NYFF AT 60: ASKING THE TOUGH QUESTIONS

IF THIS YEAR'S LINEUP OF FILMS IS ANYTHING TO GO BY, ONE THING THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL WILL CONTINUE TO DO IS THROW UP THE TOUGH QUESTIONS, WHILE REMAINING A HAVEN FOR FILMMAKERS WHO ENGAGE WITH THEM

- SOLEIL NATHWANI

When Martin Scorsese and James Gray took to the stage last month at the mid-point of the 60th New York Film Festival (NYFF) to introduce their films - Scorsese's Personality Crisis: One Night Only, a docu-musical centered on New York Dolls' frontman David Johansen, and Gray's Armageddon Time, a fictionalized account of his own childhood - they both harkened back to one thing. These titans of cinema, native New Yorkers from Queens themselves, had grown up on the NYFF. Scorsese was all of 20 in 1963 when he watched Bunuel and Bresson grace the big screen at the festival's home, Lincoln Center. It would be another five years before he would screen The Big Shave, his own six-minute short film, at NYFF as a young director to watch. Gray, a child of a different era, a quarter of a century younger than Scorsese, similarly equated the NYFF with a sense of home. After making films that had taken his imagination as far as the Amazon rainforest (The Lost City of Z) and the moon (Ad Astra), he noted that screening Armageddon Time, a film set in the city blocks he had roamed as a child, at NYFF was a special kind of homecoming.