By Jessica Herndon
This time of year, as leaves on the trees in Central Park change to stunning shades of red and orange and Halloween decorations sprout up on stoops and storefronts across the five boroughs, excitement revs up surrounding the New York Film Festival, which starts today and wraps on October 14.
We’re elated to see that six Sundance-supported films are slated to screen at the 62nd NYFF. It makes us proud that alums of our Feature Film Program’s Directors and Screenwriters Labs, Catalyst program, and Documentary Film Program will be showing their work in New York. Films that premiered during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival will also be screened, getting those stories to more audiences around the country.
If you plan on attending, be sure to catch the illuminating documentaries Apocalypse in the Tropics and No Other Land, Jesse Eisenberg’s touching comedy A Real Pain, and other projects below by filmmakers connected to the Institute. And for more about the programs and initiatives mentioned in this list, click here.
Apocalypse in the Tropics — Catalyst
Logline: In this gripping and urgent follow-up to her Oscar-nominated The Edge of Democracy, Petra Costa dramatizes the chilling rise of the far right in Brazil. Apocalypse in the Tropics focuses on how the evangelical movement paved the way for the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro and poses the threat of a national theocracy.
A Real Pain — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: Mismatched cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair’s old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.
Happyend — Directors and Screenwriters Labs, Catalyst
Logline: Two teenage best friends living in near-future Tokyo, where earthquakes are part of the fabric of life, must confront the end of their friendship as they navigate diverging paths towards adulthood.
My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow — Catalyst
Logline: American filmmaker Julia Loktev, born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent media journalism in Putin’s Russia — just months, as it turned out, before the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Structured in five chapters, Loktev’s film is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety.
No Other Land — Documentary Edit and Story Lab
Logline: For half a decade, Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist, films his community of Masafer Yatta being destroyed by Israel’s occupation, as he builds an unlikely alliance with a journalist from the other side who joins his fight.
Union — Documentary Film Program, 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) — a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City’s Staten Island — takes on one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies in the fight to unionize.
