The 64th New York Film Festival opens this Friday, September 25, at Lincoln Center, and Dennis Lim — the festival's artistic director — says putting the program together has not gotten easier. "For some reason, it gets harder," he told The Film Stage in an interview conducted ten days before opening night. "I don't know why."

This year's complications were partly a matter of timing. The festival announced all of its sections, then had to add several films late, each for different reasons — among them Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything, announced roughly a week before the conversation, and a film by Paul Thomas Anderson whose existence had only been rumored before its premiere. Programming is typically finalized in July, drawing on titles from Berlin, Cannes and Sundance.

Asked whether late submissions receive special treatment, Lim was blunt: "Not commenting on films that we don't program, but we did see some other films late in the process and they're not in the program."

A theme he will actually admit to

Lim is famously reluctant to impose themes on the festival, but this year he concedes one. "I think the state of the world is oppressively horrible right now," he said. "I just don't know who would dispute that. So of course I think interesting filmmakers will want to tackle that."

His Main Slate announcement quoted him saying it is "hard to recall a prior Main Slate in which the state of the world has been urgently reflected in so many creative ways" — a lineup he called "a vivid picture of what our present looks, sounds, and feels like." He points to new films by Hamaguchi, Lee Chang-dong and Mike Leigh as works that "really grapple with the difficulties of the contemporary world," alongside titles including Dreamed Adventure, Fatherland and documentaries such as My Undesirable Friends, 14th and NAZA.

The Hamaguchi film moved him deeply. He cites a mid-film scene built around a literal whiteboard and a lecture as evidence of its frontal approach: "This film is very directly, frontally tackling this question of what it means to relate to one another in a precarious late-capitalist world." Lee Chang-dong's new film he calls "a very full, very abundant film" containing "so many questions about labor and class and art-making and desire."

NAZA and the "predictably stupid" discourse

Lim saw NAZA — made under conditions of near-total secrecy — under what he describes as "very secretive, almost cloak-and-dagger-like circumstances." His verdict: "My reaction to the film is that it contains important investigative journalism and is also a powerful piece of cinema."

Yuval Abraham, one of the filmmakers, publishes in The Guardian, and Lim went back after viewing to read reporting that overlaps with the film's revelations. "This isn't entirely new news, but I think the film shows you what cinema can do," he said. "The voice, the gesture, the body language of the person speaking gives a different weight to information. It's a film that transcends the information that is being imparted to you."

What frustrates him is the online response. "I posted that out of frustration that this film has already generated so much predictably stupid discourse from people who haven't seen it," Lim said. "Alarming, actually." He noted the threats against the filmmakers and questions raised about their citizenship status, and the "endless online debate unfolding between people who may never see the film because they've discounted it for whatever reason."

His hope is modest but concrete: a 20-minute Q&A won't settle anything, but "hopefully a festival like ours at least can create a meaningful context for this film." The film press-screened the day after the interview, and it had already been written about eloquently by critics in Venice.

Porous sections and new names

The festival's section boundaries continue to blur by design. Established figures Carlos Reygadas and Bruno Dumont both land in Currents this year — a deliberate choice in Reygadas's case. "The Reygadas film could have worked in Main Slate — he's a major filmmaker — but I also feel like there's something about putting this film in Currents because it's formally radical work. So why not put it there?" Lim said. Spotlight, meanwhile, exists to widen the festival's palette, this year holding a new Godzilla film and concert films featuring Cameron Winter and Ingrid Caven.

The Main Slate also introduces newcomers: first-time feature filmmaker Marine Atlan with La Gradiva ("an incredibly impressive first film"), Mani Haghighi's documentary I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies, Isabelle Stever's I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming — a different kind of film about the war in Ukraine, seen through a young queer couple — and Lisandro Alonso's Double Freedom. "It's important to keep things a little bit unpredictable for our sakes as much as anything else," Lim said.

Always Hong Sangsoo

Could Lim ever reject a Hong Sangsoo film? "Probably, yeah. I don't like them all equally," he admitted — before complicating the answer: "I am so convinced that it is one film. It is one project, and every film just adds to this massive, ongoing film in progress."

He has recently rewatched Hong's last eight films for a new afterword to a second edition of Tale of Cinema, his Fireflies Press monograph on the director. The two Hongs in this year's festival are among his recent favorites, with particular affection for The Day She Returns, shot in four days and built from a chain of interviews. "I think it's conceptually so smart," he said.

The festival runs a little over two weeks, with Lim present for 15 consecutive days — a stretch he concedes is "tough," wardrobe included, now that GQ has profiled his style. The NAZA press screening was the first test of how Lincoln Center audiences will receive the festival's most contested title; the answers start arriving Friday.