Great news! I just found out today that I’ll be covering the New York Film Festival for work this year. As it turns out, our programming director and senior programmer will be scouting at Toronto in mid-September, just before NYFF. Timing works out perfectly. The festival ends October 14.

Rather than enter the fest totally green, I suspect I’ll be supplementing their coverage to some degree; there is consistent overlap between the two festivals every year, and both programmers will inevitably miss a lot in Toronto, given the intensity of nonstop industry programming.

The schedule has yet to be posted—the deadline for submissions was less than two weeks ago, after all—but the website brings promise of two retrospectives: one, a festival sidebar marking the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, which will feature “the first major U.S. retrospective of Chinese cinema between establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 and the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.” The other is an homage to Hindi actor-filmmaker Guru Dutt (Pyaasa), whose films during the 50′s and 60′s arguably set the stage for the ‘Golden Age’ of Indian cinema—a period of muscular social commentary and cultural revivalism following India’s independence from Britain (thank you, Barney Bate). He’s like the Satyajit Ray of postwar commercial Indian cinema.

The festival is presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which used to be officially partnered with our organization some years ago, before we secured our own independence (and ushered in the ‘Golden Age of Westchesterian Cinema’).