NYFF64 Full Lineup: The Cinema Group’s Complete Breakdown of the 2026 New York Film Festival

World premieres from Luca Guadagnino, Tony Gilroy, Ava DuVernay and Takashi Yamazaki, a secret Elizabeth Holmes documentary, and the complete NYFF64 lineup, section by section.

The New York Film Festival has never needed to overwhelm audiences with volume. Its identity has always rested on selection. For its 64th edition, running September 25 through October 12, Film at Lincoln Center has assembled another tightly curated survey of the year in cinema, moving between major American premieres, international discoveries, documentary work, experimental filmmaking and restorations without treating any one of those categories as secondary.

This year, though, there is an unusual amount of genuine discovery happening in New York itself. Four Main Slate films are world premieres, including Luca Guadagnino‘s Artificial, Tony Gilroy‘s Behemoth!, Ava DuVernay‘s 14th and Mani Haghighi’s wonderfully titled I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies. Spotlight adds the world premieres of Godzilla Minus Zero, Tom McCarthy’s A Statement, Jonathan Glazer’s Joy of Joys and Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall.

NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim described a pronounced impulse across the 2026 program to confront the world as it exists now. That takes wildly different forms here. Lee Chang-dong looks at labor and class in Possible Love. Mike Leigh returns to social care in contemporary Britain with Tender Loving Care. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim turn Elizabeth Holmes into the unstable center of You Can See Everything. Ava DuVernay returns to the Constitution a decade after 13th. Even the films set decades or centuries earlier repeatedly find ways back to the present.

There is spectacle, too. Takashi Yamazaki follows Godzilla Minus One with Godzilla Minus Zero. Werner Herzog returns to NYFF for the first time since Fitzcarraldo. Pedro Almodovar, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Cristian Mungiu, Hong Sangsoo, Mike Leigh, Ira Sachs and Andrew Haigh all arrive with new work. And one of the festival’s most intriguing premieres may be Artificial, a film whose own complicated path to release has become nearly as discussed as the story it tells.

THE CINEMA GROUP’S COMPLETE NYFF64 LINEUP BREAKDOWN BELOW:

Main Slate

NYFF’s Main Slate contains 34 Films spanning 31 Countries, including 4 World Premieres, 9 North American Premieres and 12 U.S. Premieres. James Gray opens the festival, Tony Gilroy takes Centerpiece and Ava DuVernay closes the edition.

Paper Tiger

James Gray | USA | North American Premiere | Opening Night

Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson lead James Gray’s return to New York.

Set in the outer-borough terrain that has defined so much of Gray’s work, Paper Tiger follows family man Irwin as his former-cop brother pulls him into a criminal scheme involving Russian criminals. What begins as an opportunity becomes a threat to Irwin’s marriage, children and increasingly fragile sense of loyalty.

Gray’s relationship with NYFF runs deep, from The Lost City of Z to Armageddon Time. Dennis Lim describes Paper Tiger as a particularly important film to champion, praising the way its gritty New York setting opens into something with the scale of tragedy.

Behemoth!

Tony Gilroy | USA | World Premiere | Centerpiece

Pedro Pascal stars as Alex Serian, a gifted cellist returning to Los Angeles after two decades on the road and trying to reconstruct a life that has come apart.

Tony Gilroy returns to feature directing after more than a decade away, moving from the enormous machinery of Andor toward something considerably more intimate. Olivia Wilde, Will Arnett, Eva Victor, Alexa Swinton, Margarita Levieva and Matthew Lillard join Pascal in a drama about artistic identity, family expectations and what happens when competence stops being enough.

NYFF has already gone unusually far in its praise, calling Pascal’s work a career-best performance.

14th

Ava DuVernay | USA | World Premiere | Closing Night

Ten years after 13th opened NYFF54, Ava DuVernay returns with a documentary centered on the 14th Amendment and the long political and legal struggle over birthright citizenship, equal protection and the meaning of American citizenship.

Rather than functioning as a conventional sequel, 14th expands the constitutional inquiry that drove 13th, tracing another amendment from Reconstruction into the present. DuVernay has described the film as an attempt to interrogate a promise that has divided the country for more than 150 years.

9 Temples to Heaven

Sompot Chidgasornpongse | Thailand, Singapore, France, Norway, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Qatar | North American Premiere

A Thai family attempts to complete a pilgrimage to nine Buddhist temples in a single day after a fortune teller predicts that its ailing matriarch is nearing death.

Sompot Chidgasornpongse, a longtime assistant director to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, turns the journey into a meditation on faith, mortality and the collision between spiritual ritual and everyday family logistics. Thailand has selected the film as its submission for the 2027 Academy Awards.

All of a Sudden

Ryusuke Hamaguchi | France, Japan, Germany, Belgium | U.S. Premiere

Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest, a 196-minute drama centered on the director of a nursing home attempting to introduce a radical new model of care.

After Drive My Car and Evil Does Not Exist, Hamaguchi again turns conversation into action, using ordinary encounters to destabilize assumptions about care, responsibility and intimacy.

Artificial

Luca Guadagnino | USA | World Premiere

Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman and Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever in Luca Guadagnino’s account of two decades of machine-learning research culminating in the 2023 OpenAI leadership crisis. Monica Barbaro appears as Mira Murati, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, with Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Mark Rylance, Chris O’Dowd and Billie Lourd also in the ensemble.

The film arrives with a strange industrial history of its own. After leaving Amazon MGM, it was acquired by NEON, and Dennis Lim says he saw it shortly afterward and immediately considered it an NYFF film. He has described Guadagnino’s tone as simultaneously frightening and funny, framing the movie as something designed to provoke exactly the kind of argument NYFF audiences tend to embrace.

Bitter Christmas

Pedro Almodovar | Spain | U.S. Premiere

Pedro Almodovar turns toward the unstable relationship between lived experience and artistic invention in a film about an actress writing a script inspired by the people around her, inside a story that is itself being invented by an Almodovar-like filmmaker.

It sounds like particularly fertile territory for a director whose work has spent decades allowing performance, memory and melodrama to bleed into one another.

Clarissa

Arie Esiri, Chuko Esiri | Nigeria, USA | U.S. Premiere

Twin filmmakers Arie and Chuko Esiri relocate Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway from 1920s London to contemporary Nigeria.

Sophie Okonedo stars as Clarissa, with David Oyelowo, India Amarteifio, Toheeb Jimoh, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Jude Akuwudike and Ayo Edebiri in the ensemble. The film retains Woolf’s parallel narrative architecture while reworking its questions of memory, privilege, trauma and social ritual through modern Lagos.

Dao

Alain Gomis | France, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau | North American Premiere

Alain Gomis cuts between two ceremonies separated by geography but connected through family and memory: a memorial in Guinea-Bissau and a wedding in Paris.

The result is described by NYFF as an ecstatic epic built through movement, music and the emotional rhythms of collective ritual.

The Day She Returns

Hong Sangsoo | South Korea | North American Premiere

A middle-aged actress returns from retirement to promote her first film in years.

Hong Sangsoo structures the movie around three conversations on a press tour, returning again to aging, filmmaking, performance and the strange distance that can form between an artist and her own life.

The Diary of a Chambermaid

Radu Jude | France, Romania | U.S. Premiere

Radu Jude adapts Octave Mirbeau’s novel into a contemporary story of a Romanian domestic worker employed by a wealthy family in Bordeaux while her own daughter remains at home.

Jude uses the arrangement to examine class, migration and the supposedly progressive structures that continue to depend on invisible labor.

Double Freedom

Lisandro Alonso | Chile, Argentina, Luxembourg, Germany, United Kingdom | U.S. Premiere

Lisandro Alonso returns to the world of his first feature, La Libertad, again following woodcutter Misael.

This time, his solitary existence is disrupted when he is forced to care for his mentally unstable sister, extending Alonso’s austere study of work and isolation into questions of responsibility and family.

The Dreamed Adventure

Valeska Grisebach | Germany, France, Bulgaria, Austria | U.S. Premiere

Winner of the Cannes Jury Prize, Valeska Grisebach’s latest begins with a middle-aged archaeologist searching for a former lover near the fragile boundary between Eastern and Western Europe.

What initially looks like a personal journey gradually expands into a crime saga, continuing Grisebach’s fascination with recognizable genre structures refracted through behavior, landscape and ordinary people.

Everything Else Is Noise

A composer lets a friend use her apartment to film a television interview, creating the confined space for Nicolas Pereda’s quiet domestic comedy.

Pereda again blurs realism and absurdity, using a seemingly minor situation to expose relationships, performance and the subtle negotiations of private life.

Everytime

Sandra Wollner | Germany, Austria | U.S. Premiere

After a shocking accident involving a teenage girl in Berlin, her mother, younger sister and boyfriend enter a state of suspended grief.

Sandra Wollner’s film won the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes and has been selected as Germany’s submission for the 2027 Academy Awards.

Fatherland

Pawel Pawlikowski | Poland, Germany, Italy, France | New York Premiere

Hanns Zischler plays novelist Thomas Mann and Sandra Huller his daughter Erika in Pawel Pawlikowski’s postwar road movie.

Set across Germany after World War II, the film follows father and daughter through a country reckoning with what it has become. Pawlikowski won Best Director at Cannes for the film.

La Gradiva

Marine Atlan | France | U.S. Premiere

Marine Atlan’s feature debut follows French high-school students on a trip to Naples that becomes an unexpectedly formative experience.

Dennis Lim has singled the film out as one of the Cannes discoveries that could benefit from the more concentrated attention New York gives smaller films after the rush of the spring festival.

I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies

Mani Haghighi | Iran | World Premiere

Mani Haghighi profiles Nasser Bakhshi, a painter, conceptual artist, collector and curator whose enormous archive becomes a record of collective memory.

The documentary screens with Kleber Mendonca Filho’s South of Tehran.

I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming

Isabelle Stever | Germany, Ukraine | North American Premiere

A young queer couple navigates life in Ukraine during the Russian invasion in Isabelle Stever’s tender drama of personal and external transformation.

The Loneliest Man in Town

Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel | Austria | North American Premiere

Vienna blues musician Al Cook learns that the apartment he has long called home is going to be demolished.

Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel turn that practical crisis into a portrait of aging, music, place and the difficulty of leaving behind a life built within a particular room.

A Long Winter

Andrew Haigh | Canada, United Kingdom | New York Premiere

Andrew Haigh adapts a Colm Toibin story into a 1950s family drama set against the isolated Mountain West.

Fred Hechinger plays Mikey, whose family begins to unravel after his younger brother, played by Kit Connor, leaves to fight in Korea. Caitriona Balfe and Ebon Moss-Bachrach play his parents, whose marriage deteriorates until a disappearance in a snowstorm turns private discontent into something much more frightening.

The Man I Love

Ira Sachs | USA | New York Premiere

Rami Malek plays Jimmy George, a New York performance artist living with AIDS during the 1980s and attempting to return to the stage after a serious illness.

Tom Sturridge plays his partner, Rebecca Hall his sister and Ebon Moss-Bachrach her husband. Ira Sachs avoids reducing Jimmy to his diagnosis, instead building the film around theatre, desire, artistic community and the relationships that continue while death remains close by.

A Man of His Time

Emmanuel Marre | France | North American Premiere

Swann Arlaud plays a mild bureaucrat in Vichy France who gradually recognizes the extent of his government’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.

Winner of Best Screenplay at Cannes, Emmanuel Marre’s film approaches political corruption not through spectacle but through the incremental normalization of complicity.

Minotaur

Andrey Zvyagintsev | Latvia, France, Germany | New York Premiere

Andrey Zvyagintsev returns with a domestic drama about a wealthy CEO who begins to suspect that his wife is having an affair.

The Cannes Grand Prix winner expands that suspicion outward into a study of personal, patriarchal and governmental corruption. France has selected the film as its submission for the 2027 Academy Awards.

Misty Green

Chris Rock | USA | U.S. Premiere

Rosalind Eleazar plays a former actress attempting to rebuild her life and career in Los Angeles in Chris Rock’s latest film.

Rock appears alongside Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya and Anna Kendrick in a show-business satire about money, addiction, race and the compromises demanded by an industry capable of chewing through people as quickly as it creates stars.

My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile

Julia Loktev | USA | New York Premiere

At 355 minutes, Julia Loktev’s second chapter is one of the festival’s largest commitments.

The documentary follows outspoken Russian broadcast journalists after exile, tracing their lives and work across Europe and beyond as they continue reporting after leaving Moscow.

My Wife Cries

Angela Schanelec | Germany, France | U.S. Premiere

A withdrawn construction worker’s understanding of his marriage changes after his wife reveals something shocking.

Angela Schanelec again strips narrative to its emotional architecture, approaching love, gender and trauma through gestures, absences and formal precision.

NAZA

Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor | United Kingdom | North American Premiere

Directed by two of the filmmakers behind No Other Land, NAZA is an investigative documentary examining Israeli military targeting and civilian deaths in Gaza. Film at Lincoln Center says the film builds on reporting published between 2023 and 2025 and won the Special Jury Prize at Venice.

Nowhere to Lay My Eyes

Hong Sangsoo | South Korea | North American Premiere

Kim Min-hee plays an experimental filmmaker returning to Jeju Island to visit her semi-estranged mother and the family life that has formed without her.

Hong Sangsoo won Best Direction at Locarno, while Kim received Best Performance.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem

William Greaves, David Greaves | USA | New York Premiere

In 1972, William Greaves gathered artists, writers, musicians, performers and thinkers connected to the Harlem Renaissance inside Duke Ellington’s townhouse.

More than 50 years later, David Greaves has completed his father’s footage as a living document of a generation discussing its own legacy.

Possible Love

Lee Chang-dong | South Korea | U.S. Premiere

Lee Chang-dong returns with a story of two married couples from different classes whose lives become entangled through a documentary project.

Sul Kyung-gu and Jeon Do-yeon play a couple living with the consequences of a labor dispute, while Cho Yeo-jeong and Zo In-sung play the filmmaker and wealthy husband who enter their lives. The film won the Silver Lion at Venice and is South Korea’s submission for the 2027 Academy Awards.

Rose

Markus Schleinzer | Austria, Germany | New York Premiere

Sandra Huller won Berlin’s Silver Bear for playing a 17th-century woman who disguises herself as a male soldier and continues the deception after the war.

Markus Schleinzer turns that premise into a fable of identity, survival, faith and social intolerance.

Tender Loving Care

Mike Leigh | United Kingdom | New York Premiere

Mike Leigh returns to contemporary Britain with an ensemble drama about people negotiating an overloaded social-care system.

Kate O’Flynn plays Amy, a child-protection worker whose own life becomes unstable, while Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson play her aging parents as they face a crisis of their own. As always with Leigh, institutional failure is inseparable from the irritation, humor and vulnerability of everyday life.

The Unknown

Arthur Harari | France | New York Premiere

After a hookup, a Parisian photographer played by Niels Schneider discovers that he has somehow swapped bodies with a German actress played by Lea Seydoux.

Arthur Harari treats the high-concept premise with complete seriousness, turning it into an uncanny story about identity, desire and what it means to inhabit someone else’s life.

Spotlight

Spotlight contains NYFF’s more deliberately eclectic mix of prestige premieres, documentaries, concert films, genre work and high-profile festival carryovers. This year’s section includes 12 features, one medium-length film and two shorts programs.

Godzilla Minus Zero

Takashi Yamazaki | Japan | World Premiere | Spotlight Gala

Takashi Yamazaki returns directly to the world of Godzilla Minus One.

Set in 1949, two years after its predecessor, the sequel reunites Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe as Koichi and Noriko while bringing back much of the original ensemble. Yamazaki again directs, writes and supervises the visual effects, expanding the scale without abandoning the human stakes that made Minus One work.

Bucking Fastard

Werner Herzog | Ireland, USA | New York Premiere

Werner Herzog returns to NYFF for the first time since Fitzcarraldo in 1982.

Kate Mara and Rooney Mara play sisters Jean and Joan Holbrooke, women who speak together, dream together and fall for the same man while living according to a logic almost entirely their own. It sounds like the kind of material Herzog could have invented himself.

Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall

Paul Thomas Anderson | USA | World Premiere | 35mm

Paul Thomas Anderson turns Cameron Winter’s December 2025 Carnegie Hall performance into a 75-minute concert film.

Shot on 16mm and 35mm, the film moves between the intimacy of Winter alone at a piano and the scale of the room surrounding him.

Club Kid

Jordan Firstman | USA | New York Premiere | 35mm

Jordan Firstman stars as Peter Green, a washed-up New York nightlife fixture who discovers that he has a 10-year-old British son.

The comedy begins in familiar irresponsibility before opening into something more tender about fatherhood and the queer community around Peter.

The Debut

Jesse Eisenberg | USA | New York Premiere

Julianne Moore plays a New Jersey housewife who unexpectedly lands a role in a community-theatre musical despite having no experience.

Paul Giamatti co-stars in Jesse Eisenberg’s comedy about ambition, artistic seriousness and what happens when seemingly low stakes become enormous to the people living them.

Edward Said: Between Worlds

Maiken Baird | USA | U.S. Premiere

Constructed entirely from archival footage, Maiken Baird’s documentary allows Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said to speak largely in his own voice.

The film connects displacement, scholarship, music and political advocacy across a life that helped reshape academic and cultural discussion around representations of the Arab world.

Fjord

Cristian Mungiu | Romania, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark | New York Premiere

Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan play a Romanian couple living in Norway whose family comes under suspicion after concerns are raised about the treatment of their children.

Cristian Mungiu turns that investigation into a wider conflict involving religion, parenting, cultural assimilation and institutional authority. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Iron Boy

Louis Clichy | France, Belgium | U.S. Premiere

Winner of the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize, Louis Clichy’s hand-painted animated feature follows an 11-year-old boy growing up in a struggling farming family in 1980s rural France.

Joy of Joys

Jonathan Glazer | United Kingdom | World Premiere

Jonathan Glazer gives London schoolchildren cameras and brings them inside Abbey Road Studios during the recording of War Child Records’ charity album HELP.

The result combines the young observers’ perspective with musicians working inside one of popular music’s most mythologized rooms, turning a behind-the-scenes documentary into something about creation, conflict and who gets to watch whom.

Making Marie Antoinette

Eleanor Coppola | USA | New York Premiere

Eleanor Coppola documented daughter Sofia Coppola making Marie Antoinette at Versailles in 2005.

After Eleanor began assembling nearly 80 hours of footage during the pandemic, Sofia completed the film following her mother’s death. Narrated by Diane Lane using Eleanor’s journals, the documentary becomes both a production chronicle and a final collaboration between mother and daughter.

One More Time

Cindy Kleine, Andre Gregory | USA | New York Premiere

Andre Gregory, now in his nineties, joins Larry Pine and Gerry Bamman for a filmed reading of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.

Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, the film is as much about continuing to create as it is about Beckett.

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York

Noah Segan | USA | New York Premiere

John Turturro stars as an aging Bronx pickpocket who suddenly finds himself racing across New York after stealing from the wrong person.

Steve Buscemi, Giancarlo Esposito and Tatiana Maslany join a crime film designed as much as a love letter to the city as a thriller.

Sixteen Moments of My Life

Albert Serra | France, Spain | North American Premiere

Albert Serra films longtime Rainer Werner Fassbinder collaborator Ingrid Caven in concert in Paris.

The singer and performer dominates every frame of a film built around presence, performance and accumulated artistic history.

A Statement

Tom McCarthy | USA | World Premiere

Tom McCarthy reconstructs a real 1980 gathering of scientists, activists and policymakers trying to agree on a public response to a federal study warning about rising carbon dioxide emissions and global temperatures.

Paul Rudd, Evan Peters, Amy Ryan, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, Tatiana Maslany, Nina Arianda and Zach Woods form the ensemble. McCarthy uses transcripts from the actual conference and filmed in the same Florida hotel, turning bureaucratic language into a dark comedy about institutional caution.

You Can See Everything

Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim | USA | New York Premiere

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim secretly filmed Elizabeth Holmes for four years, beginning shortly before she reported to prison.

Holmes actively participated in the project, giving Fielder and Oppenheim access to her home and family while continuing to maintain her innocence. The 174-minute film begins as intimate nonfiction and becomes a confrontation with performance, manipulation and the documentary camera itself.

Dennis Lim says he knew almost immediately that NYFF needed the film after finally seeing it late in the programming process. Unlike last year’s Marty Supreme surprise, however, NYFF will not hold back a secret screening in 2026.

Spotlight Shorts

Kleber Mendonca Filho, Kamal Aljafari, Camilo Restrepo, Jia Zhangke, Morgan Fisher | 85 minutes

The program includes South of Tehran, Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo, A Stolen Movie, Torino Shadow and Screening Room.

New York Shorts

J. Wortham, Heather Landsman, Eliza Barry Callahan, Fanny Texier, Charlotte Wells | 80 minutes

The New York program consists of The People’s Beach, ee, The House Call, A Woman’s Place Is Everywhere and Charlotte Wells’ New York Never Let Me Down.

South of Tehran

Kleber Mendonca Filho | Brazil, USA | World Premiere

In the inaugural NYFF Encounters short, Jafar Panahi remembers the cinephilia of his youth from the unlikely vantage point of the 2025 New York Film Festival.

Currents

Currents remains the festival’s most formally adventurous section. NYFF64 includes 15 features, five of them world premieres, alongside 28 shorts grouped into six programs.

Bardi

Tala Hadid | Morocco, France, Qatar | World Premiere | Currents Centerpiece

Tala Hadid immerses herself in the world of horse riders in central Morocco and the centuries-old military equestrian tradition of Tbourida.

At Night

Beatrice Gibson | United Kingdom, France | U.S. Premiere

Women move through Paris over the course of a single night in Beatrice Gibson’s shapeshifting feminist meditation on body, mind and urban space.

A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra

Jacqueline Lentzou | Greece | North American Premiere

A consequential day in the life of a 15-year-old becomes something cosmic in Jacqueline Lentzou’s suburban Athens drama.

For the Moon

Eric Baudelaire | France | World Premiere

Eric Baudelaire collaborates with students at Paris’s National Institute for Blind Youth in another improvisational work built around young people shaping the film alongside its director.

Foreign Travel

Ted Fendt | Germany | North American Premiere

A Berlin book club reading Anna Maria Ortese becomes the center of Ted Fendt’s characteristically quiet study of friendship, literature and time.

Hanabi

Ana Vaz | France, Brazil | North American Premiere

Ana Vaz journeys through contemporary Japan using Yoko Hasuke’s “Journal of a Radioactive Brain” as a guide through natural disaster, technological catastrophe and life lived alongside both.

Heil Jupiter!

Carlos Reygadas | Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Norway, Sweden | World Premiere

Carlos Reygadas returns with his first feature since Our Time, pushing bodies, landscape, violence and transcendence into a feral science-fiction allegory.

Two young couples occupy a remote coastline while an apparently godlike force observes them from above, and dialogue partially unfolds in an invented language.

Life of Jorge Luis Borges

Mariano Llinas | Argentina | U.S. Premiere

At 323 minutes, Mariano Llinas attempts nothing less than the life of Jorge Luis Borges, constructed through rediscovered documents, poems, drafts, manuscripts and archival fragments.

London

Sebastian Brameshuber | Austria | New York Premiere

A rideshare driver in his seventies moves between Vienna and Salzburg with strangers, allowing Sebastian Brameshuber to quietly map the gig economy through repeated journeys.

Overt Listening

Tiffany Sia | USA, Austria, Germany | World Premiere

Tiffany Sia films Taiwan’s Kinmen archipelago as both serene landscape and historical listening post, confronting the Cold War legacy that continues to reverberate there.

Red Rocks

Bruno Dumont | Portugal, France, Italy, Spain, Qatar | North American Premiere

Children between five and seven enact their own miniature Romeo and Juliet along the French Riviera, complete with rival groups, romance and danger.

The Remotes

John Torres | Philippines | U.S. Premiere

A deadly driver app powers John Torres’ science-fiction neo-noir, which uses technology to ask larger questions about political and technological systems controlling bodies and identities.

Suicide Note

Fred Camper | USA | World Premiere of New Restoration

Shot largely in New York between 1976 and 1984 on silent Super 8 Ektachrome, Fred Camper’s rarely screened work survives as a fragmented cinematic diary.

Its appearance in both Currents and Revivals makes sense: it is simultaneously a recovered historical object and an experimental film that still feels alive.

Tomorrow a Long Time Ago

Luise Donschen | Germany | North American Premiere

Set against German reunification, Luise Donschen’s film follows a middle-aged factory worker who loses her job before the narrative begins slipping beyond ordinary historical time.

What Can’t Be Mentioned

Dan Sallitt | USA | World Premiere

Tallie Medel returns as Jackie in Dan Sallitt’s sequel to The Unspeakable Act, now a social worker in training confronting the unresolved parts of her own life.

It screens with Nathan Silver’s Sounds From Home.

Currents Shorts

Program 1: The Hidden Dimension

Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness (Yixuan Zhang), A Correspondence (Josh Weissbach, Ben Balcom), Chronicle of Tiredness (Natalia Marin), Rebecca’s Mess (Jamie Crewe), Harmony (Tatsu Aoki)

Program 2: The Visible Invisible

Fevers (James Richards), The End (Artavazd Pelechian), Forever…Forever (Johann Lurf), Screening Room (Morgan Fisher)

Program 3: Surface Noise

Procedures (Simon Liu), Practice Towards Light (Jonathan Seungjoon Lee), Interwoven Intervals (Laura Kraning), Flim Flam (Siegfried A. Fruhauf), Moored Shadow (Karissa Hahn), Day One (Cameron Worden)

Program 4: The Real World

Certainties (Calum Walter), RW-LO (Martine Syms), Placeholder (Jesse McLean), Moon Palace (Jiaqi Yu)

Program 5: The Material Ghost

The Wayfinders (Peggy Ahwesh), National Seating (Kevin Jerome Everson), The Flesh of the Mountain (Adam Piron), Elegy for the Forgotten, On an Endless War (Bani Khoshnoudi)

Program 6: Out of the Present

They’re Here (Laura Poitras, Rachel Lauren Mueller), Another Earth (Ben Russell), This Suffocating Now (Vika Kirchenbauer), Morne Fortune (Mara Chavez, doris duhennois)

Revivals

NYFF64 Revivals contains 12 features and two programs of rare shorts, moving between established landmarks and films whose original versions were suppressed, recut, neglected or simply difficult to see.

The Devils

Ken Russell | United Kingdom | North American Premiere of Newly Restored 35mm

Ken Russell’s famously censored adaptation of Aldous Huxley returns in a newly restored version featuring material removed from earlier releases.

Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed remain at the center of one of British cinema’s most feverish collisions of religion, sexuality, political power and spectacle.

The Drift

Paula Delsol | France | North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Paula Delsol’s 1964 debut follows a young woman moving through encounters with different men in a modernist portrait of women’s independence in 1960s France.

Gone to Earth

Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger | United Kingdom | World Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Jennifer Jones stars in Powell and Pressburger’s 1950 film, restored in its complete original version after decades of being known through a substantially altered American cut.

Goodbye South, Goodbye

Hou Hsiao-hsien | Taiwan | North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

One of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s defining 1990s films returns in 4K, following young people chasing money, schemes and increasingly unstable futures in a transforming Taiwan.

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones

Pradip Krishen | India | North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Written by Arundhati Roy, who also appears in the film, Pradip Krishen’s English-language feature captures idealism and cynicism among architecture students in 1970s New Delhi.

L’Innocente

Luchino Visconti | Italy, France | North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Visconti’s final film returns in a new restoration, completing his lifelong fascination with aristocratic beauty and moral decay.

Just Like Weather

Allen Fong | Hong Kong | World Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Allen Fong’s 1986 feature combines fiction and documentary as a Hong Kong couple moves through domestic instability before eventually leaving for the United States.

Nitrate Kisses

Barbara Hammer | USA | World Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Barbara Hammer’s pioneering first feature mixes archival and original footage into an explicitly queer interrogation of which histories survive and which disappear.

Report to Mother

John Abraham | India | U.S. Premiere of New 4K Restoration

A man discovers a body and begins the journey to inform the dead man’s mother in John Abraham’s politically charged 1986 Malayalam landmark.

Suicide Note

Fred Camper | USA | World Premiere of New Restoration

The Currents selection appears again here as an act of historical recovery.

A Well for the Thirsty

Yuri Ilyenko | Ukraine, USSR | North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Completed in 1965 and suppressed until 1987, Yuri Ilyenko’s debut follows an elderly peasant confronting memory and death through a stark, visionary cinematic language.

Yesterday Girl

Alexander Kluge | West Germany | North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Alexander Kluge’s foundational New German Cinema debut follows a woman from East Germany attempting to build a life on the other side of the Wall.

Pelechian Project: Program 1

Artavazd Pelechian | USSR, Armenia | Restored Shorts

The first program surveys Pelechian’s early work, in which documentary, montage and poetic abstraction continually collapse into one another.

Pelechian Project: Program 2

Artavazd Pelechian | USSR, Armenia | Restored Shorts

The second program continues through the early 1990s, completing NYFF’s career-spanning survey of one of experimental cinema’s defining montage artists.

Talks

NYFF64‘s Talks program is unusually substantial, extending the festival beyond screenings with conversations between filmmakers, artists, critics and craftspeople.

Amos Vogel Lecture: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Hamaguchi delivers the sixth Amos Vogel Lecture while All of a Sudden plays the Main Slate.

James Gray in Conversation with Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese joins Opening Night filmmaker James Gray for a career-spanning discussion of Gray’s work.

Lee Chang-dong

Lee discusses Possible Love and a career spent examining contemporary South Korea through intensely personal stories.

Mike Leigh

Leigh reflects on his collaborative directing process, long-term creative partnerships and the humanist approach that runs through Tender Loving Care and his earlier work.

Valeska Grisebach

The Dreamed Adventure filmmaker discusses improvisation, actors and her unusual relationship with genre.

Ava DuVernay

DuVernay discusses 14th, her larger body of work and her use of cinema to interrogate American institutions and history.

Andrew Haigh and Ira Sachs

The directors of A Long Winter and The Man I Love discuss New Queer Cinema, naturalism, melodrama and the challenges of dramatizing queer histories.

Jacqueline Lentzou and Marine Atlan

The filmmakers behind A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra and La Gradiva discuss youth, narrative and experimentation.

Pedro Almodovar and Sofia Coppola

Almodovar and Coppola meet for a conversation about gender, memory, relationships and the unstable boundary between fiction and lived experience.

Alain Gomis and Arie and Chuko Esiri

The filmmakers discuss Dao and Clarissa, and the ways both films connect intimate lives with colonial histories.

Kleber Mendonca Filho on South of Tehran

Mendonca Filho presents his NYFF Encounters short alongside Agnes Varda’s Pier Paolo Pasolini , Agnes Varda , New York , 1967 before discussing the encounters made possible by film festivals.

The remaining free programs include panels on casting, editing, Currents and alternative cinema, sex on screen, the festival itself, an IndieWire Screen Talk with Tony Gilroy and the return of NYFF Trivia Night.

A Festival Built Around Context

What separates this year’s NYFF lineup from a simple greatest-hits package of the fall festivals is the amount of context the festival is creating around the movies.

Some films arrive with prizes already attached. Fjord has the Palme d’Or. Possible Love has the Silver Lion. Everytime, The Dreamed Adventure, Fatherland and others come to New York after major recognition elsewhere.

But NYFF is also launching films whose first real public conversation will happen here. Artificial is one. Behemoth! is another. Godzilla Minus Zero, A Statement, Joy of Joys, Bardi and 14th all arrive without a long trail of reviews already defining them.

That combination is what NYFF does particularly well. Cannes, Venice, Telluride and Toronto send films into the season with momentum. New York has the opportunity to put them beside one another, strip away some of the festival noise and see what actually survives sustained attention.

There is no secret screening this year. Dennis Lim says the festival decided that rather than trying to manufacture another Marty Supreme moment, it would simply reveal the films it had, including late additions such as You Can See Everything and NAZA.

Looking at the finished program, that decision makes sense. NYFF64 already has more than enough to talk about.

The 64th New York Film Festival runs September 25 through October 12 at Film at Lincoln Center and additional New York venues.