Unlike most of its brethren, the annual New York Film Festival, which begins this year on Sept. 26, does not have a marketplace or give out awards. “For me, there is one question that lies at the heart of our curatorial process,” said Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director. “If we are to make a case for cinema as a vibrant and essential art form at this moment in time, which films would we put forth as evidence?”
A former editor of the Village Voice’s film section who has written about culture for The New York Times, Lim joined Lincoln Center, the festival’s parent organization, in 2013 and has been leading the festival since 2020.
It is made up of five sections, including Spotlight, Revivals and the Main Slate, and opens this year with Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt.” “We end up showing something like 60 to 70 features and 30 to 40 shorts,” Lim said. Which means someone has to choose them.
Lim, who puts the festival together with the help of committees and advisers, scouts by watching movies at home and at screenings, traveling to festivals around the world, and talking with industry insiders. The selection process starts in earnest in January; invitations go out April through July. And then he works on logistics and organization until the event ends in mid-October.
We caught up with him during a particularly busy week in June that included committee discussions and hours upon hours of screen time, both in New York and in Italy.
Lim, 52, lives in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. These are edited excerpts from phone and email interviews.
Wednesday: Choosing the Centerpiece
From May onward, I’m watching films for eight, sometimes 10 to 12 hours a day. This was our ninth consecutive day in the cinema with the full committee. The film that excited us the most in that stretch was Jim Jarmusch’s “Father Mother Sister Brother,” which will be the centerpiece of this year’s festival. It’s not just one of his best, but a distillation of so much of what we love about Jarmusch.
After we wrapped, I went to MoMA, where I caught the Jack Whitten show, which is immense and thrilling. I also visited the show by the Indian collaborative studio Camp and particularly liked their multichannel installation “Bombay Tilts Down,” which does some interesting things with CCTV cameras and the language of surveillance. Resetting my brain and looking at art, taking a walk or reading a book is a good thing to do.
Thursday: Ways of Seeing
When I’m screening submissions at home, I try to connect to a monitor or projector so that I’m not staring at my laptop — which is not a mode of viewing I particularly like, but because I’m traveling so much, I often do watch things on my laptop. In the afternoon, I met with my friend and former colleague J. Hoberman, who gave me a signed copy of his new book, “Everything Is Now.” Then I went to the Margot Samel gallery for a show by my friend Carolina Fusilier, an Argentine artist based in Mexico.
During the most intense stretch of the selection process, I tend to avoid additional moving-image screen time, but this evening I allowed myself an episode of “The Rehearsal,” which I have been loving.
Friday: Off to Italy
The programming process involves a lot of checking in with producers, distributors, filmmakers, etc. about the films under consideration. I invited some films and had to reject some, which is never fun.
In the evening, I flew to Bologna for Il Cinema Ritrovato, a festival of film restorations, where I’ll be working on the program for the Revivals section of N.Y.F.F. I like to travel with one fiction and one nonfiction book, so I brought the second part of Solvej Balle’s septology, “On the Calculation of Volume,” about a woman who relives the same day in an eternal loop, and the literary critic Frank Kermode’s “The Sense of an Ending,” which has some relevance to a class I’m teaching at Columbia in the fall.
Saturday: Catching Up With Movies and Friends
Arrived in Bologna late morning. Lunch with Chanel Kong, moving-image curator at M+, the contemporary-art museum in Hong Kong, which recently launched a restoration initiative for films from Hong Kong.
Watched three films. One highlight was Jocelyne Saab’s “The Razor’s Edge,” from 1985, a drama set amid the devastation of the Lebanese Civil War. My partner, John Bruce, was working in Switzerland this past week, and he joined me at the festival. We met up with a small group of friends for a dinner organized by Eva Sangiorgi, the director of the film festival in Vienna. I’m always grateful for a moment to catch up with colleagues who have become kindred spirits and compatriots over the years.
Sunday: Feasting on Older Films in Bologna
Lunch with Anu Rangachar, a programmer at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and Teesha Cherian of the Film Heritage Foundation in Mumbai. One of the most anticipated films in Bologna is the foundation’s restoration of the Bollywood classic “Sholay.”
Watched four films, two of which were queer-themed: “Winter Kept Us Warm,” a charming, microbudget Canadian film from 1965, and “Man of Ashes,” a 1986 film from Tunisia. It was fascinating to see these films from very different times and places testing the limits of what could be said and shown.
Monday: A Lynchian Excursion
Took the train to Rimini for a new festival devoted to international TV. I organized a tribute to David Lynch with Carlo Chatrian, who heads the film museum in Turin. We screened the “Twin Peaks” pilot, and two of Lynch’s collaborators — the cinematographers Frederick Elmes and Peter Deming — were on a panel. It was a treat to hear their many insights and stories.
Tuesday: Basking in the Power of Quiet
Back to Bologna, where a strand of the program has focused on the prewar films of Mikio Naruse. His best-known film, “Floating Clouds,” is an all-time favorite, but I’m less familiar with his 1930s works, and each one has been a small revelation.
It has become something of a ritual to stop by the Museo Morandi whenever I’m here. Bologna was the painter Giorgio Morandi’s hometown. His quiet, mysterious still lifes are exactly the kind of artwork that rewards repeated attention.
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