At New Directors/New Films, the Faces Tell the Story

In “Familiar Touch,” Kathleen Chalfant plays a woman whose inner life alternately burns bright and suddenly dims. Her character, Ruth, has an inviting smile and natural physical grace, though at times she falters midstep. A former cook and a cookbook author now in her 80s, she lives alone in a pleasant modern home cluttered with shelves of books and just-so personal touches that convey the passage of time in a full, well-lived life. Ruth seems thoroughly at ease in her own skin when she first appears, bustling in her kitchen. She’s preparing lunch for a visitor who, you soon learn, is the son she no longer recognizes.

Written and directed by Sarah Friedland, “Familiar Touch” is the opening-night selection Wednesday in the New Directors/New Films festival and a terrific leadoff for the annual event. Ruth’s openly loving and hurting son soon hurries her to his car — she thinks that they’re en route to a hotel — and into an assisted living facility. There, she settles into a new reality as she struggles with her memory, connects with other residents and finds support among the staff. In Chalfant’s mesmerizing, eloquently expressive face, you see both Ruth’s piercing loss and a soul safely settling into the eternal now as her past, present and future fade away.

Chalfant’s is just one of the memorable faces in the annual New Directors/New Films series, a collaboration of Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art that gathers movies from around the world. Established in 1972, the event was designed to draw attention to the kind of nonmainstream work that didn’t always make it into commercial theaters. That’s one reason that I always look forward to it; the other is that its programmers take film seriously. That’s clear throughout the lineup, which could use more genre variety, yet, at its finest, offers you personal, thoughtful, imaginative, adult work of the kind that plays in art houses and on more adventurous streamers. These are movies made and chosen by people who love the art.

That love is also evident in the great diversity of men, women and children in the program, a variety that underscores the centrality of the human face as the great cinematic landscape. This year, partly because of the dystopian chatter about A.I., I was struck anew by the deep, signifying power of smiles, frowns and sneers, and how watching movies usually means watching other people. No matter if their directors tug at your heart (as in the documentary “Timestamp”) or keep you at an intellectual distance (the drama “Drowning Dry”), these movies present an astonishment of humanity. In selection after selection, old and young visages, some untroubled and others wrenched in pain, bring you face-to-face with the world.