SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK

This directorial debut from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, ADAPTATION, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND) is a majestically melancholic rumination on love, life, and the painful inevitability of death. SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK follows regional theatre director Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) as he struggles with romantic relationships, the problems of aging, and a mysteriously degenerative medical condition. He develops all this into a monumental theatre production, building a full-scale replica of New York City inside an impossibly large warehouse and populating it with thousands of actors. Cotard spends the remainder of his life creating a piece so personal and epic in scope that the line between reality and art collide... and the universe that he has created swallows up everything within it.

“Despite its slippery way with time and space and narrative and Mr. Kaufman’s controlled grasp of the medium, SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK is as much a cry from the heart as it is an assertion of creative consciousness. It’s extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times