NY Film Festival opens with the industry in limbo

NEW YORK — The New York Film Festival got off to a stylish start Friday night with a party at Central Park’s famed Tavern on the Green — or as stylish as you can get when none of the striking actors in this season’s slate of films were expected to attend.

While thousands of movie and TV writers are celebrating the end of a nearly five-month work stoppage that crippled Hollywood, the industry’s actors remain on strike, prohibited from promoting their projects, and therefore conspicuously absent from the festival.

Last year, Greta Gerwig, Adam Driver, Don Cheadle, Lars Eidinger and Jodie Turner-Smith were on hand for the festival’s first day, talking up their roles in Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise.”

By contrast, the audience at the Lincoln Center on Friday applauded screenwriter Samy Burch, who was able to make her first promotional appearance for “May December” now that the writers strike has ended. And director Todd Haynes gave a speech lamenting the absence of cast members such as Natalie Portman, Charles Melton and Julianne Moore, who plays a middle-aged woman married to the man she had an illegal sexual relationship with when he was a child.

The whole night was a strange mix of rumination and celebration.

The courtyard party was lively and shoulderto-shoulder for hours. VIPs like the filmmaker Laura Poitras, composer Nicholas Britell and journalist Ronan Farrow feasted at ever-refilling buffet tables, and the coat checks stayed busy with late-arriving guests well past 11 o’clock, when the passed hors d’oeuvres turned from tuna tartare and croquettes to dainty slices of cheesecake and pineapple cake.