New York Film Festival, Thriving At 62 Thanks To Young Moviegoers, Offers Hope To Unsettled Industry
In 2021, when the New York Film Festival returned to in-person screenings, organizers noticed a surprising pattern in the ticketing and survey data.
Twentysomething moviegoers, they realized, had become the lifeblood of the festival. Their embrace of the beloved New York institution has since helped it make remarkable strides, surpassing pre-Covid attendance and sales levels. For more than six decades, the festival has occupied a key berth as the last big fest of the year, with a buzzy lineup of selections from Cannes, Sundance, Venice, Telluride and Toronto.
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NYFF’s 62nd edition, which opens tonight with RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, is pretty much sold out. Uptake of passes for multiple films, or to gain the right to jump to the front of a wait list, jumped 14% vs. last year.
“I mean that’s the dream, right? Every cultural organization is worried about that. We really need to foster that next generation,” Matt Bolish, managing director of NYFF and deputy director of FLC told Deadline in an interview. Bolish has been workking with outgoing President Leslie Klainberg during a transition as the board recruits her successor.
Bolish said he and his colleagues initially struggled to make sense of the youth movement. Eventually, he said, “We realized it was because they engaged, they were back at school. And we’ve since heard from them. We’ve polled them. We’ve talked to them. We’ve seen that audience continually show up. They’re showing up to our year-round events. They’re showing up to NYFF because … they want to come together and share this experience with each other, with the filmmakers.”
Lively programming at FLC’s four theaters, spanning first-run indies, classics and retrospectives are “the reason we’re able to get this sponsor, or this donor, or to engage this foundation,” Bolish said, “because they see the strength of the program as expressed in record numbers of audiences showing up” all year.
“We hope the trend continues, but we’re very excited to see spikes in membership [from] that under 40, under 30 crowd that just keeps coming back.” FLC currently has more than 5,300 members.
It helps that moviegoing in NYC has been relatively healthy, says NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim. Nationally, box office revenue remains below pre-pandemic levels, but New York has lately over-indexed.
Annual box office and NYFF combined make up 30% of FLC’s total annual revenue.
Lim says the Main Slate of the invitation-only festival that’s nurtured generations of aspiring filmmakers is assembled by asking a central question: “If you need to make a case that cinema matters as an art form today, that it is vital and relevant and exciting, which are the 30 or so films that we would put together to make that argument?”
He said 18 of 33 filmmakers in the Main Slate are first-timers.
“It’s something we think about, this balance … not to just draw on the same pantheon of favorite auteurs.” Of course, there are plenty of legends in the mix, among them Pedro Almodovar and Steve McQueen. But Nickel Boys is RaMell Ross’ (Hale County This Morning, This Evening) first narrative feature, ditto for Neo Sora’s Happyend.
“There are a lot of filmmakers who are really just starting out, and we’re excited to sort of put them in conversation” with other filmmakers, Lim says. NYFF’s series of free talks includes RaMell Ross in conversation with Barry Jenkins, and New Asian Auteurs with Neo Sora, Tr??ng Minh Quy (Vi?t and Nam), and Yeo Siew Hua (Stranger Eyes). No Other Land, a vérité-style documentary made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors over the course of five years, is part of the Main Slate.
A second strand is Spotlight with Luca Guadagnino’s Queer as the gala film. Another is Currents where Lim says he saw “one of the discoveries of the year” in Jimmy by Yashaddai Owens, which imagines the life of young James Baldwin newly arrived in Paris.
The fest’s three world premieres include two documentaries, My Undesirable Friends – The Last Air In Moscow by Julia Loktev and Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury; and Jem Cohen’s hybrid feature Little, Big, And Far.
There are no splashy debuts as in recent years like Universal’s She Said and United Artists’ Till in 2022. They’re great to have but not “mission-critical,” Lim said. “We didn’t have any last year either. All our galas were either U.S. or North American premieres.”
NYFF remains “fundamentally an audience festival,” he added. “And I don’t think that it really makes a whole lot of difference for the New York audience where something is shown before.”
Nickel Boys, for example, has “only shown in Telluride and we were very excited to see how well received it was there … Festivals have a place on the calendar, and we work with those dates.”
NYFF issued a record 82,488 tickets in 2023. The number will be a bit lower this year with seven fewer screenings. The number of showtimes vary from year to year depending on the number and length of films.
Lim said last year’s dual Hollywood strikes meant “some films that we were hoping would be ready were not … There were films that we would have been interested in seeing if they had been ready,” one being Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister.
That said, “I don’t know that the pipeline was massively affected. We saw more films [this year] than last.” The slate is heavy on international fare and documentaries, which weren’t impacted by the strikes.
What may have shifted is the rhythm of distribution.
“One thing I noticed was that a lot of films that we saw and invited in the summer, at the time that we saw them and we invited them, were without distribution,” Lim said. “But they were eventually picked up” That roster includes Queer (A24), Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (A24) and Pablo Larrain’s Maria (Netflix). “We knew that these films would eventually be acquired, and they were … But in the past, right at the time we were seeing them, there might have been a deal announced.”
With or without distribution, Lim sees NYFF as a great platform for films to “re-launch” even if they’ve been on the circuit.
With the industry disrupted by Covid, streaming and strikes, Lim said, “I feel like we’ve been living through like one sea change after another.” Nevertheless, “Our job is to show that good, important films still get made, regardless and filmmakers always find a way.”
Brady Corbet’s “finding a way to make a film of that scope and ambition on … not a huge budget. I think it’s exciting and inspiring,” he said referring to The Brutalist, a historical epic that won the Silver Lion in Venice.
“If you just look at the lineup overall … one of the stories we hope to tell is that cinema remains in good health even if the industry is unsettled.”
“It’s a challenging time” for nonprofits, Bolish said. “You see these cycles every four years, around election years, because people are focused on that moment, especially lately, there’s a distraction factor … especially, in my experience, in New York.”
Links between media companies and the cultural organizations that are based in New York are also under stress as the film industry experiences dramatic changes. “Media companies are rethinking release strategies” Bolish said. “And are they going to be underwriting nonprofit organizations? Are they going to kind of continue to invest this way? So I think that we, like others, not just film nonprofits, but nonprofits in the city, are facing that down a little bit now. And that means you have to be kind of light on your feet.”
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