The 2024 New York Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Will DiGravio

I

On September 20, 2024, the same day the film he co-directed, No Other Land, screened before press and industry at the sixty-second New York Film Festival, Basel Adra, who lives in Masafer Yatta, Hebron, in the West Bank, posted on X, the platform formally known as Twitter, an image of his father, Nasser, with news: “Things only got worse since we made it. Today my dad was kidnapped by soldiers, blindfolded, tied for hours inside a settlement for no reason.”

Filming of No Other Land ended shortly before the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas in Israel, which has since been followed by the relentless bombing of Gaza by the Israeli military, warfare that a United Nations committee recently found to be “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.” As governments, the media, and other institutions try to downplay and erase the loss of life in Palestine, No Other Land tells the story not specifically of the current moment, but of the years in the lead up to the violence. It stands as a crucial corrective to those who seek to erase the ongoing devastation of the Palestinian people. While the greater world may be watching like never before, in the face of ongoing violence, the devastation inflicted by the Israeli military and government on the people of Palestine is anything but new.

The film is an incredible act of bravery on the part of its creators: Adra, the civilians depicted, including his family, and his collaborators, including Hamdan Ballal, who is Palestinian, and Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who are Israeli. Adra and Abraham have traveled to discuss their film at major festivals throughout the world, including, in February 2024, to the seventy-fourth Berlinale, where it won two awards. Their acceptance speech was met with ludicrous charges of antisemitism, which continued as recently as November 2024, when the film began its theatrical run in Germany. The festival’s director publicly defended the film.

The political import of the film is self-evident and significant, especially as it continues to make its way into elite cultural institutions. It is also a brilliant piece of filmmaking, as finely edited a documentary as one will see this year. Adra, who figures as the film’s main subject, and his collaborators began filming in the summer of 2019. No Other Land goes on to cover the events of four years, dropping on screen titles to make clear each part of the narrative, and bringing in the stories of neighbors, friends, and family. The filmmakers manage to weave together a deeply personal story, moving it along while at the same time maintaining the geopolitical weight of the footage and evoking a deep sense of history, both in the years depicted and the decades-long activist tradition in which they operate.

At the core of the film is the relationship between Adra and Abraham, who also spends much of the film on camera. In moments of levity, the film turns into a buddy movie, with the two musing on life and finding humor even in the direst of places. At others, Adra grows understandably frustrated, and the circumstantial imbalance of their relationship makes it tense. As an Israeli, Abraham is given the full rights of citizenship, able to pass in and out of the West Bank with no problem. By contrast, Adra was born into this fight, without a choice, unable to access basic needs without permission from the occupying force.            

Throughout, in chatting with Abraham in between moments of intense violence, Adra has a chance to share his thoughts on life in the occupied territory, and his hope and fears for the future. Most devastating to watch, from here in the United States, the country that has most enabled the violence wrought by Israel, is to hear the hope from the Palestinians that America will intervene to stop the violence—how could we not, they wonder. And then there are moments, when they realize no help is coming, despite pleas for help on social media, a tool used by citizen-activists-journalists like Adra. “What else can I do,” he says, “but be on my phone.” (See “Same Country, Different Rights,” an interview with Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in the Winter 2024 print issue of Cineaste.)

II 

The sixty-second New York Film Festival, presented by Film at Lincoln Center, took place from September 27 to October 14, with screenings mostly in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Manhattan. To attend the film festival is an overwhelming experience, even for press who are saved from having to buy tickets, most of which seem to sell out within seconds. But entrance into the press and industry screenings is still no guarantee. My own festival experience began with Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, an epic that follows the tragedies and triumphs of architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who survives the Holocaust and travels to the United States in the hope to earn enough money to send for his family. I arrived at the press and industry screening more than an hour and a half before the start time and was, quite literally, the last person admitted to the 268-seat Walter Reade Theater. Never let anyone tell you cinema is dead.            

As I stood in line for The Brutalist, staring at the marble pillars of Lincoln Center, listening to the buzz of Manhattan and the excited chatter of my peers on line, I felt a tremendous sense of place. And it was this feeling that seemed to carry on throughout my time watching: place, again and again, figured strongly in so many of the standouts at this year’s festival.  

Take, for example, Yashaddai Owens’s magnificent Jimmy, which screened as part of the festival’s Currents program, a sidebar for more formally innovative works. The 16mm, black-and-white, sixty-seven-minute film features actor Benny O. Arthur as a young James Baldwin, freshly arrived in Paris. The twenty-four-year-old Baldwin began living there in November 1948, after receiving a fellowship to support the writing of what would become his first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953).            

There exists a fine body of cinema about James Baldwin, including works that detail his time abroad and in Paris, where he lived in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés, feeling liberated from American racism. As part of a series programmed in 2024 to mark the centenary of Baldwin’s birth, the independent New York theater Film Forum showed a trio of shorts on Baldwin’s life outside the United States: James Baldwin: From Another Place (Sedat Pakay; 1963), Baldwin’s N****r (Horace Ové; 1968), and Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (Terence Dixon; 1971), which screened alongside works like Raoul Peck’s recent documentary portrait of Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro (2016). Baldwin’s gift for talk rivaled his pen, and his appearance in a documentary inevitably centers his voice, both in the literary and oral sense.  

Yet, with Jimmy, Owens depicts Baldwin in near silence. The camera follows young Baldwin as he moves about his new home, imagining what it must have felt like for Baldwin to stretch, smoke, eat, and think while walking through the streets that were not just Parisian, but non-American. One of the great moments in the film comes just from watching Baldwin eat an apple, in the park, on a sunny day, wondering what he might be thinking.  

Owens’s camera takes on an immersive quality, settling in with Baldwin as he grows comfortable, mentally preparing to undertake the arduous task of writing. We witness that essential part of the creative process: living.            

Not until the end of the film does the Baldwin voice, full of affect, come. Arthur as Baldwin sits in his hotel room, at a table with the typewriter. With the fuel of recent days, he begins to write.

III 

Were a despondent leftist to ask me for a movie recommendation following the 2024 election, I would point them to Northern Lights (1978), screened in another of the festival’s marquee programs, Revivals, a slate of film restorations.

In the early 1900s, farmers in North Dakota found themselves under threat from financiers and industrial farming. Despondent over the predatory mortgages they were forced to take on in order to compete, farmers were left to decide whether to sell or to pressure the state to seize back the means of production and regulate business. They opted to build political power.  

Northern Lights, like Jimmy, is an independent black and white film that centers real life events through dramatization, in this case, the formation of the Nonpartisan League (NPL), an organization of farmers founded by socialist organizer, Arthur Townley. The film, directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, won the Caméra d’Or, awarded to the best first feature film, at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.            

Featuring a remarkable cast of nonprofessional actors, much of Northern Lights takes place on the open road. The stunning cinematography of Judy Irola captures the melancholic beauty of the farmland and the great potential of the people who live there, who aspire to the noble goal of self-sustenance.

Robert Behling plays Ray Sorenson, a young farmer who refuses to give in to the status quo. In a Model T, he sets out to convince his peers, many of whom are older and prefer to (or only) speak in Norwegian, to join up. Their power, he makes clear, comes from their strength. And it will only come if they take the risk.

Northern Lights is the spiritual cousin to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941), showing the generational nature of change, the growth that comes with a new layer of soil. Rather beautifully, the film makes palpable the feeling of class consciousness, of a liberation derived from one’s own efforts, with one’s own people, on one’s own land.

IV

I grew up in Massachusetts, where the end of the summer months meant the dark and cold were uncomfortably near. It is also home to the Boston Red Sox, one of the most revered teams in all of professional sports, inspiring kids like me to dream about a life in baseball. We had a catch and played wiffle ball on a Sunday night until the darkness became too much, and the inevitability of school the next day became impossible to ignore. But at least we knew that we would have another day, or another season in which we could play ball into the late hours of the night. Never did we think it would come to an end, as it does in Carson Lund’s Eephus, a film on which the dreams of independent film and baseball fans are made.

Set in rural Massachusetts, Eephus concerns the final game in the history of a men’s baseball league that has been going on for longer than its members would care to remember, though, rest assured, they will be able to recall every at bat each man has ever taken. The ball field on which they play, the only one within a reasonable driving distance, is set to be torn down. This game, on a crisp afternoon in early fall, will be it. We in the audience sit back and watch as they try to make the most of it.  

Lund has been explicit in citing as an influence one of the greatest films of this century, Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003). And remarkably, Lund’s film, named after one of baseball’s most infamous pitches, is an able spiritual successor to Tsai’s film, taking the comedic, vignette style and applying it to America’s most beautiful game. But Tsai’s film concerns the showing of a movie, which has a runtime that cannot be exceeded. When the film ends, it ends.            

Baseball goes on until someone wins. Nine innings are but the minimum. Time is not the concern of baseball. And that is why these men love it. The logic of life does not apply. The men who play are in various stages past their prime. Some are young men not yet willing to accept that baseball as they have known it is now in the rearview mirror. Others are old men, simply there to squeeze as much nostalgia out of the ball as possible.

The passage of time comes to manifest quite literally as the game progresses. This time, there will be an end. The slow pace of play leads the umpires to leave before the ninth inning. The men decide to keep playing. The sun begins to set. They keep playing. The sun fully sets. They decide to drive their cars on the field, direct the headlights at home plate, and keep playing. Lund opts for strikingly realistic lighting, keeping us in near darkness with the men as they play, or, rather, fight to continue, to not go back to a world without baseball. They fight to stay young, connected, with each other and the ghosts of their past.

And then, it’s over. Darkness and the cold New England air remain.

V

Press and industry screenings at the New York Film Festival are often all-day affairs. I sit in the middle, in the front few rows, because they provide my favorite view, but also because I am often late to the theater, or just dashing in after getting some fresh air on the balcony overlooking West 65th Street. Those are the seats that are most often free, and much easier to sneak into before the opening credits roll.  

On the day before I saw Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de soledad), I was rushing to the theater, coming from my day job and with a head full of things other than the films of Albert Serra, the director, whose name is more than enough to merit the dash to the festival from my apartment in Brooklyn. Only when I got off the subway did I begin to think about Pacifiction, which I saw the previous year in the very same theater toward which I was walking. Eventually, I walked into the theater with a few minutes to spare, totally in the dark as to its subject, save for the fact that it was about bullfighting.

I sat in awe of the film’s visuals, wrought by Serra and cinematographer Artur Tort. The matador places himself in fantastic danger, his back stiff, arms proud, doing battle with the bull, who, even after besting the matador in a bout, is mercilessly stabbed and treated with utmost cruelty. We witness the animals in their final moments, as the crowd cheers on their hero, and at their lowest, where the matador gets to walk away from death as the bulls face it.  

Even a vegetarian and animal lover like me could appreciate the spectacle—the pride of the fight, the thrill of the crowd, which Serra and Tort never really show. We in the film audience hear them mostly in a muted way, fully focused on the movements and mental focus of the matador. The crowds become abstracted, reminiscent of the final chariot scene in Ben-Hur (1959).  

I walked out of the theater and got ready to put in my headphones en route to the subway stop at Columbus Circle. But I overheard a conversation amongst fellow theatergoers that, excuse the cliché, literally stopped me in my tracks. The way they talked made clear something I had not realized until that very moment, that the film I had just watched had, in fact, featured the famous bullfighter, Andrés Roca Rey. The film I had just watched was a documentary.  

As I walked through Lincoln Center and sat on the subway as it took me home, I was in awe once more.  

Will DiGravio, a Cineaste assistant editor, is a Brooklyn-based critic and researcher. 

For further information on The New York Film Festival, visit here.

Copyright © 2024 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 1