How the pandemic brought Lincoln Center to Brooklyn

By Joshua Encinias

During the pandemic, director of the New York Film Festival Eugene Hernandez and his peers, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s President Gina Duncan, had regular Zoom to discuss ways to support each other while audiences were barred from their theaters — and how to support each other when they could come back.

“We intentionally looked for theaters where we could, hopefully, be helpful and serve as real partners,” says Hernandez. “In recent years, Lincoln Center has tried to re-engage audiences and artists that don’t have a long relationship with the institution.”

In the wake of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020, Lincoln Center re-examined its past to build a better future. The institution was built in 1956 on the site of San Juan Hill, displacing a vibrant neighborhood inhabited by Black, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican New Yorkers. As a gesture, Lincoln Center has sought to rectify their past by becoming more open and more inviting.

To do their part in executing on this vision, the 60th New York Film Festival is bringing their programming to all five boroughs for the first time, including at BAM in Fort Greene. They hope to reach people who may never step foot in Lincoln Center, but would visit their local cinema. Six movies from this year’s festival will show at BAM Rose Cinemas from October 8 to 10.

“When I started as the director in 2020, we wanted to figure out how to take the festival outside of Lincoln Center and really be New York’s film festival,” says Hernandez. “But we couldn’t have imagined how we’d get there.”

The promises made between cultural curators during the lockdowns of 2020 become promises kept in 2022. The films chosen for BAM were decided between the festival, their partner venues, and the filmmakers.

Hernandez sees bringing the New York Film Festival to neighbors outside of Lincoln Center as a turning point for the festival.

“It’s because of what we did a couple of years ago that we’re in all five boroughs this year. There’s a direct correlation,” says Hernandez. “Decades from now, when the story of the New York Film Festival is told, and we’re all long gone, I think it’s going to be seen as an important bridge.”

When this festival wraps-up, Hernandez will end his tenure at Lincoln Center — he’s been with Lincoln Center for a total of twelve years in several roles — to become the Sundance Film Festival’s director.

Before you hit the theater this weekend, read what Hernandez has to say about some of the movies playing at BAM. Plus, Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues, whose movie “Will-o’-the-Wisp” is playing at BAM on October 8, tells us about the imaginary royal family at the center of his movie. And Brooklyn filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin tells us about her new short film, “Maria Schneider, 1983,” which is playing along with a new documentary about Thelonious Monk.

“Will-o’-the-Wisp”
Playing at BAM on October 8

This hopeful, sexually frank confection from queer filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues engages in questions of climate change, inequity, and politics with bawdy humor and song-and-dance.

João Pedro Rodrigues: BAM did a retrospective of my work in 2010 and we’re joyful that people are coming again to BAM to see my new film. Part of “Will-o’-the-Wisp” is about becoming more aware of nature and ecology. We deal with the actual wildfires happening in Portugal via a royal family. They’re an unreal family because we don’t a royal family anymore. They’re people who feel, by blood, they inherited something, but it’s totally not meaningful nowadays because we’ve been a republic since 1910. Still, I’m telling the story about a prince, because royalty has deep history in Europe because our colonial past was made by the monarchy.

“Maria Schneider, 1983”
Playing at various theaters on October 8, 10, and 12

Actresses Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval recreate a 1983 French TV interview with Maria Schneider, which takes a turn when she’s asked about the traumatic filming of “Last Tango in Paris” with Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando a decade before.

Elisabeth Subrin: I think of the New York Film Festival as home. Its top commitment is the films over stars, the press or the marketplace. My new short “Maria Schneider, 1983” is playing with with Alain Gomis’s “Rewind & Play” and it’s a gorgeous pairing. [Gomis’s film shows Thelonious Monk being subjected to an interviewer’s dismissive, casual racism in a way that echoes the way Maria Schneider’s traumatic experience filming a rape scene was treated in the media.] People don’t like to hear it, but in our marketplace, nobody would show women being raped if it wasn’t something people wanted to see. That’s the sad truth about the dominant film industry in the United States.

“Saint Omer”
Playing at BAM on October 9

Alice Diop constructs a highly sensitive, superbly acted film — part courtroom drama, part psychological portraiture, part inquiry into human agency — about the limits of myth and cross-cultural knowledge.

Hernandez: “Saint Omer” proves director Alice Diop is a major filmmaking talent. The programming team watched it over the summer and were so blown away. It won an award at the Venice Film Festival and it was just selected as the French entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars. It’s a film that keeps gaining momentum and attention. When we were putting together this NYFF program at BAM, there was a natural conversation that emerged around “Saint Omer” immediately.

“After Sun”
Playing at BAM on October 10

In this spellbinding debut, Scottish director Charlotte Wells tells a semi-autobiographical story about the loving bond between a young father and daughter that’s shaken during a weekend at a coastal resort.

Hernandez: Charlotte Wells is another strong filmmaker. It’s her first feature, it’s produced by Barry Jenkins’s company, and it’s an A24 film. It stars Paul Mescal, who’s such a major talent and so present right now in television series and movies. It’s rare to have a first time director in the New York Film Festival and we immediately knew this would be a great one to screen at BAM.