The New York Film Festival  which begins its 48th iteration Friday night at Lincoln Center with a gala screening of “The Social Network”  is at once buoyed and burdened by its past. This is true of other festivals, too. Spend a few hours at Sundance or Cannes and you are bound to hear someone conjuring up the old days, when indie film really, you know, mattered or when Marcello Mastroianniwas standing right over there.

And so as the crowds filter into Alice Tully Hall and the Walter Reade Theater between now and Oct. 10, shadows of earlier times are likely to flicker across the marble and glass. This was where, in the ’60s and ’70s, the French and German New Waves  particularly represented by Godard and Fassbinder  broke on North American soil, and where local audiences in subsequent decades became aware of the boom times in Asian and American independent cinema. Remember?

But though such backward glances are part of the festival atmosphere, they are not really the point. When you watch a movie you sit facing forward, and the festival’s annual program  a relatively small bouquet of new films, selected and arranged by a committee of critics and programmers  is both a sampling of the present and an intimation of the future. Other festivals are more comprehensive or more attuned to the business of buying, selling and publicizing films. New York, though, is about something else: discrimination, criticism, the formation of taste.