This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with The Tale of King Crab directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis and NYFF programmer Tyler Wilson.

This rich, engrossing fiction feature debut from documentary filmmakers Rigo de Righi and Zoppis takes storytelling itself as its subject. Based on a legendary figure about whom the filmmakers first heard while making their previous collaboration, 2015’s Il Solengo, this rousing, bifurcated tale follows the improbable adventures of Luciano, played by a bewitching Gabriele Silli, a village outcast in late-19th-century rural Italy. In the film’s first half, set in the countryside near Rome, his life is undone by alcohol, forbidden love, and an escalating quarrel with a local aristocrat; in the second, Luciano is in the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego, hunting for a mythic treasure with the help of a compass-like crab. Rigo de Righi and Zoppis have created a highly unconventional narrative of redemption, alternating images of grandeur and folkloric idiosyncrasy

The Tale of King Crab opens exclusively in our theaters this Friday. Get showtimes and tickets at filmlinc.org/crab.

#393 - Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis on The Tale of King Crab

This week we’re excited to present an archival conversation with director Martin Scorsese, whose new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, is currently playing in theaters worldwide courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Apple Original Films. 

In this conversation with Scorsese, the director discusses his early '70s masterpiece, Mean Streets, co-starring his Killers of the Flower Moon supporting actor Robert De Niro. De Niro’s lasting partnership with Scorsese began with the filmmaker’s breakthrough third feature, an electrifying and unforgettable depiction of small-time thugs in Little Italy that established much of what was to come in both artists’ careers. Harvey Keitel, an alum of Scorsese’s student feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, is Charlie, an aspirant gangster seeking a middle ground between his profession and his efforts to lead a morally upright life. But his irrepressible friend Johnny Boy (De Niro) complicates matters with his anarchic behavior and debts to loan sharks. Raising hell as soon as he arrives on screen, De Niro is entirely at home as Scorsese’s young id of Mulberry Street—equal parts funny, ferocious, and frightening.

This conversation was moderated by former NYFF Associate Director of Programming, Scott Foundas.

#497 - Martin Scorsese on Mean Streets

This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen, the two lead actors of the NYFF61 Main Slate selection Fallen Leaves from director Aki Kaurismäki.

Sweet-souled in story, scalpel-sharp in filmmaking precision, this enchanting love story from Finnish virtuoso Aki Kaurismäki circles around two financially strapped Helsinkians who keep finding and losing one another in a world that seems to be falling apart. Evoking dark-comic romances from his early career such as Shadows in Paradise and Ariel (NYFF27), the sardonic yet exquisitely melancholic Fallen Leaves devotes its wry, humane gaze to grocery clerk Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and construction laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), who commence an on-again, off-again relationship of extreme tentativeness, while seeking employment and stability. As with the greatest of Kaurismäki’s films, everyday details register as grand, meaningful cinematic gestures. This filmmaker has scrupulously carved another fictive universe out of a handful of specific, vivid locations, yet Fallen Leaves very much takes place in the world we’re living in, which makes its surrender to hope all the more affecting. Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Finland’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards. A MUBI release.

This conversation was moderated by The Wrap's Tomris Laffly.

#501 - Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen on Fallen Leaves

The Film at Lincoln Center Podcast is a weekly podcast that features in-depth conversations with filmmakers, actors, critics, and more.

#393 - Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis on The Tale of King Crab

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