The New York Film Festival has unveiled the programming for its Currents section, a curated collection designed to showcase films that challenge conventional approaches to filmmaking. The selection encompasses 15 feature-length films and 28 short films that explore expanded possibilities in cinematic form and narrative structure.
The centerpiece of the Currents lineup is the world premiere of Bardi, directed by filmmaker and photographer Tala Hadid, which draws from her immersion in Morocco’s horse-riding culture. Additional feature selections include works by established and emerging filmmakers across various aesthetic approaches. Beatrice Gibson presents a feminist meditation titled At Night, while Sebastian Brameshuber’s London follows drivers and ride-share passengers along the Westautobahn. Bruno Dumont contributes an observational film set on the French Riviera called Red Rocks, and John Torres offers a neo-noir piece titled The Remotes. Luise Donschen’s Tomorrow a Long Time Ago explores themes of unemployment and social displacement within the context of German reunification in 1990.
The program also includes diverse international perspectives. Ana Vaz’s Hanabi operates in a surreal register set in contemporary Japan, while Carlos Reygadas’ Heil Jupiter! employs dreamlike imagery to examine authoritarian surveillance. Tiffany Sia’s Overt Listening combines landscape cinematography with complex sound design to address Cold War legacies affecting China and Taiwan. Jacqueline Lentzou contributes an expansive coming-of-age narrative, and Mariano Llinás presents a 330-minute biographical film about Jorge Luis Borges.
Intimate character studies form another strand of the selection, including Éric Baudelaire’s For the Moon, a world premiere collaboration with students at a Paris school for the blind, and Ted Fendt’s Foreign Travel, which follows four friends navigating Berlin over the course of a year. The Currents section will also present a newly restored version of Fred Camper’s Suicide Note, a 1970s diary-like work originally filmed in New York. Among the shorts lineup, Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller collaborate on They’re Here, which documents confrontations between immigration enforcement agents and Minneapolis residents through dashcam footage and crowdsourced material.
According to festival artistic director Dennis Lim, the Currents lineup reflects a commitment to programming that resists standardized cinematic conventions. The 2026 New York Film Festival runs from September 25 through October 12.
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