Once again it’s late March and with the opening salvos of the 09’ festival circuit already fired in Park City, Berlin and Austin, our friends at some of Midtown’s most venerable arts institutions have picked what they see as the cream of the fresh, young crop for their yearly survey of “new” filmmaking. But what’s so “new” about New Directors/New Films, MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s customary selection of a couple dozen features and a half dozen shorts by recently emergent filmmakers, which opened Wednesday night with Cherien Dabis’ Amreeka, a earnest multi-cultural drama about a woman from Ramallah who moves to middle America with her son and ends up working at White Castle? Yes, this is what you crave, you midtown Manhattan cinephiles, you wine and cheese pasties. Amreeka has quickly won a reputation among the cinerati as reeking, for better or worse, rightly or wrongly, of the Sundance Lab and its liberal indie realist orthodoxy,  which might provoke some to dismiss it. I won’t hold it against you.

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I’ve been in New York for a grand total of about two weeks in the last month and a half, so I missed most of the press screenings for New Directors/New Films, the annual co-production of MoMA and the Film Society at Lincoln Center, which opened last night. We’ll be publishing a recap of the full festival from Brandon Harris tomorrow, but I wanted to drop some notes on the one film for which I did have a chance to attend a press screening, Harmony & Me.

Written and directed by Bob Byington (his RSO: Registered Sex Offender premiered at SXSW last year and then played around the country on the Range Life tour) and edited by Frank V. Ross (Hohokam, Present Company), the film was shot in Austin and features a number of faces that will be familiar to devotees of SXSW cinema and its descendants: Justin Rice as Harmony, a “loser” who we meet mid-heartbreak at the hands of a brunette succubus (Kristen Tucker); Alex Karpovsky as a friend whose verbal abuse of his sweetly nerdy wife is played for uncomfortable laughs — and serves as a reminder to Harmony that relationships are inevitably sad and cruel as often as they’re legitimately romantic; Pat Healy as the dickish boss at Harmony’s cubicle job; Allison Latta as an outlandishly outgoing neighbor who sets her sights, against his wishes, on our retiring hero.

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In honor of the 75th anniversary of the New York Film Critics Circle, this year’s New Directors/New Films festival will devote a week of matinees to previous NYFCC Best Director winners, selected and presented by current members of the critics group. The can’t-miss of the lineup looks to be the infamously contrarian Armond White’s presentation of Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, which takes place on April 1. The other critics are David Fear, Marshall Fine, Lisa Schwarzbaum and Peter Travers; the other films are Half Nelson, Big Night, Frozen River and In the Company of Men.

MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center have released the schedule for New Directors/New Films, and as in the past, it’s heavy on films that recently played Sundance, including award winners (Push, We Live in Public, The Cove and The Maid). I’m looking forward to catching Amreeka (the ND/NF opening night film), Stay the Same Never Change and Unmade Beds, all of which I missed in Park City, as well as Bob Byington’s Harmony and Me, a world premiere starring Justin Rice.

indieWIRE has the full lineup. ND/NF starts March 25.

New Directors/New Films, The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual Spring retrospective of hits, overlooked gems and conversation starters from the recent festival circuit, opens tomorrow night with Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Frozen River. I won’t be covering the series extensively this year, partially because I was in Austin when the press screenings started and partially because we’ve already covered several of the films on the schedule at previous festivals. For full coverage, I’d recommend Slant Magazine; I imagine we’ll see some stuff from our friends at The House Next Door as well. After the jump, you’ll find a look at some of the films on the schedule that we’ve had previous encounters with.

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