous international feature films.
“We got to thinking about the composition of the festival, and it seemed like it might be interesting to add a new element, a new section of films linked by a common spirit of adventurousness on the part of the filmmakers,” said festival director Kent Jones. “We talked it over as a group, everyone liked the idea, and these are the six films we chose for the first incarnation. I love the range here. And I love the extremity of these movies, the feeling of an artist sparked by an intuition or a desire, no matter how fugitive or fleeting, and pursuing it all the way to its end point.”
Explorations will feature Albert Serra’s “The Death of Louis XIV”; Douglas Gordon’s “I Had Nowhere to Go”; João Pedro Rodrigues’s “The Ornithologist,” which won him the director prize at Locarno; Natalia Almada’s “Everything Else”; and Gastón Solnicki’s Kékszakállú and Oliver Laxe’s “Mimosas.”
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The 54th New York Film Festival will also feature 23 shorts as part of five programs in the main slate.
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Shorts Program 1: Narrative will feature emerging filmmakers such as New Directors/New Films alum Terence Nance (“An Oversimplification of Her Beauty”) and Roger Ross Williams, a co-creator of Convergence’s “Traveling While Black” and an Oscar winner for documentary short.
Shorts Program 2: International Auteurs will feature new work from acclaimed directors Nadav Lapid, Bertrand Bonello, Jia Zhangke, and Gabriel Abrantes.
Shorts Program 4: New York Stories focuses on the city, featuring Gina Telaroli (NYFF Artists Academy 2015), Dustin Guy Defa (Local Color: The Short Films of Dustin Guy Defa, FSLC 2015), and the directorial debut of actress Chloë Sevigny.
The second annual Genre Stories and the inaugural Documentary shorts program present global tales, both real and unreal, and boast world premieres of Jack Burke’s “New Gods,” Adam Goldhammer’s “Imposter,” Lewie Kloster’s “Legal Smuggling With Christine Choy,” Matt Tyrnauer’s “Jean Nouvel: Reflections,” and Mila Aung-Thwin and Van Royko’s “The Vote.”
The New York Film Festival will run from Sept. 30-Oct. 16.
(Pictured: “The Death of Louis XIV”)