Over the past 20 years, the language of the boardroom has infiltrated film culture. Thanks to increased access to trade publications like Variety and podcasts like The Town, the average moviegoer has an eye on conversations about film financing and positioning that, for many decades, rarely extended beyond industry circles. Box office multipliers, studio mergers, and the economic viability of the theatrical experience were as much a part of the conversation surrounding The Odyssey, summer’s hottest blockbuster, as Matt Damon’s performance.
Even independent movies aren’t free from money talk; to flex its success, the Obsession team crowed the impressive but relatively inside-baseball statistic that it made more money on its second weekend in theaters than its first. Amid declining ticket sales and dwindling funds for small and mid-level projects, these conversations have real stakes—but it’s increasingly rare to encounter a space that is just about the filmmaking.
In this way, the New York Film Festival (NYFF) stands apart. There are no prizes. There’s no associated marketplace, meaning that distributors aren’t jostling to scoop up the movies with the most box office potential or awards buzz. It does sometimes offer splashy debuts (last year, Alice Tully Hall was abuzz for the secret premiere of Marty Supreme), but, more often than not, the festival is a reflection of the year in movies rather than any particular headline-making moment. This year’s festival, which opens on Sept. 25, includes James Gray’s suburban drama Paper Tiger, the world premiere of Bourne director Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, and Ava DuVernay’s 14th, her anticipated follow-up to the 2016 documentary 13th.
“The way I see it is that I’m making an argument with the program, making a case that cinema remains a vital and relevant and exciting art form,” says Dennis Lim, NYFF’s artistic director.
A former Village Voice editor who has written extensively for the New York Times, the Criterion Collection, and more, Lim has had a front row seat to the changes in New York film culture over the last three decades. He first attended NYFF as a student in the mid-’90s (Strange Days by Kathryn Bigelow was a standout) and often rode the subway uptown to Film at Lincoln Center, NYFF’s parent organization, for its film programming (a series on Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien was “a seismic event” for him). Lim began film programming not long after, joined Lincoln Center in 2013, and became the festival’s lead programmer in 2020.
Critics have always been at the heart of NYFF. Andrew Sarris, who popularized auteur theory, served on the selection committee the festival’s first year. Susan Sontag joined for the second. Lim’s current team includes New Yorker film critic Justin Chang, film curator Rachel Rosen, and former Rolling Stone film critic K. Austin Collins as an advisor, among others. What do they share? An affinity for Hong Sang-soo and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but also an “openness,” says Lim. “Always be thinking about what’s being left out, what’s being ignored.”
For Lim, both critics and film programmers provide a framework, a context for understanding a movie. But as alternative newspapers like the Village Voice and jobs for film critics dried up over the last few decades, “it felt like programming was something that was more interesting or at least offered me more control and agency than being a writer,” Lim says.
Lim and his team start planning NYFF in January, keeping tabs on films coming out of festivals in Sundance, Rotterdam, and Berlin. By May, Lim is watching movies for up to 12 hours a day in order to pare down hundreds of films to a final slate of over 70 features and 40 shorts. The three festivals Lim attends every year are the Berlinale, Cannes, and Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna (which shows recently restored films).
He and his collaborators also watch movies anywhere and everywhere: rough cuts in screening rooms, at home on digital screeners, projected several stories high in the open air at the Piazza Maggiore, and, yes, occasionally on their laptops. Lim often watches things multiple times, so he can be sure that he’s not influenced by movie-marathon-induced delirium.
The festival—which also includes several short film sections, an experimental section called Currents, and a section of recently restored pictures called Revivals—doesn’t have many restrictions. New York cinema frequently plays a part: This year alone, Paper Tiger, Ira Sachs’s The Man I Love, Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, the documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem, and New York Never Let Me Down (a short from Aftersun director Charlotte Wells) all take the city as their subject in one way or another.
What Lim finds most exciting about this year’s slate of films is how many speak with clarity to the current moment. “Some of my favorite films of the year—All of a Sudden, Possible Love, The Dreamed Adventure, Fatherland—are reminders that cinema is a way of reflecting and making sense of the world, even as the state of things gets more dire and dystopian,” he says.
Lim still writes criticism—occasionally. He’s a semi-regular contributor to Criterion (he wrote the in-booklet essays for Todd Haynes’s Safe, John Cassavetes’s Opening Night, Sean Baker’s Anora, and the “Before“ trilogy, among many others). He’s also written extensively about David Lynch—if you buy the new Wild at Heart Blu-ray, you’ll find a video of Lim talking about the film. “I write when I want to figure something out,” Lim says. Inspired by the philosophy that powered the Village Voice, he considers it his mission to propose alternatives to a cinematic mainstream led by the pursuit of profit.
“Everybody’s thinking about metrics. We’re thinking about metrics, too. We want to fill the halls, but I also want to fill the smaller cinemas with quote-unquote ‘smaller films,'” says Lim. “Making the case that cinema is not just blockbusters, cinema is not just Hollywood, is more important than ever.”
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