Spotlight
Making Marie Antoinette
Eleanor Coppola
New York Premiere
Sofia Coppola’s dynamic craftsmanship in creating her personal vision for 2006’s Marie Antoinette (NYFF44) is on full display in this video diary shot by her mother, Eleanor Coppola, on the film’s set in Versailles in 2005. Preceded by Kleber Mendonça Filho’s South of Tehran.
- Runtime
- 86 min
- Country
- U.S.
- Language
- English
- Year
- 2026
- More information
- Official film page
Screenings
Polarizing upon its release, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (NYFF44) is now, 20 years later, widely embraced as a 21st-century cinematic cornerstone and a distilled expression of its director’s recurring themes of celebrity, wealth, and isolation. For the first time, Coppola’s dynamic craftsmanship in creating her personal vision for the brief life of the 18th-century queen (Kirsten Dunst) in the years leading up to the French Revolution is on full display in this diary shot by her mother, filmmaker Eleanor Coppola, on the film’s set in Versailles in 2005. From almost 80 hours of video, Eleanor began to assemble the footage during the pandemic lockdown, and Sofia helped finish editing it after Eleanor’s death in 2024. Narrated by Diane Lane, reciting Eleanor’s journals from the time, this is a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse that is both process-oriented and touchingly personal. A MUBI release.
Preceded by:
South of Tehran
Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2026, Brazil/U.S., 8m
Farsi with English subtitles
World Premiere
South of Tehran. Courtesy of Kleber Mendonça Filho.
South of Tehran is the first film in the new NYFF Encounters initiative, a commissioning program that invites a filmmaker in the lineup to create an original short during the course of the festival. This prismatic reflection on cinema and memory emerged from conversations between Kleber Mendonça Filho (The Secret Agent) and Jafar Panahi (It Was Just an Accident), both of whom screened films at the 2025 New York Film Festival.
Polarizing upon its release, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (NYFF44) is now, 20 years later, widely embraced as a 21st-century cinematic cornerstone and a distilled expression of its director’s recurring themes of celebrity, wealth, and isolation. For the first time, Coppola’s dynamic craftsmanship in creating her personal vision for the brief life of the 18th-century queen (Kirsten Dunst) in the years leading up to the French Revolution is on full display in this diary shot by her mother, filmmaker Eleanor Coppola, on the film’s set in Versailles in 2005. From almost 80 hours of video, Eleanor began to assemble the footage during the pandemic lockdown, and Sofia helped finish editing it after Eleanor’s death in 2024. Narrated by Diane Lane, reciting Eleanor’s journals from the time, this is a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse that is both process-oriented and touchingly personal. A MUBI release.
Preceded by:
South of Tehran
Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2026, Brazil/U.S., 8m
Farsi with English subtitles
World Premiere
South of Tehran. Courtesy of Kleber Mendonça Filho.
South of Tehran is the first film in the new NYFF Encounters initiative, a commissioning program that invites a filmmaker in the lineup to create an original short during the course of the festival. This prismatic reflection on cinema and memory emerged from conversations between Kleber Mendonça Filho (The Secret Agent) and Jafar Panahi (It Was Just an Accident), both of whom screened films at the 2025 New York Film Festival.