New York Film Festival 2011 First to Grace $41M Building

The 49th annual New York Film Festival kicked off on Friday with a few new changes.

The festival will be the first to take place in Lincoln Center’s new film building that cost $41 million to create, according to Forbes reports. Each year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center presents the best in film and this year is no different.

The newly built 17,000-square foot Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center features two additional theaters and an auditorium which leaves room for larger audiences with the opportunity to view more films, Forbes reports.

Rose Kuo, executive director for the Film Society, said the goal was to enhance the old model.

"When we looked at it, the decision was to not change the festival," Kuo said, according to Forbes. "We realized that we weren't going to change as much as add to the festival."

Richard Peña, Selection Committee Chair & Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, said the additional space creates the opportunity to intensify the NYFF experience.

“The addition of the three new exhibition spaces at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center in addition to the Walter Reade Theater and Alice Tully Hall allows us to offer an even richer and more varied program, in terms of both works that enrich our knowledge of film history as well as others that point towards the future of film and media arts,” Peña said, according to the NYFF website. “We are also able to offer a more expanded selection of nonfiction works than ever before."

Peña said people who attend the festival will be able to see a different type of character development infused within many of the movies.

“In many of the films in this year’s Festival, characters pass from recognition of a problem or situation to actual resistance,” the Selection Committee Chair & Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center said. “This confrontational attitude is perhaps a sign of our increasingly polarized times.”