Film Society of Lincoln Center Announces CELINE AND JESSE FOREVER

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today the series, Celine and Jesse Forever, a special presentation of Richard Linklater's Before trilogy (including the Gotham and Spirit Award nominated BEFORE MIDNIGHT) at the Film Society from January 3-9.

One of the cornerstones of contemporary American cinema, Linklater's Before trilogy tells the story of a single couple through the lens of three life-changing days, each nine years apart. Telling a continuing story of love gained, lost, and painfully re-found, the films also amount to a poignant and profound reflection reflection on who we are, what we value, and who we love-and how that endures, or fails to endure, over time.

"Each of the Before movies is a window onto a stage of life, revealing the possibilities and disappointments of one's 20s, 30s and 40s," said Dennis Lim, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Director of Cinematheque Programming. "Taken together, they have become something much larger and altogether more amazing: an ongoing collective experiment in embodying the passage of time."

BEFORE SUNRISE (1995) starts with a chance traincar meeting between a cocky young American (Ethan Hawke) and a brilliant young Parisian (Julie Delpy). What begins as a flirtation becomes a one-night adventure, then a romance, then something like love. The next two films (BEFORE SUNSET [2004], Before Midnight [2013]) revisit Jesse and Celine in Paris and Greece, respectively, telling the story of the couple's shared life in pivotal, snapshot-like flashes.

Each installment is packed with unforgettable moments: an exchange of glances inside a cramped record booth, an impromptu morning-after Auden recitation, a seduction by way of Nina Simone, a dinner-party roundtable on the subject of love, a take-no-prisoners hotel-room squabble. Taken as a whole, Linklater's epic-in-miniature is a rare work that seems to age with its viewers, revealing new truths, comforts and warnings when watched at successive stages of life.

BEFORE MIDNIGHT has been in the awards mix for 2013, receiving a Gotham Award nomination for Best Film, Independent Spirit Award nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Actress (Julie Delpy), and winning the Hollywood Film Award for Screenwriter of the Year (Delpy, Hawke and Linklater).

Celine and Jesse Forever will also include screenings of Linklater's visually mesmerizing and fascinating rotoscope film WAKING LIFE (2001), in which the Celine and Jesse characters also make an appearance.

Tickets and a discount package for the series will go on sale Thursday, December 19. Single screening tickets are $13; $9 for students and seniors (62+); and $8 for Film Society members. Discount packages start at $30; $24 for students and seniors (62+); and $21 for Film Society members. Discount prices apply with the purchase of tickets to three films or more. Visit FilmLinc.com for more information.

Film descriptions for Celine and Jesse Forever

BEFORE SUNRISE (1995) 105 min
Director: Richard Linklater
Country: USA
"Think of this as time travel." Twentysomething American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meets twentysomething Parisian Celine (Julie Delpy) on a cross-Europe train. He convinces her to disembark in Vienna and kill time with him before his Flight the next morning; over the next twelve hours, they walk, talk, look around and fall desperately, unexpectedly in love. Linklater's third feature is many things: a sensitive portrait of youth, with all its deep fault lines, painful insecurities, deep-set arrogances and deeper-set longings; a curious, digressive city symphony; a rich meditation on the act of looking; a love story that, for all its idealized meet-cute trappings, stays rooted in a concrete language of gestures, glances, vocal inflections and shifts of weight; and, in the end, a devastating study of the passage of time. Seen in relation to the subsequent two films in the celebrated Jesse and Celine trilogy, BEFORE SUNRISE takes on new, still sadder resonances. Taken on its own, it's simply one of the great movies-past, present, or future.
January 3 at 2:45PM
January 4 at 9:15PM
January 5 at 6:30PM
January 6 at 2:15PM and 6:30PM
January 8 at 3:45PM and 8:15PM
January 9 at 3:45PM

BEFORE SUNSET (2004) 80 min
Director: Richard Linklater
Country: USA
BEFORE SUNSET picks up nine years after BEFORE SUNRISE's open-ended finale. The immediate question-did Jesse and Celine reunite in Vienna six months later, as planned?-soon gets eclipsed by other, knottier ones: questions of commitment, fidelity, responsibility, and the great subject of Linklater's trilogy, time. The setting has been re-located from Vienna to Paris, and the time frame narrowed from twelve hours to two. Jesse and Celine themselves have changed: they're less self-conscious and less self-satisfied, worried about the extent to which their lives are ossifying, nervous about settling into adulthood. But the most jarring change is in Delpy and Hawke, whose noticeably tauter, wearier faces seem to have registered all their characters' setbacks and disappointments. BEFORE SUNSET is packed with moments of heartbreaking emotional clarity-a series of initial flashbacks; a painful ferry-boat ride; a taxi meltdown-and ends, like its predecessor, with a gesture that works as both a tease and a consummation. (With some help from Nina Simone.)
January 3 at 7:10PM
January 4 at 5:10PM
January 5 at 2:30PM
January 6 at 4:30PM and 8:45PM
January 7 at 3:00PM and 7:00PM
January 9 at 6:10PM

BEFORE MIDNIGHT (2013) 109 min
Director: Richard Linklater
Country: USA
The third installment in the Celine and Jesse trilogy is a frank look at the pitfalls of long-term romantic commitment, a very loose retelling of Rossellini's VOYAGE TO ITALY (with a dash of CONTEMPT), and a meditation on the continuity (or lack thereof) of identity: how much can two people change before they break completely with their past selves? Before Midnight finds Jesse and Celine at the tail end of a summer in Greece, and the new location brings with it a shift in perspective. In one long passage, the pair contribute to a dinner party turned modern-day Greek symposium in which they're placed in a chronological lineup of couples young and old. From then on, it's their show: we see them reminisce, crack jokes, pick at each other's sore spots, engage in some ungainly foreplay (with little of the previous films' chaste discretion), and finally erupt into full-scale conflict. The result is a miracle of a movie, equally wistful and unsentimental, blunt and tender, allusive and plainspoken. Before Midnight ends on a touching grace note that brings the series satisfyingly full circle.
January 3 at 9:00PM
January 4 at 7:00PM
January 5 at 4:15PM
January 7 at 4:45PM and 8:45PM
January 8 at 1:30PM and 6:00PM
January 9 at 8:00PM

WAKING LIFE (2001) 99 min
Director: Richard Linklater
Country: USA
Celine and Jesse make a brief cameo in Linklater's visually stunning, mind-bending, wildly discursive exercise in film-as-dream. WAKING LIFE was the first feature film to be entirely rotoscoped: made up of live-action footage animated over frame-by-frame. A puzzled Wiley Wiggins wanders through a shifting dreamworld populated by friends, lovers and strangers, all holding forth on topics ranging from the problem of other minds to the nature of reality and the existence of God. One of Linklater's most deliriously untapped movies, WAKING LIFE takes place in a world where, in one character's words, it "seems like everyone's sleepwalking through their waking state-or wake-walking through their dreams."
January 3 at 5:00PM
January 4 at 3:00PM
January 5 at 8:45PM
January 9 at 1:30PM

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility and understanding of the moving image. Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year's most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, LatinBeat, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-vous With French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment Magazine, Film Society recognizes an artist's unique achievement in film with the prestigious "Chaplin Award." The Film Society's state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year round programs and the New York City film community.

The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from Royal Bank of Canada, Jaeger-LeCoultre, American Airlines, The New York Times, Stonehenge Partners, Stella Artois, illy café, the Kobal Collection, Trump International Hotel and Tower, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

For more information, visit www.filmlinc.com and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.