Says Clooney: "It was hysterical to be shooting the burning-of-the-cross scene, with all these guys in Ku Klux Klan outfits. Half of them were black!"
A new documentary from Paul Thomas Anderson and a new documentary about Brian De Palma are part of the lineup of special presentations, announced today, that will screen at the New York Film Festival, which runs from Sept. 25 to Oct. 11. The fest, presented by The Film Society of Lincoln Center, also announced a 15th anniversary screening of Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, starring George Clooney.
Anderson’s doc, Junun, a world premiere, centers on a trip the director took with composer Jonny Greenwood to Rajasthan in northwest India, where Greenwood and Radiohead engineer Nigel Godrich recorded an album with Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur.
The film about De Palma, titled simply De Palma, is directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow and explores the work of the director of such films as Carrie, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. In conjunction with the doc, the festival also plans to screen the 1981 Blow Out as part of its revivals sidebar.
Other special presentations will include Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog, an autobiographical film that touches on the artist’s late dog Lolabelle as well as life in downtown New York in the wake of 9/11; Laszlo Nemes’ Son of Saul, a drama set in the Auschwitz death camp, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival; and Chevalier, a psychodrama directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari, who is the Film Society’s 2015 Filmmaker in Residence.
In addition to Blow Out, the revivals lineup consists of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, which opened the 1985 edition of the festival; King Hu’s A Touch of Zen; and Manoel de Oliveira’s Visit, or Memories and Confessions.
The festival also will present seven new restorations from the Martin Scorsese-founded Film Foundation, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. They are: Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl/La Noire de…; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Boys From Fengkuei; Ernst Lubitsh’s Heaven Can Wait; Lino Brocka’s Insiang; John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home; Marcel Ophuls’ The Memory of Justice; and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers.
