#510 - Trân Anh Hùng on The Taste of Things

02/01/24 • 22 min

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Trân Anh Hùng to discuss the NYFF61 Spotlight selection, THE TASTE OF THINGS, opening at Film at Lincoln Center on February 9th. The director will appear in person at select screenings opening weekend as well as for a sneak preview on Thursday, Feb. 8. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/taste. Destined to be remembered as one of the great films about the meaning, texture, and experience of food, this sumptuous, exceptionally well-crafted work, set in late 19th-century France, stars Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel (married, decades ago, in real life) as Eugénie, a cook, and Dodin, the gourmet chef she has been working with for 20 years. As they reach middle age, they can no longer deny their mutual romantic feelings, which have so long been concentrated in their passionate professionalism. This simple narrative—based upon Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel LA PASSION DE DODIN-BOUFFANT, GOURMET—sets the table for a sublime, sense-heightening exploration of pleasure, in which the play of sunlight across a late-afternoon kitchen is as meaningful as the image of a perfectly poached pear or the crisp of a buoyant vol-au-vent. Director Trân Anh Hùng won the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his bravura, scrupulously deployed feat of epicurean cinema. France’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards. An IFC Films release.

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#509 - Bas Devos and Liyo Gong on Here

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with director Bas Devos and actress Liyo Gong to discuss the NYFF61 Main Slate selection, HERE, opening at Film at Lincoln Center on February 9th. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/here. Stefan, a migrant construction worker living in Brussels, is planning a trip home to his mother in Romania. In preparing for his voyage, he reconnects with local family members over gifted bowls of homemade soup, interacts with strangers, and discovers a revivifying commune with nature. This all leads him to an unexpected connection with Shuxiu, a Chinese-Belgian bryologist, who’s studying the local moss. The gradual cultivation of this friendship—beautifully performed by actors Stefan Gota and Liyo Gong—motivates this hushed, emotionally resonant film about the power of observation, of people often deemed socially invisible, and of the larger green world surrounding us. In his lovely and tranquil fourth feature, Belgian filmmaker Bas Devos (GHOST TROPIC) has created a work that finds transcendence in the simplest human encounters and the most radiant of cinematic gestures. Winner of the Best Film prize in the Berlin International Film Festival’s Encounters competition. A Cinema Guild release.

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#511 - Serge Daney Talk with Richard Brody, Nicholas Elliott & Madeline Whittle

This week we’re excited to present a panel of critics and programmers to discuss the significance of the late French film critic Serge Daney (1944–1992)'s thought today, with a particular emphasis on how his politically driven analysis and radical enthusiasms of the 1970s might speak to our contemporary moment. Film at Lincoln Center was proud to recently present Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970s, a series that celebrated French film critic Serge Daney and the films he championed in his book La Rampe, occasioned by its long-awaited English translation under the title Footlights. Complementing this program was a panel that featured The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, translator of Footlights and series co-programmer Nicholas Elliott, and moderator FLC Assistant Programmer Madeline Whittle. This discussion considered the relation between mise-en-scène and moral perspective, the cinema as an antidote to advertising, and the critic’s role as an ally to filmmakers. Never Look Away: Serge Daney’s Radical 1970 was sponsored by MUBI.