With its 32-film main slate now set, the New York Film Festival stakes its authority on the one thing the fall circuit has stopped doing — choosing, and declining to compete.
On 11 August, Film at Lincoln Center completed the main slate of the 64th New York Film Festival: thirty-two features from thirty-one countries, running 25 September to 12 October. The names are the season's heaviest — Almodóvar, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Mike Leigh, Paweł Pawlikowski, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Andrew Haigh — and yet the number that matters is a small one, easy to miss in the announcement. Of those thirty-two films, only three are world premieres. Seven more are North American bows. Everything else has already played somewhere: Cannes in May, Venice this month, the rooms where the arguing was done. New York is not breaking these films. It is collecting them.
A festival with nothing to award
That is the whole design, and it is stranger than it looks. NYFF has no competition, no jury, no prize — nothing to hand out and nobody to lose. While Venice litigates its open door to Netflix and Toronto routes a fortnight of crowds through a 293-title schedule, New York does the one thing the circuit has quietly abandoned: it curates down. A selection committee watches the year and comes back with thirty-two titles and no ranking, staking the festival's entire authority on the act of selection itself. There is no Golden Lion to dispute, no People's Choice to game. The list is the verdict.
Every other festival tells you what won. New York tells you what it watched all year and decided was worth your evening — and stakes its name on nothing more than that.
The wager is old-fashioned and, this season, almost defiant. In a circuit that increasingly confers status through premiere logistics — who gets the world bow, whose title routes through Venice to Telluride to Toronto before anyone has seen a frame — NYFF insists that being chosen twice is worth more than being chosen first. The risk is just as plain. A festival that mostly ratifies what Cannes and Venice already crowned can slide from curation into consensus, a lap of honour for films the taste-makers have already blessed, three world premieres doing the work of an alibi. But at its best the second look is the harder one: no gala momentum, no market to flatter, only the question of whether a film survives the year and still earns the room. New York has bet, again, that saying so plainly is a kind of power the prize festivals gave away. The slate is the argument. Come autumn we find out whether it still convinces.