NYFF Lands World Premieres of 'Artificial' and 'Behemoth'

The New York Film Festival opens September 25 with an unusually heavy slate of world premieres, including Luca Guadagnino's "Artificial," a film about OpenAI founder Sam Altman, and Tony Gilroy's "Behemoth," led by Pedro Pascal.

Over two weeks, NYFF audiences will also be first to see Tom McCarthy's climate change drama "A Statement," Ava DuVernay's documentary on the 14th Amendment, "14th," and "Godzilla Minus Zero," a kaiju sequel to the Oscar-winning "Godzilla Minus One." For a festival whose lineup typically draws the buzziest titles from Cannes, Venice and Toronto, securing several major premieres marks a coup in a year light on festival fanfare.

"Premiere status is never the be-all and end-all for us," NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim told Variety. "But I think we've proved in the last few years that we create a pretty interesting context for the launch of a film."

Lim attributed the cluster of premieres to timing rather than strategy. NYFF runs a month after Telluride, Venice and Toronto, and it does not compete for titles. "We're not a competitive festival," he said. "It doesn't make sense for us to have world premieres be the majority of our program."

"Artificial," which had been rumored to skip the festival circuit entirely, came together late. The film sat with a different studio until recently, and whether it would do festivals remained, in Lim's words, "genuinely an up-in-the-air situation." Guadagnino is a filmmaker the festival has a relationship with, and Lim believed NYFF would be "a great launchpad." He described the film's subject as urgent: "AI is in the news practically daily. The film recaps this trajectory that we've been on with alarming clarity." He added that it does so "in the form of an incredibly entertaining movie" with "very dark humor, which is certainly one valid way of approaching the dystopian present."

McCarthy's "A Statement" arrived just as unexpectedly. Festival programmers saw the film late in the process. Lim connected it to this summer's extreme weather, noting that the film examines a specific moment — a climate conference from 1980 — and "explains why it's so hard for action to be taken, despite very clear evidence."

At Venice, jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal called films "fundamentally, unavoidably political." Lim agreed without hesitation. "I think all films are political," he said. "Even to say that one is apolitical is kind of a political position to take. To be human, to be alive in the world, is political. Cinema of all the art forms is unavoidably political."

Not everything on the slate is fire and brimstone. Lim cited Jordan Firstman's comedy "Club Kid" and Jesse Eisenberg's musical drama "The Debut" as evidence of fun and joy in the program.

Of the premieres, "Behemoth" surprised Lim most. Gilroy, long active in television, had not made a feature film in a while, and the project read as a passion project with a clear point of view. "This is a film that makes clear that music isn't just an accompaniment in the background of a film but a narrative device," Lim said. The director also flagged smaller titles in the main slate: "The Loneliest Man in Town" by Austrian filmmaker Tikovian Rainer Frimmel and Nicholas Pareda's "Everything Else Is Noise," a Mexican film by what Lim called one of the most interesting filmmakers working today.

Last year's surprise screening of "Marty Supreme" generated the festival's buzziest moment, but Lim cautioned against expecting a repeat. "A surprise that ends up being anticlimactic doesn't serve anyone," he said. "We're not wedded to the surprise thing." Still, he promised evenings this year that will "certainly rival the excitement of the 'Marty Supreme' night."

One thing will not change: the festival's refusal to hand out jury prizes. "As long as I have any say, there will not be competitions," Lim said. Filmmakers, he said, tell him they enjoy New York precisely because the pressure of competition is removed.

With "Artificial" and "Behemoth" set to dominate the opening week's conversation, NYFF opens its 15-day run on September 25 having made the case that a non-competitive, late-season festival can still land the fall's most sought-after premieres.