Business & Finance Club - Festivals : Clint Eastwood's supernatural thriller "Hereafter" will be the closing night selection of the 48th annual New York Film Festival, whose primary slate of 28 films was announced Monday. The festival will open Sept. 24 with David Fincher's "The Social Network," and run through Oct. 10, with screenings at Walter Reade Theater and Alice Tully Hall, on the Lincoln Center campus.

Aside from Mr. Eastwood, who will be making his fourth visit to the festival since 1988, the event will present new films from other frequent invitees. Jean-Luc Godard returns for the 27th time with the philosophical "Film Socialisme," and the 101-year-old Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira marks his 10th appearance with "The Strange Case of Angelica." Other repeat guests include Britain's Mike Leigh ("Another Year"), Portugal's Raul Ruiz ("Mysteries of Lisbon"), the France-based Iranian director Abbas Kiaostami ("Certified Copy"), and South Korea's Hong Sang-soo ("Oki's Movie").

This season at Lincoln Center, however, seems to belong to Mr. Eastwood, who was feted by the Film Society in July with a program dedicated to his entire directorial oeuvre. "Hereafter," starring Matt Damon with a script by Peter Morgan ("The Queen," "Frost/Nixon"), concerns three seemingly unconnected people and their dovetailing experiences with death and the afterlife.

"It's great to see a filmmaker who's at this stage where, aside from being at the artistic height of his powers, there's a sense of freedom—of not needing to prove anything," said Richard Peña, program director for the Film Society of Lincoln Center and festival selection committee chair, of the 80-year-old icon. "He just makes the films that matter to him, and this is clearly one that I think is a very personal film for him."

With 28 films representing 16 countries, the festival's selections feature a wide range of international filmmakers. Among them are Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose "Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall Past Lives" won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival; France's Oliver Assayas, whose "Carlos" is a five-hour biographical drama about the 1970s terrorist Carlos the Jackal; and Romania's Cristi Pulu, whose "Aurora" follows up the 2005 "The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu"—the movie that put the country's cinematic new wave on the radar.

New York is represented by Julie Taymor, whose adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" is the festival's centerpiece, and by Michael Epstein's documentary "Lennon NYC." Other American filmmakers in the festival include Oscar nominee Charles Ferguson with "Inside Job," and Kelly Reichardt ("Wendy and Lucy") with "Meek's Cutoff."

The festival also includes four sidebar series: the annual "Views from the Avant-Garde" and "The Cinema Inside Me: Olivier Assayas," a Q&A session with the director about films that influenced him, as well as the masterworks retrospectives "Elegant Elegies: The Films of Masahiro Shinoda" and "Fernando de Fuentes' Revolutionary Trilogy." In addition, there will be 10 special-event screenings, including premieres of new documentaries by Frederick Wiseman ("Boxing Gym") and Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones ("A Letter to Elia").