The New York Film Festival’s mission is to celebrate the best in world cinema. The 62nd edition did just that, introducing New Yorkers to the most sparkling of cinematic treasures from top international festivals, plus a few world premieres. Before heavily-hyped movies make their way toward a theatrical release, the NYFF allows diehard fans the chance to catch films like Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winning Anora; Brady Corbet’s buzzy The Brutalist; and Jacques Audiard’s crime-world musical Emilia Pérez.
From September 27 through October 14, New Yorkers watched movies by great filmmakers from around the world: Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds (starring Vincent Cassel), and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door (currently generating Oscar buzz). The fest also offered a peek at lesser-publicized gems that may not make it to the big screen, or land only a blink-and-you-miss-it theatrical release, like Carson Lund’s smalltown baseball charmer Eephus; Japanese director Neo Sora’s Happyend—about rebellious high school students protesting their school’s new surveillance system; and Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s moody stunner Harvest.
There was also No Other Land, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor’s gut punch documentary about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Though the film is almost excruciating to watch, given the current state of the region, it should be required viewing. No Other Land will have an exclusive, one-week run at Lincoln Center in New York beginning November 1. Hopefully additional screenings will follow.
The festival is always kind to French cinema, which makes sense given its universal appeal and the sheer number of strong films produced in France every year. Including shorts, revivals, French co-productions, and films starring French actors, there were a stunning 26 French films in the program this year. So many offerings for lovers of le cinéma français! Here is our list of the ten best, many of which will be coming soon to a theater (or streaming service) near you.
The 2024 NYFF’s Top French Films, Ranked
10. It’s Not Me, directed by Leos Carax
Leos Carax has spent 40 years making movies that wake you up and shake you up. Early films like Boy Meets Girl and The Lovers on the Bridge captured cinephiles’ hearts with their electrified tales of tortured lovers against the world. Then there’s the deliriously surreal vision of Holy Motors and, more recently, his Cannes Best Director-winning Annette, a bizarro musical starring Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard, and the puppet who plays their daughter. Now the trickster, who has always flirted with a French New Wave aesthetic, is back with his own stab at a Jean-Luc Godard film. In playful conversation with the master, whose 2022 death rocked the world, Carax offers an evocative and personal collage of images from his own films, the films of others, and a grab bag of inspiration and provocation that plays like a love letter to the legendary director.
Sideshow and Janus Films acquired It’s Not Me out of Cannes. The film’s U.S. release date has not been announced at this time.
9. A Traveler’s Needs, directed by Hong Sangsoo
In her third collaboration with Korean director Hong Sangsoo, the great Isabelle Huppert plays Iris, a Frenchwoman living in Seoul and trying to earn a living teaching rich people how to speak French. She proudly uses a teaching method she dreamed up that involves finding a perfect sentence for each student, one that expresses something meaningful and personal, and having them repeat it until they attain a sort of emotional truth—and hopefully start to speak better French. While Iris believes she’s discovered something groundbreaking, her students appear baffled. Whether Iris is a good teacher is up for debate, but she certainly brings moments of surprise and delight into her students’ lives. The amusing film (which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival) explores the mysterious connections that transcend language between people of different cultures.
A Traveler’s Needs is in English, French, and Korean, with English subtitles. It will be in limited release beginning November 22.
8. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, directed by Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich
This is not your typical biopic. Director Hunt-Ehrlich introduces us to a historical figure we are unlikely to know, the Martiniquan writer, political activist, and mother of six, Suzanne Césaire, who wrote 7 seminal articles before disappearing from the public eye. Hunt-Ehrlich’s approach doesn’t tell Césaire’s story as much as explore the ideas in her writing, which remains largely unread. “We are making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered,” explains Zita Hanrot, the actress playing Césaire.
Parts of the film are set in 1930s Paris, where Césaire meets her husband, the poet and politician Aimé Césaire, as jazz plays on an old record player. Others follow the couple as they wander a Martinique field blindfolded with their friend, the poet and founder of the surrealist movement André Breton, whose work was an inspiration for them. Hunt-Ehrlich’s meta approach enfolds Suzanne Césaire’s anti-colonialist and feminist beliefs into the contemporary world. When wind scatters pages of her work, a young production assistant picks one up and reads it, shivering under a tree as a storm comes on, thunder muffling her words. What a beautiful metaphor for an artist’s life lived under the shadow of her more successful husband, struggling to juggle creative work and motherhood, as many women do. Thanks to this entrancing, poetic film, at least we know her name.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is in English and French, with English subtitles. A release date has not yet been announced.
7. Misericordia, directed by Alain Guiraudie
When Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to his hometown for the funeral of his beloved former boss at the local bakery, everyone pays attention. He asks his mentor’s widow (Catherine Frot) if he can stay a while, raising big emotions. Her son for one is pissed, convinced that his childhood rival has the hots for his mom. Other neighbors, especially the hilarious busybody local priest (Jacques Develay), are intrigued. When a local goes missing, the strangely paced and surprisingly funny story shifts seamlessly into thriller mode, with oddball local cops showing up at all hours and lots of suspicious trips into the woods—for truffle hunting and other mysterious activities. Director Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake) is known for presenting LGBTQ themes in his films, and this one blends carnality, intrigue, and violence in ways that continually upend audience expectations, often provoking huge laughs. This twisty, sly thriller is unlike any other you’ve seen.
Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired Misericordia. A release date has not yet been announced.
6. Dahomey, directed by Mati Diop
Director Mati Diop (Atlantics) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for her stunning documentary about the return of 26 royal treasures to the African Kingdom of Dahomey (now part of the Republic of Benin), where they were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892. The film opens on a table of sparkly light-up Eiffel Towers, the type that can be snatched up by any tourist and shoved in a suitcase to take home. Then we move into a dark warehouse, where thousands of looted works of art from Dahomey are stored. Diop gives voice to one of the artifacts, the statue of a king who wonders what it will be like to escape enslavement from this dark place. Back home, the locals dance in the street, happily filming the artifacts’ return with their cellphones. VIPs arrive at the opening in traditional garb. At a heated event at Benin’s University of Abomey-Calavi, students debate the objects’ significance in a postcolonial world. Some want the entire treasure to come home and be showcased in Benin—it’s theirs, and essential to educate future generations—while others believe museums are a Western institution that they have no use for. As one young man says, “Our soul was looted. Let’s take back the life that was taken.”
Dahomey premieres in theaters on October 25.
5. Scénarios and Exposé du Film annonce du film “Scénario”, directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Just when we thought we’d seen the last film by the late Jean-Luc Godard, with his 2018 feature, The Image Book, two additional films by the towering New Wave director have emerged in the two years since his death. The 17-minute Scénarios resembles some of his earlier work, with its layers of drawings, stills, film clips—from others’ work and his own—ending, in an overwhelmingly poignant touch, with the great man himself reading text from Sartre—on the day before his assisted death. Scenes of violence and death suggest that his mind was on death and the destruction of the planet. Scénarios (17m) is paired with Exposé du film annonce du film “Scenario” (36m), footage shot the previous year by Godard’s longtime collaborator Fabrice Aragno, in which Godard gives detailed instructions for a four-part feature version of the project that now will never be made. It’s profoundly moving to see the great man himself paging through his outline, smoking a cigar, as stringent and sharp as ever. This is a rare and precious gift for cinema goers. Godard’s truest admirers, be prepared to weep.
A release date has not yet been announced for Scénarios or Exposé du film annonce du film “Scenario.”
4. April, directed by Déa Kulumbegashvili
Watch out for this one. Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician in Eastern Georgia, moonlights performing illegal abortions for local women, and she pays the price. When a baby dies in childbirth, the shellshocked father calls her a murderer and spits in her face. As attention is thrown on the hospital, her job, and even her freedom, are in jeopardy. There are long scenes of Nina driving at night to the villages where someone needs her help, sometimes stopping for disturbing sexual encounters with strange men. After years of living this way, Nina has no personal life. She denies that she’s missing out, but the film opens on a sexless misshapen figure in a black abstract space where we hear water lapping, birdsong, children’s laughter, someone calling her name. Later the figure reappears, clearly female now, in Nina’s house—twisted, monstrous, alone. Does the gruesome creature reflect her loneliness, regret, or fear? Does it represent how she sees herself or how she imagines others see her? She sacrifices so much to keep these women safe, and yet they are not—and neither is she. Yet she can’t stop trying, even if it turns her life into an endless, haunting road toward nothing but emptiness and despair.
April is a co-production between Georgia, Italy, and France. The film is in Georgian, with English subtitles. A release date has not yet been announced.
3. Emilia Pérez, directed by Jacques Audiard
Jacques Audiard’s (A Prophet, Rust and Bone, Paris 13th District) latest film is a dark, propulsive, genre-bending thriller about a Mexican drug-cartel boss with a wife and two kids who undergoes gender-affirming surgery to become a woman. As if the concept weren’t provocative enough, it’s a musical! Zoe Sandaña stars as the overworked, underpaid attorney who takes a big paycheck to help the drug lord become the titular Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón). It’s only when Emilia starts missing her wife (Selena Gomez, sexier than ever) and sons that things go haywire. In the hands of one of France’s most esteemed directors, the film becomes not only a total nailbiter, but also a touching drama about friendship, family, and redemption, with song and dance numbers that are shockingly catchy and smart. It’s a film that asks whether it’s possible to transform your life, to really change, to make up for the sins of your past and live the life you were meant to live. It’s no wonder it won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where its four leads also shared the Best Actress prize. And it’s attracting serious Oscar buzz.
Emilia Pérez is in English and Spanish, with English subtitles. The film opens theatrically on November 11, and streams on Netflix starting November 13.
2. All We Imagine as Light, directed by Payal Kapadia
Through the beautifully wrenching story of three women who work together at a Mumbai hospital, documentary director Payal Kapadia’s fiction feature debut explores what it’s like to be a working-class woman in India today. The Cannes Grand Prize-winning drama is about head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti), whose husband from an arranged marriage moved to Germany years before, leaving her alone and unsure how to handle the advances of a kind young doctor to whom she is drawn. Prabha lives with young, recently hired nurse Anu (Divya Prabha), who’s in love with a Muslim man she must keep secret from her Hindu parents. Meanwhile, their retired coworker Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is losing her apartment because the building is being sold and all the paperwork is in her deceased husband’s name. We see Kapadia’s documentary background in her vivid exploration of the city and its cramped spaces, where one character says they could just vanish and no one would know. When Prabha and Anu move Parvaty back to her seaside hometown, the film enters an idyll that is touched by magic. Or maybe being away from noise of the city simply allows the friends to clear their minds and imagine what life would look like if they were allowed to relax and breathe—and dream. What life would look like if they were happy, not just getting by.
Though All We Imagine as Light is in Malayalam and Hindi with English subtitles, it was produced by the French production company Petit Chaos, and even found itself in an Oscar entry dispute between France and India. The film will open in New York and Los Angeles on November 15.
1. Who by Fire, directed by Philippe Lesage
One of the great surprises of the festival was this gorgeously layered and unsettling coming-of-age drama set in a log cabin deep in the woods of Quebec. When famous director Blake Cadieux (played by 2024 César Best Actor winner Arieh Worthalter) invites his former collaborator (Paul Ahmarani) for a visit to his secluded man pad, along with his kids and his son’s best friend, Jeff (Noah Parker), everyone expects a relaxing good time. But longtime resentments spew from Day One, putting everyone on edge. It doesn’t help that Jeff has fallen hard for his friend’s sister Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré). As tensions mount, the gathering becomes a dick-swinging contest lorded over by Blake, whose insistence on winning pushes the group into increasingly dangerous situations. But the moments of joy are equally affecting, especially an exuberant dance party set to the B-52s’ Rock Lobster, and nothing is as simple as it seems. In the end, despite some horrifying behavior, we learn that people—all people—are complicated, and even bullies have their own personal pain.
Distributor KimStim has acquired the North American rights to Who by Fire. The film is set for release in early 2025.
Andrea Meyer has written creative treatments for commercial directors, a sex & the movies column for IFC, and a horror screenplay for MGM. Her first novel, Room for Love (St. Martin’s Press) is a romantic comedy based on an article she wrote for the New York Post, for which she pretended to look for a roommate as a ploy to meet men. A long-time film and entertainment journalist and former indieWIRE editor, Andrea has interviewed more actors and directors than she can remember. Her articles and essays have appeared in such publications as Elle, Glamour, Variety, Time Out NY, and the Boston Globe.
