Film Society of Lincoln Center Kicks Off Summer 2015 New Releases

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced its new releases for Summer 2015. Scroll down for details!

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Opens June 26:
The Princess of France / La Princesa de Francia
Matías Piñeiro, Argentina, 2014, DCP, 70m
Spanish and Italian with English subtitles
As in his critical hit VIOLA (2013), Matías Piñeiro doesn't transplant Shakespeare to the present day so much as summon the spirit of his polymorphous comedies. Víctor (Julián Larquier Tellarini) returns to Buenos Aires after his father's death and a spell in Mexico to prepare a radio production of Love's Labour's Lost. Reuniting with his repertory, he finds himself sorting out complicated entanglements with girlfriend Paula (Agustina Muñoz), sometime lover Ana (María Villar), and departed actress Natalia (Romina Paula), as well as his muddled relations with the constellation of friends involved with the project. As the film TRACKS the group's crisscrossing movements and interactions, their lives become increasingly enmeshed with the fiction they're reworking, potential outcomes multiply, and reality itself seems subject to transformation. An intimate, modestly scaled work that takes characters and viewers alike into dizzying realms of possibility, The Princess of France is the most ambitious film yet from one of world cinema's brightest young talents, a cumulatively thrilling experience. A Cinema Guild release.
Matías Piñeiro in person!

Opens July 3:
Stray Dog
Debra Granik, USA, 2014, DCP, 105m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
Debra Granik could have GONE in any number of directions after the success of Winter's Bone. She decided to FOCUS on a documentary portrait of Ron "Stray Dog" Hall (who played Thump Milton in the 2010 film), an aging biker and RV park manager from southern Missouri. When we are introduced to Hall and his friends, they appear to be the very image of "middle America" held by New Yorkers: hard-drinking (moonshine, no less), gun-toting, tattooed motorcycle freaks. Slowly, gradually, another image comes into view, of a man who has been permanently altered by his tours of duty in Vietnam, who has come to terms with himself and acquired a rare wisdom and patience in the process, and who is now dedicated to helping his friends, his loved ones, and his fellow vets. This is a moving film about community and the bonds that hold it together; in its surprising second half, when the children of Hall's Mexican wife arrive in Missouri, it is also a vivid snapshot of a changing America. A Still Rolling Productions release.
Debra Granik in person!

Opens July 10:
Tangerine
Sean Baker, USA, 2015, DCP, 88m
Sean Baker's fifth feature is a frenetic, funny, and often moving work that employs the most contemporary of means-it was shot on the iPhone 5S-to present the story of Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), a transgender hooker back on the streets of Los Angeles following a stint in jail. Seeking to confront her unfaithful boyfriend/pimp (James Ransone), Sin-Dee and fellow sex worker Alexandra (Mya Taylor) tear through Tinseltown against a sonic backdrop of blaring trap music, innocent and not-so-innocent bystanders be damned. Baker's film is nothing short of innovative in the artistic mileage it gets out of the iPhone 5S's onboard video camera, yielding colorful and vibrant 16:9 images suffused with energy, movement, and anarchic freedom, cut together with the precision of a vintage CinemaScope blockbuster. A Magnolia Films release.
Sean Baker in person!

The Film Society will present Sean Baker x 3 on Thursday, July 9. Includes screenings of Prince of Broadway, Starlet, and Tangerine. Visit filmlinc.com for more information.

Opens July 24:
Horse Money
Pedro Costa, Portugal, 2014, DCP, 103m
Portuguese and Creole with English subtitles
Since the late '90s, Pedro Costa has devoted himself to the task of doing justice to the lives and tragedies and dreams of the Cape Verdean immigrants who once populated the now-demolished neighborhood of Fontainhas. Costa works with a minimal crew and at ground level, patiently building a unique cinematographic language alongside the men and women he has befriended. Where does his astonishing new Horse Money "take place"? In the soul-space of Ventura, who has been at the center of Costa's last few shorts and his 2006 feature Colossal Youth. It is now, a numbing and timeless present of hospital stays, bureaucratic questioning, and wandering through remembered spaces... and it is then, the mid '70s and the time of the Carnation Revolution, when Ventura got into a knife fight with his friend Joaquim. A self-reckoning, a moving memorialization of lives in danger of being forgotten, and a great and piercingly beautiful work of cinema. A Cinema Guild release.
Pedro Costa in person!

The Film Society will present Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The Films of Pedro Costa (July 17-23), a comprehensive survey of this modern master's cinematic world. Details will be announced shortly.

Opens July 31:
The Kindergarten Teacher
Nadav Lapid, Israel/France, 2014, DCP, 119m
Hebrew with English subtitles
Nadav Lapid's follow-up to his explosive debut, Policeman, is a brilliant, shape-shifting provocation and a coolly ambiguous film of ideas. Nira (Sarit Larry), a fortysomething wife, mother, and teacher in Tel Aviv, becomes obsessed with one of her charges, Yoav (Avi Shnaidman), a 5-year-old with a knack for declaiming perfectly formed verses on love and loss that would seem far beyond his scope. The impassive prodigy's inexplicable bursts of poetry-Lapid's own childhood compositions-awaken in Nira a protective impulse, but as her actions grow more extreme, the question of what exactly she's protecting remains very much open. The Kindergarten Teacher shares the despair of its heroine, all too aware that she lives in an age and culture that has little use for poetry. But there is something perversely romantic in the film's underlying conviction: in an ugly world, beauty still has the power to drive us mad. A Kino Lorber release.
Nadav Lapid in person!

Opens August 14:
The Great Man
Sarah Leonor, France, 2014, DCP, 107m
French with English subtitles
When we first meet Markov (Surho Sugaipov), he and fellow French Legionnaire Hamilton (Jérémie Renier) are tracking a wild leopard in a desert war zone, at the end of their posting in Afghanistan. An ambush RESULTS in an abdication of duty-despite it stemming from an act of fidelity. We learn that Markov had joined the Legion as a foreign refugee, hoping to gain his French citizenship and provide a better life for his young son. Ultimately, the complications of immigration and legal status seem petty when compared with the primal urge to do right by those who have committed their lives to saving others'. The intrinsic struggle between paternal/fraternal responsibility and unfettered mobility takes on a deeply moving dimension in Sarah Leonor's alternately heartbreaking and empowering SOPHOMORE feature. A Distrib Films release.

Opens August 21:
Youth
Tom Shoval, Israel/Germany, 2013, DCP, 107m
Hebrew with English subtitles
Tom Shoval's gripping, haunting feature debut depicts the ill-advised kidnapping scheme of two Israeli brothers (real-life siblings Eitan and David Cunio) from preparation to aftermath. With their father's unemployment threatening the stability of their comfortable middle-class existence, older brother Yaki takes advantage of his recently acquired assault rifle, courtesy of his compulsory military service, to put into action a plan equally inspired by desperation and a lifelong diet of violent mainstream American cinema. But the brothers might have bitten off more than they can chew: it's Shabbat, and their victim's wealthy orthodox family won't pick up the phone to take the ransom call. This sharply observed study of familial attachment and fraternal psychology broadens into a tough-minded generational portrait that subtly addresses many aspects of contemporary Israeli life, from the role of the military to the recent economic protests to the enduring fault lines of class and gender. A Match Factory release.

Opens August 26:
Queen of Earth
Alex Ross Perry, USA, 2015, DCP, 90m
Writer-director Alex Ross Perry's blistering follow-up to 2014's LISTEN UP PHILIP (NYFF52) is a sophisticated and unnerving psychodrama, created under the sign of Polanski and Fassbinder and buoyed by two fiercely committed performances from stars Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston. A harried Catherine (Moss) arrives at the lakeside cabin of her best friend VIRGINIA (Waterston), intending to recover from the death of her artist father and a bad breakup with her boyfriend (Kentucker Audley). But the privileged VIRGINIA isn't having any of Catherine's martyr complex, and the two find themselves at each other's throats as Catherine increasingly loses her grip on reality and Virginia's next-door neighbor and occasional love interest Rich (Patrick Fugit) arrives on the scene. Shot on 16mm by Perry's regular cinematographer Sean Price Williams, edited by documentarian Robert Greene (who also cut Listen Up Philip), and heightened by the haunting soundscapes of Keegan DeWitt, Queen of Earth is a stark departure from Perry's previous films, yet no less psychologically acute, confirming his artistic range and irrepressible vision. An IFC Films release.
Alex Ross Perry in person!

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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, HBO, Stella Artois, The Kobal Collection, Variety, Trump International Hotel and Tower, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

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