This long weekend, The New York Film Festival wrapped its 62nd season after a two-week stretch of screenings and guest speakers. Films and filmmakers traveled from all over, but not without trials and tribulations to do so. Sure, it was Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s first time in New York City. At the same time, Iranian director for”, Rasoulof challenged and escaped the Mullah government to produce “The Seed of the Sacred Fig. The harsh realities of our world in 2024 seep more vividly into stories. Kapadia says in her talkback that, “Everything is very interesting wherever you are. Life becomes more interesting than cinema.” When writing her film, “All We Imagine As Light” she found her frequent experiences were a cool “mis-en-scene”. What happens when real life becomes cinema? I couldn’t decide if documenting as fiction degrades the line between art and reality itself. Does Kapadia patronize the real world or encourage us to write about real things?

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Films at NYFF model after themes around the Jewish culture, Iranian oppression, women’s rights, class, and immigration. These narratives call out the idea that issues across the world have too much in common. Dea Kulumbegashvili’s “April” hints at American abortion rights in the country, Georgia’s version. Meanwhile, Kapadia’s film covers tiresome tensions around Hindus, Muslims, and arranged marriage. While Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain” could be taken from his personal experiences, Sean Baker had to do intense research on Brooklyn prostitution in “Anora”. He recalls, “A lot of research and work clearly went into the making of this carefully wrought film, even into the broad working-class Brooklyn accent that Madison adopts for Ani, as well as her expert, graceful call-girl moves”. Research is crucial when quick media demands for genuine content to lure them into longer-form works. Editorial writer Barbara Quart writes that Rasoulof’s film automatically meets this quota. Despite it being “an imperfect work”, its “artifice, awkwardness” does not matter because of the “overall power” and “pain” of the Iranian regime.

Yet, it’s not like these artists base their work on their real lives just to sell. Creators for “My Undesirable Friends” began because they just wanted to make a film about “journalists being named foreign agents”. In a city where authenticity comes first, are these real films being sold to the wider audience?

Manohla Dargis, chief critic at the New York Times, writes that NYFF pioneered “crucial international distribution networks” for “smaller, less mainstream work”. They refer to the editorial, The Film as Art which divides audiences as chasers for “product” versus festivals which provide cultural “dignity”. However, I find it snobby to continue with studio patterns and exclude the mainstream from festival picks. The truth is that exclusivity in festivals restricts global stories from being included in people’s homes. I worry that films packaged with established stars at festivals like NYFF will make a bigger mark at the awards season. Frankly, it’s what Netflix TV has been doing with Adam Brody’s social media thirst traps on Nobody Wants This. Dargis puts it best when she notes that “the Oscar race tends to generate more attention than the movies do”. While Lily Gladstone made her debut in the Native-American movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese is still a white director packaging Leo DiCaprio into the content. After its run at NYFF, the film Queer could be the next front for white men displayed as an aesthetic.

Moving forward, it is even more important to take a critical lens at how our institutions relate to real issues in the world that we seem to care so much about. Where does the Oscars get its funding from? Will people forget about festival stories? Does adding them to digital pop culture or the awards season make them any more real? In a world of oversaturated media, NYFF’s indie, long-form films remind us that we must not make quick decisions when it comes to content. Rather, we must research, identify, and remember what real work means to us.

Works Cited

NYFF Film Review: 'Queer' is a Trippy But Ultimately Ponderous Affair - Awards Radar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bp_Lx7Z5IM

https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff62-ticket-availability-and-updates/

https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2024/daily/62nd-new-york-film-festival-main-slate-announced/

https://theberkshireedge.com/reflections-on-the-62nd-new-york-film-festival-part-one/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NYFilmFestival/comments/1ffkaho/are_films_pulling_out/

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