FSLC Announces An Evening with Athina Rachel Tsangari

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today An Evening with Athina Rachel Tsangari on Thursday, September 17, including a conversation and double feature of Attenberg and The Slow Business of Going. Greek writer-director Tsangari was recently selected as the 2015 Filmmaker in Residence for the upcoming 53rd New York Film Festival, a program co-created and sponsored by Jaeger-LeCoultre.

The dynamic and fearless filmmaker, at the crest of a new Greek wave in cinema, actually made her entrance into cinema through a happy accident while living in Austin, Texas, and studying film direction-with a small role in Richard Linklater's landmark 1991 film, Slacker. Her relationship with Linklater continued when she served as co-producer and actress in 2013's Before Midnight. The Film Society is thrilled to welcome Tsangari for a conversation about her career, during which she will introduce and discuss her widely lauded, one-of-a-kind sophomore feature Attenberg (2010), a New Directors/New Films selection in 2011. The conversation will be followed by a screening of her rarely seen The Slow Business of Going, a lo-fi sci-fi road movie listed in the 2002 Village Voice Critics' Poll as one of the year's "best first films." It was her MFA thesis feature at the University of Texas at Austin.

The third annual initiative and partnership between the two organizations offers an annual residency in New York during the festival to a notable independent director each year, with past participants including Lisandro Alonso (2014) and Andrea Arnold (2013). During her residency in New York starting next month, Tsangari will be working on a screwball action-thriller called White Knuckles. Her newest feature, Chevalier, a buddy comedy that takes place on a luxury yacht astray on the Aegean Sea recently had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival and will also be screening at the upcoming New York Film Festival.

Tickets will go on sale today. Single screening tickets are $14; $11 for students and seniors (62+); and $9 for Film Society members, or take advantage of the Double Feature package and save. Visit filmlinc.org for more information.

FILMS, DESCRIPTIONS & SCHEDULE

Attenberg
Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece, 2010, 35mm, 95m
Greek and French with English subtitles
In its irreverent use of (new) Nouvelle Vague, musical, melodrama, and nature documentary, Attenberg symbolically visualizes a change in generation and perspective as a father and daughter gently negotiate their individual rites of passage. The film follows a visionary architect who has come home to die in the vanishing industrial town that is his legacy to his daughter. Meanwhile, his daughter (played by Ariane Labed, in a performance that won her the Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival) is exploring the mysteries of kissing with her girlfriend, and the beyond with a visiting engineer. Tsangari's film-with a soundtrack featuring Françoise Hardy and Suicide-is poised between sincerity and hilarity, tradition and experimentation. A New Directors/New Films 2011 selection.
Thursday, September 17, 6:30pm (Q&A with Athina Rachel Tsangari)

Followed by:

The Slow Business of Going
Athina Rachel Tsangari, USA/Greece, 2001, 35mm, 101m
William Gibson meets Samuel Beckett in Tsangari's feature directorial debut, an exhilarating, shape-shifting work set mostly in the indeterminate spaces of hotel rooms and aboard a barge in Texas, as Global Nomad Project representative Petra Going (Lizzie Curry Martinez) travels the world, generating and transmitting memories back to the Experience Data Agency. Audaciously stylized and charming in its singular brand of lo-fi sci-fi, The Slow Business of Going radically changes forms (and, frequently, formats) with each strange situation Petra finds herself in. The result is a fast and funny ode to life without a home base and a stimulating exploration of human consciousness between the real and the virtual.
Thursday, September 17, 9:00pm (Introduction by Athina Rachel Tsangari)

ABOUT FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility, and understanding of the moving image. The Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year's most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment magazine, the Film Society recognizes an artist's unique achievement in film with the prestigious Chaplin Award, whose 2015 recipient was Robert Redford. The Film Society's state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year-round programs and the New York City film community.

The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from American Airlines, The New York Times, Stella Artois, HBO, The Kobal Collection, Variety, Loews Regency, Row NYC Hotel, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

For more information, visit www.filmlinc.org and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.