AHED’S KNEE
DIRECTED BY NADAV LAPID
**North American Premiere**
Winner: Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival
Official Selection: TIFF, NYFFT
RT: 109 minUS
Release Date: Early 2022
Y, a celebrated Israeli filmmaker, arrives in a remote desert village to present one of his films at a local library. Struggling to cope with the recent news of his mother’s fatal illness, he is pushed into a spiral of rage when the host of the screening, a government employee, asks him to sign a form placing restrictions on what he can say at the film’s Q&A. Told over the course of one day, the film depicts Y as he battles against the loss of freedom in his country and the fear of losing his mother. Lapid wrote the film soon after the death of his own mother, who worked as an editor on many of his works. This masterfully detailed, complex drama offers a sharp critique of the censorship, hypocrisy, and violence instigated by Israel and repressive governments everywhere. The fact that Lapid’s film was produced, largely funded, and highly acclaimed in Israel highlights the complexities of a national cinema that refuses to be muzzled, born of the divisions of society itself.
Screening: Sunday, Sept 12, 8:00 pm Scotiabank 12
France
DIRECTED BY BRUNO DUMONT
**North American Premiere**
World Premiere: Cannes Film Festival
Official Selection: TIFF, NYFFT
RT: 133 min
US Release Date: December 10, 2021
Léa Seydoux brilliantly holds the center of Bruno Dumont’s unexpected, unsettling new film, which starts out as a satire of the contemporary news media before steadily spiraling out into something richer and darker. Never one to shy away from provoking his viewers, Dumont (The Life of Jesus, NYFF35) casts Seydoux as France de Meurs, a seemingly unflappable superstar TV journalist whose career, homelife, and psychological stability are shaken after she carelessly drives into a young delivery man on a busy Paris street. This accident triggers a series of self-reckonings, as well as a strange romance that proves impossible to shake. A film that teases at redemption while refusing to grant absolution, France is tragicomic and deliciously ambivalent—a very 21st-century treatment of the difficulty of maintaining identity in a corrosive culture.
Screening: Wednesday, Sept 15, 8:00 pm – Cinema 2, Friday, Sept 17, 10:00 am, Cinema 3 – Piers Handling Cinema