New York Film Festival sheds light on history

By Gregg Kilday

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – History as it is
reflected onscreen will be one of the themes that is front and
center as the 43rd New York Film Festival kicks off September
23 with George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck,” an
account of CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow’s confrontation with
Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Reflecting on the festival’s lineup, announced Wednesday,
Richard Pena, chairman of the selection committee and program
director, said, “The films are never selected with themes in
mind. But if you look at this year’s selections, starting with
opening night, there is a notion of how history is treated,
re-created and expressed onscreen and in art.”

Films that touch on that subject include Hou Hsai-hsien’s
“Three Times,” a Taiwanese film set in three time periods,
1911, 1966 and 2005; Israeli documentarian’s Avi Mograbi’s
“Avenge but One of My Two Eyes,” which records the treatment of
Palestinians by members of the Israeli army; Bennett Miller’s
“Capote,” which follows Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman)
as he researches his seminal nonfiction book “In Cold Blood”;
and Lars von Trier’s “Manderlay,” which looks at the legacy of
slavery in the American South of the 1930s.

Neil Jordan’s “Breakfast on Pluto,” the story of an Irish
transvestite cabaret singer in ’60s London that stars Cillian
Murphy, will be featured prominently as the festival’s
Centerpiece film. And Michael Haneke’s “Cache,” a thriller that
earned Haneke the best director award at the Cannes Film
Festival, has been chosen as the closing-night film October 9.

Steven Soderbergh will be represented by two films at the
fest. He’s an executive producer of “Good Night,” which was
produced by, among others, his Section 8 banner, which he heads
with Clooney. And he directed “Bubble,” an Ohio-set murder
mystery, produced under his new pact with Todd Wagner and Mark
Cuban’s 2929 Prods., which calls for Soderbergh to direct six
high-definition films to debut day-and-date in theaters and on
TV and home video.

While this year’s lineup doesn’t rely upon the grand old
masters of cinema, it includes plenty of contemporary auteurs.
The fraternal Belgian directing team of Jean-Pierre and Luc
Dardenne will bring their “L’Enfant,” which took home the Palme
d’Or at Cannes this year. French director Patrice Chereau will
offer his latest film, “Gabrielle,” starring Isabelle Huppert.
And Korean Park Chan-wook will be represented by “Sympathy for
Lady Vengeance,” the third film in his vengeance trilogy that
includes 2003′s “Old Boy.”

Several filmmakers are making return trips to the New York
showcase. Hou Hsiao-hsien has had more than a half-dozen films
in the festival. Both von Trier and Russian director Aleksandr
Sokurov, whose “The Sun” will screen, will show their fourth
films to be chosen. French director Phillippe Garrel, whose
“Regular Lovers” won a spot, was last represented at the
festival in 1969.

Geographically, Pena said, this year’s selections reflect
the growing importance of South Korean cinema, “which has
clearly in the last decade emerged as a major filmmaking
culture. And all three are so different and so well achieved.”

In addition to “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance,” they include
Im Sang-soo’s “The President’s Last Band” and Hong Sang-soo’s
“A Tale of Cinema.”

The lineup also reflects what Pena called “the re-emergence
of Eastern European cinema.” Titles from that region include
Cristi Puiu’s “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” from Romania, Dorota
Kedzierzawska’s “I Am” from Poland and Bohdan Slama’s
“Something Like Happiness” from the Czech Republic.

Other films on the schedule include Noah Baumbach’s “The
Squid and the Whale,” an account of a family dealing with
divorce; Michael Winterbottom’s “A Cock and Bull Story,” an
adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s novel “Tristram Shandy”; Michel
Negroponte’s “Methadonia”; Hany Abu-Assad’s “Paradise Now”;
Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s “Through the Forest”; and Mitsuo
Yanagimachi’s “Who’s Camus Anyway?”

Panel discussions will include “Speaking Truth to Power:
Media, Politics and Government,” with Brian Lehrer, Helen
Thomas and Don Hewitt, who is portrayed in “Good Night”; HBO
Films’ Directors’ Dialogues with Neil Jordan and other
directors at the festival; and a Film Comment Focus on actor
Steve Coogan.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter