Here is the press release from NYFF:

Film at Lincoln Center (FLC) announces the films selected for the Currents section of the 64th New York Film Festival (NYFF64), taking place September 25 through October 12. Presented by Film at Lincoln Center in partnership with Rolex, the New York Film Festival is an annual celebration of the most significant international films of the year. This year’s edition of Currents showcases 15 feature films, including five world premieres, five North American premieres, three U.S. premieres, and one restoration world premiere, along with 28 short films presented in six programs representing 24 countries and regions.

Currents presents films that expand the possibilities of the form, reminding us that contemporary cinema is an ever-evolving terrain. An international survey of feature-length, short, and medium works, the section showcases adventurous and inventive artistic visions, and offers multiple ways of rethinking the medium.

“The Currents lineup pushes against the conventions of cinematic form, putting into relief the standardization that dominates the film landscape,” says Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, New York Film Festival. “This year’s selection is especially thrilling in its scope and diversity, encompassing multiple modes of production and possibilities for film language, and visions that range from the dynamically intimate to the genuinely—sometimes literally—cosmic.”

As in past years, Currents consists of both a selection of feature films and shorts programs that break boundaries of narrative and form, offering a cross-section of some of the boldest and most innovative filmmakers working today. This year’s Currents Centerpiece selection, making its world premiere, is the visually thrilling Bardi by filmmaker and photographer Tala Hadid. A majestic work for which Hadid immersed herself in the rugged, fraternal world of a group of horse-riders in central Morocco, Bardi follows an equestrian military ritual called Tbourida, which dates to the 16th century.

Bardi is just one of many features in Currents that contest standard definitions of fiction and documentary, enveloping viewers in situations built around real people and events. These include British experimental filmmaker Beatrice Gibson’s shapeshifting, feminist meditation At Night; Sebastian Brameshuber’s London, about a driver connecting with ride sharers on the Westautobahn between Vienna and Salzburg; Red Rocks by Bruno Dumont (France, NYFF59), who uses an observational approach to tell a fanciful story of young children in a French Riviera town; The Remotes, Manila-based John Torres’s strikingly original neo-noir that combines sci-fi and documentary; and Luise Donschen’s Tomorrow a Long Time Ago, a lightly supernatural tale of unemployment and social estrangement set against the backdrop of the 1990 German reunification.

Other films take expansive and wide-ranging approaches in daring and surprising ways, from Greek filmmaker Jacqueline Lentzou’s A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra, an audacious coming-of-age story that playfully teases at the mysteries of existence; to Brazilian artist Ana Vaz’s diaristic journey through the combustible heart of contemporary Japan with the kaleidoscopic Hanabi; to two world premieres at the festival: Heil Jupiter!, a dreamlike vision of transgression and authoritarian surveillance from singular Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas (SIlent Light, NYFF45), and Hong Kong–born artist Tiffany Sia’s serene yet sonically complex landscape film Overt Listening, which confronts the Cold War legacy of China and Taiwan.

On the other side of the spectrum, a handful of personal, fondly intimate features speak to the beauty of cinematic smallness, from the world premiere For the Moon, Éric Baudelaire’s improvisatory collaboration with kids at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris; to Ted Fendt’s Foreign Travel, which follows four friends over a year in Berlin as they engage with the books of novelist Anna Maria Ortese; to Dan Sallitt’s hilariously neurotic What Can’t Be Mentioned, another world premiere, which catches up with characters from Sallitt’s acclaimed The Unspeakable Act. NYFF will also showcase, as a Currents and Revivals selection, the world premiere of a new restoration of Suicide Note by critic and artist Fred Camper, a diaristic work shot largely in New York in the late 1970s and shown only a handful of times since, and designed to be slightly different at each screening thanks to a simple chance operation.

Splitting the bill between the epic and the small-scale is Life of Jorge Luis Borges, a 330-minute delight from Argentinean director Mariano Llinás (La Flor, NYFF56) that delves into the life of the legendary writer-poet and his fellow countryman through archives and private collections, rediscovered documents, poems, drafts, sketches, recitations, readings, and irreverent narration.

This year’s Currents shorts create a dialogue across generations of experimental cinema. The individual programs present NYFF debuts—including Yixuan Zhang, Jiaqi Yu, and Cameron Worden—alongside work by such experimental stalwarts as Artavazd Pelechian, Morgan Fisher, Tatsu Aoki, Peggy Ahwesh, and Kevin Jerome Everson. (The forthcoming Revivals section will also present a selection of newly restored Pelechian films.) 

Many films in this year’s shorts programs continue thematic through-lines present in some features. Echoing At Night, For the Moon, and Red Rocks, several works emerge from collaboration, whether between co-directors, artists working across disciplines, or filmmakers and their subjects. These include Josh Weissbach and Ben Balcom (A Correspondence); Jonathan Seungjoon Lee and painter Huh Yun-hee (Practice Towards Light); Laura Poitras, Rachel Lauren Mueller, and anonymous residents of Minneapolis (They’re Here); and Mara Chavez and doris duhennois (Morne Fortune). Engaging inquiries into the cosmic, as seen in features A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra and Heil Jupiter!, continue with works by Artavazd Pelechian (The End), Johann Lurf (Forever…Forever), James Richards (Fevers), and Peggy Ahwesh (The Wayfinders).

The format and theatrical experience is central to the experience of many of the shorts, with Forever…Forever shot on a specially developed 65mm camera and presented on a 70mm print; Tatsu Aoki’s Harmony screening in restored 16mm; Yixuan Zhang’s Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness presented in 3D; and Cameron Worden’s Day One, produced using an entirely photochemical process on 35mm film. This year, we’re also pleased to premiere the latest iteration (or “state”) of Morgan Fisher’s Screening Room, a site-specific project initiated in 1968, which was shot in—and can only be screened at—the Walter Reade Theater.

NYFF64 films are screened in theaters at Lincoln Center and at four venues across the city: BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens), Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), and AMC Bay Plaza Cinema (Bronx).

The Currents features selection committee, chaired by Dennis Lim, includes Aily Nash, Rachael Rakes, and Tyler Wilson. Leo Goldsmith, Nash, and Wilson are NYFF shorts programmers, and Jac Renée Bruneau, Marius Hrdy, Aniko Kovecsi, Vikram Murthi, Tendai Mutambu, Cici Peng, and Mariana Sánchez Bueno are shorts screeners for NYFF64. Violeta Bava, Michelle Carey, K. Austin Collins, and Antoine Thirion are NYFF program advisors.

NYFF64 is generously supported by Festival Co-Chairs Susannah Gray and John Lyons, Susan and John Hess, Almudena and Pablo Legorreta, and Nanna and Dan Stern; Vice-Chairs Jack Heller, Tara Kelleher and Roy Zuckerberg, and Ronnie Planalp; and Supporters Great Hill, Kathy and Kris Heinzelman, Hillary Koota Krevlin and Glenn Krevlin, Marcia DB Levy and William G. Levy, Ari Rifkin, and Mary Solomon / GS Gives.

Currents selections are included in Passes, limited quantities on sale now with discounts through today only. NYFF64 single tickets will go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, September 15 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date. Become an FLC Member by August 28 to secure NYFF64 pre-sale access and discounted tickets year-round. NYFF64 Press and Industry accreditation is now open through August 14.

64th New York Film Festival Currents

Currents Centerpiece: Bardi (Tala Hadid)
At Night (Beatrice Gibson)
A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra (Jacqueline Lentzou)
For the Moon (Éric Baudelaire)
Foreign Travel (Ted Fendt)
Hanabi (Ana Vaz)
Heil Jupiter! (Carlos Reygadas)
Life of Jorge Luis Borges (Mariano Llinás)
London (Sebastian Brameshuber)
Overt Listening (Tiffany Sia)
Red Rocks (Bruno Dumont)
The Remotes (John Torres)
Suicide Note (Fred Camper)
Tomorrow a Long Time Ago (Luise Donschen)
What Can’t Be Mentioned (Dan Sallitt) preceded by Sounds From Home (Nathan Silver)

Currents Program 1: The Hidden DimensionBranching Streams Flow in the Darkness (Yixuan Zhang)
A Correspondence (Josh Weissbach)
Chronicle of Tiredness (Natalia Marín)
Rebecca’s Mess (Jamie Crewe)
Harmony (Tatsu Aoki)Currents Program 2: The Visible InvisibleFevers (James Richards)
The End (Artavazd Pelechian)
Forever…Forever (Johann Lurf)
Screening Room (Morgan Fisher)

Currents Program 3: Surface NoiseProcedures (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)Currents Program 4: The Real WorldCertainties (Calum Walter)
RW-LO (Martine Syms)
Placeholder (Jesse McLean)
Moon Palace (Jiaqi Yu)Currents Program 5: The Material GhostThe 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)Currents Program 6: Out of the PresentThey’re Here (Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller)
Another Earth (Ben Russell)
This Suffocating Now (Vika Kirchenbauer)
Morne Fortune (Mara Chavez and doris duhennois)

64th New York Film Festival Currents Films & Descriptions

Currents CenterpieceBardi
Tala Hadid, 2026, Morocco/France/Qatar, 109m
Arabic and Greek with English subtitles
World Premiere
Filmmaker and photographer Tala Hadid immersed herself in the rugged, fraternal world of a group of horse-riders in central Morocco for this visually rapturous work that merges portraiture and fabulation. With thrilling camerawork, Hadid accompanies the men as they take part in Tbourida, an equestrian military ritual that dates to the 16th century and allows them to transform into new personas. As the itinerant group rides across the country, Hadid captures with a mix of intimacy and epic grandeur their geographically expansive yet emotionally enclosed universe, with its codes of behavior and fully embodied performances of masculinity. Hadid, whose previous films include the short Your Dark Hair Ihsan (NYFF43) and the feature House in the Fields, about the Amazigh of Morocco, is fascinated with how people within communities encounter tradition, myth, and the self; Bardi is a majestic work of earthy imagination that transcends time and landscape.

At Night
Beatrice Gibson, 2026, U.K./France, 87m
French, English, Tibetan, Bambara, and Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
An expansive and provocative work of rich nocturnal beauty, British experimental filmmaker Beatrice Gibson’s first feature embarks on a journey through the experiences—both shared and individualized—of six women over the course of one night in Paris. With its vibrant, textural 16mm cinematography by Ben Rivers (Mare’s Nest, NYFF63), and a compelling array of characters that cut across a wide spectrum of contemporary life, including sex workers, poets, and single mothers, Gibson’s latest work is a deeply collective experience that bears the echoes of the trailblazing literary figures who inspired her (such as Alice Notley, Kathy Acker, and June Jordan). At Nightis a shapeshifting, feminist meditation on the mind and body.

A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra / Mia Mera sti Zoi tis Tzo: Kefalaio Fedra
Jacqueline Lentzou, 2026, Greece, 90m
Greek with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Contemporary suburban Athens becomes the site of astronomical, ethereal beauty in Greek filmmaker Jacqueline Lentzou’s audacious follow-up to her feature debut Moon, 66 Questions (New Directors/New Films 2021). Combining the mundane and the cosmic, Lentzou follows one consequential day for 15-year-old Jo—angrily bickering with her mom; falling hard for vocally gifted new friend Phaedra; having a run-in with her divorced dad after school—until a shocking incident occurs that changes the course of her young life. Lentzou then takes the audience and Jo into a final passage that offers a sensory, transitory experience, glancing at the ephemerality of life and the ultimate mysteries of existence with poignancy and humor.

For the Moon / Car la lune
Éric Baudelaire, 2026, France, 88m
French with English subtitles
World Premiere
Visual artist and filmmaker Éric Baudelaire (Un film dramatique, NYFF57) returns with another marvelous, improvisatory collaboration with school-age kids finding their voices through creativity and experimentation. This time, he has teamed up with students at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, arming them with their own cameras and empowering them to find beauty and visual texture in the world around them. Performing music, making art, or bearing witness to the tiniest details of their surrounding environment, their expressions are woven together by Baudelaire and editor Claire Atherton to create a complete, subjective cinematic universe unto itself, whether capturing the tactility of everyday objects or moments of gorgeous abstraction.

Foreign Travel / Auslandsreise
Ted Fendt, 2026, Germany, 63m
German, French, and Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A small circle of friends and acquaintances in Berlin meet off and on over the course of a year. Part of a book club cultivated by Leonie (co-writer Leonie Rodrian), they tackle the work of magical realist novelist Anna Maria Ortese (The Iguana), occasionally convening as the seasons change to chart their progress and discuss the writer’s themes and literary style. Yet their conversations also reveal the loose-knit group’s alternating feelings of connection and dislocation, as well as the search for meaning and structure in the writings we absorb. The latest compact feature from American filmmaker and translator Ted Fendt (Outside Noise, NYFF59), lovingly shot, as ever, on 16mm, takes the question of realism and authenticity in art as a starting point for a gentle exploration of the time, space, and syntax of life and literature.

Hanabi
Ana Vaz, 2026, France/Brazil, 105m
English and Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
In this diaristic journey through the combustible heart of contemporary Japan, filmmaker Ana Vaz uses Yoko Hasuke’s essay “Journal of a Radioactive Brain” as the inspiration and anchor for a freeform inquiry into living amidst natural and manmade disasters. With the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear disaster constantly simmering below its surface, Vaz’s discursive and associative film features a kaleidoscopic flow of images on video and 16mm shot over the course of 10 years, accompanied by a vibrant, densely layered soundscape. In her radical vision, the threat of ecological disaster leads to—and rhymes with—the hope and imagination for a practicable human future.

Heil Jupiter!
Carlos Reygadas, 2026, Mexico/Poland/Portugal/Norway/Sweden, 150m
Invented language and Spanish with English subtitles
World Premiere
Amidst crashing waves and monumental rocks on a distant coast, two young couples open up a realm of shifting realities. Unbeknownst to them, a mysterious entity watches from high above with Godlike judgment. Between these spaces exists a world balanced on the edge of the modern and the primitive, the high-tech and the rural, the corporeal and the mythic. This dreamlike astonishment from Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light, NYFF45) is a work of feral cinematic expression, splendid in its elemental pleasures, which exist in profound and challenging contrast to its depiction of authoritarian brutality.

Life of Jorge Luis Borges / Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges
Mariano Llinás, 2026, Argentina, 330m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
With the complex nested structures of epics like La Flor (NYFF56), Argentinean filmmaker Mariano Llinás has worn his Jorge Luis Borges influence on his sleeve, transposing labyrinthine narrative gambits to a giddily inventive cinematic realm. It’s no surprise that Llinás has decided to delve into the life of his beloved fellow countryman—in his own cheeky, aptly sprawling fashion. Llinás’s sorta-documentary is a maniacally detailed research project, telling Borges’s life story by rummaging through archives and private collections, rediscovered documents, poems, drafts, and sketches, and materializing this literary phantom onscreen through recitations, readings, and irreverent narration. Luxuriously stretched out over three parts, Life of Jorge Luis Borges shuttles around the world, from Geneva to Brooklyn to Iceland, with many pit stops and dead ends along the way. It’s as much a celebration of Borges himself as of the cartographical pleasure of roads leading nowhere in particular.

London
Sebastian Brameshuber, 2026, Austria, 122m
German, English, and Romanian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Bobby, a good-natured yet solitary driver in his early seventies, shuttles back and forth on the Westautobahn between Vienna and Salzburg. In the passenger seat are a series of strangers Bobby has invited via a car-pooling app: a morally conflicted young soldier, a supermarket worker, a cinema-loving son of Albanian immigrants, a Romanian migrant, a Bosnian queer activist, and many more. A former art museum guard, the questing, questioning Bobby bonds with each of his guests as time passes and the seasons change, while all the while enacting his own emotional journey: visiting a hospitalized friend hovering at death’s door. From this beautifully simple premise, Sebastian Brameshuber draws a delicate, perceptive portrait of the contemporary gig economy that also feels humane and timeless, of people connecting despite the capitalist mechanisms that control them.

Overt Listening
Tiffany Sia, 2026, U.S./Austria/Germany, 85m
English, Mandarin Chinese, and Taiwanese Hokkien with no subtitles
World Premiere
Hong Kong–born artist Tiffany Sia confronts the Cold War legacy of China in this landscape film shot amidst the serene environs of Taiwan’s Kinmen archipelago. On this stretch of land only 1,800 meters from the coast of China, deserted beaches and abandoned military bunkers and training facilities harbor echoes of past conflict, such as the 1949 Battle of Guningtou, in which Taiwan defeated the Chinese Communist Party and maintained control of the land. Mostly wordless, with onscreen text, Sia’s film is accompanied by a dynamic yet unsettling sonic terrain of propagandistic radio broadcasts, imported pop music, and military exercises. In Overt Listening, the artist reminds us that sound is a political presence all its own, even in the most seemingly tranquil of places.

Red Rocks / Les Roches Rouges
Bruno Dumont, 2026, Portugal/France/Italy/Spain/Qatar, 90m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
In a coastal French Riviera town, surrounded by the glistening azure blue of the Mediterranean, a group of young children cavort and compete with each other, diving off the rocky red cliffs into the sea. Soon, we find these tykes—played by kids between the ages of 5 and 7—enacting a kind of pre-preadolescent Romeo and Juliet, complete with rival gangs and puppy love. With natural light bouncing off these stunning vistas, and a distanced yet intimate observational style, Bruno Dumont (France, NYFF59) uses a documentary approach to portray a small-scale drama of danger, purity, and freedom. In the tradition of Small Change and The Florida Project, these tots are largely untethered from adults, becoming avatars of a primal utopia.

The Remotes
John Torres, 2026, Philippines, 153m
Tagalog with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Manila-based filmmaker, musician, and artist John Torres has constructed an original, visually striking form of neo-noir that combines sci-fi and documentary into a new kind of stylistic blueprint. Following a cop in mourning one year after his wife was killed in a mysterious driver-app-related auto accident, and his telepathic sister-in-law, whose recorded voice might hold a clue to the case, The Remotes is a thought-provoking inquiry into the larger forces—political, technological—that conspire to control our bodies and identities. Fashioned in part as a response to the Philippines’ longtime president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs” and the country’s resultant surveillance state, Torres’s drifting, impressionistic film expands and compresses time, allowing its sinister, tragic narrative to gradually emerge from its moody, fog-enshrouded cityscape.

Suicide Note
Fred Camper, 1976–1984, U.S., 16mm, 110m
Silent with no subtitles
World Premiere of New Restoration
Shot largely in New York in the late 1970s, and seldom screened publicly, this rare film from critic and artist Fred Camper is a fragmentary, diaristic work, capturing a cluttered and melancholic world on Super 8 reversal film. Haunted by its title, the film is at once intimate and opaque, rhapsodic and withdrawn, as its tremulous images attempt to reckon with the fleeting beauty of crowds, shop windows, domestic interiors, art exhibitions, and a panoptic view of New York City taken from the south tower of the World Trade Center. Each screening of the film, which unfolds across 10 sections, is different from the last: the reels that make up its eighth section are determined by way of a chance operation performed before each projection. Previously known as SN, the film has now been given its full title (conceived after Camper’s stepfather took his own life and left no note), to coincide with this essential new restoration.

Suicide Note has been restored by Chicago Film Society with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation and Big Creek Cooperative. Picture Restoration: BB Optics; 4K Scan and Laboratory Services: Colorlab.

Tomorrow a Long Time Ago / Morgen vor langer Zeit
Luise Donschen, 2026, Germany, 91m
German with English subtitles
North American Premiere
In a small, placid town in central Germany in the early ’90s, middle-aged Patty (Manuela Biedermann) is let go from her factory job. Unemployed and rootless, she wanders through a bucolic landscape, has an affair with a younger man, and eventually leaves behind her apartment and possessions—and her present reality—as she wanders into the fantastical forests of the Kyffhäuser mountains. Set against the backdrop of the 1990 German reunification, this meditative tale of estrangement, directed by the singular Luise Donschen (ELLE, NYFF59) and shot by Helena Wittman (Human Flowers of Flesh, NYFF60), teases at the supernatural, capturing a fleeting moment in time on the verge of shifting forever.

What Can’t Be Mentioned
Dan Sallitt, 2026, U.S., 61m
World Premiere
Jackie (Tallie Medel) is a social worker in training picking at the knots of her own unresolved issues in microbudget maestro Dan Sallitt’s return to the scene of his notorious-yet-gentle 2012 taboo-buster The Unspeakable Act. This sequel of sorts catches up with Jackie, now in her late twenties in Brooklyn, confronting sexual incompatibility with her bookkeeper boyfriend Anthony (Kyle McCormack) while still maybe nursing latent feelings for her everyguy older brother (Sky Hirschkron), who’s just announced that he’s having a baby with partner Lily (Kit Zauhar). Medel is a neurotic delight as she navigates these murky waters with piquant indelicacy, dancing around that “phase” of her life that remains unspoken—and unspeakable. What Can’t Be Mentioned is an exemplar of Sallitt’s expert comic timing and radical empathy, a minor symphony of emotional projection, transference, and pseudo-flirtation.

Preceded by:
Sounds From Home      
Nathan Silver, 2026, France, 7m
North American Premiere
Nathan Silver’s parents have been a constant presence in his fractious features; their kibitzing continues in his new short, but from a remove. They narrate their Upstate New York birdwatching adventures in voice memos as he films the more prosaic birdlife in Paris, where he and his wife moved after the 2024 election. In a modern portrait of expatriation, smartphones bridge sound and image, continents, and generations—and carry anxious tidings.

Currents Program 1: The Hidden Dimension
64m

Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness
Yixuan Zhang, 2026, U.S./China, 3D, 15m
World Premiere
A garden path, a billiards room, a solarium, a parlor—historical photographs of these shadowy scenes and spectral atmospheres are subject to strange and subtle transformations in Yixuan Zhang’s evocative stereoscopic film, which explores the uncanny space-time and illusions of depths hidden within the two-dimensional surface of the screen.

A Correspondence
Josh Weissbach, Ben Balcom, 2026, U.S., 8m
World Premiere
The title of Ben Balcom and Josh Weissbach’s collaborative film suggests both the form of letter-writing and the act of making meaning. Cryptic voices and ghostly images accumulate and collide in eerie soft focus and fleeting alternations of light and shadow, as noise steadily coalesces into a signal.

Chronicle of Tiredness / Crónica del cansancio  
Natalia Marín, 2026, Spain, 21m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
The audio track mixes sounds of toil with dialogues compiling a history of housing precarity in the filmmaker’s native Spain. As long lateral pans materialize the foundations of the modern housing crisis—land, labor, bureaucracy—and are interrupted with one numbing, repetitive fixed-camera setup, Natalia Marín unfurls a structuralist cri de coeur for a generation running to stand still.

Rebecca’s Mess
Jamie Crewe, 2026, U.K., 10m
World Premiere
Fluttering forms and buzzing shards of light conjure a grimy monochrome world in Rebecca’s Mess. Punctuated by eruptions of pixelation, apologetic text, and jump-scare abstractions, Jamie Crewe’s tense and sinister work creates a hybrid organic-electric space in which lurking dolls peer out at the spectator from a haze of cursed video.

Harmony
Tatsu Aoki, 1991, U.S., 16mm, 10m
New York Premiere of Restoration
To make Harmony—newly restored by the Chicago Film Society—Tatsu Aoki gathered 16mm footage of pedestrians in Chicago’s Loop, and assembled it into as many as 32 layers of superimposition. As striding business-casual slacks and summer dresses effulge into a blur, a formal pattern as rigorous as the urban grid becomes overwhelmed by the vibrating tactility of teeming humanity.
Preserved by Chicago Film Society through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Currents Program 2: The Visible Invisible
67m

Fevers
James Richards, 2026, Germany, 31m
U.S. Premiere
Text on a spectral gray background gives way to a disorienting irregular flicker. A foreboding soundtrack of buzzy drones and whirring motors lends a menacing color to febrile declarations of indefinite love. Eyes emerge from darkness, peering at us from faces carved in rock. James Richards’s Fevers floods the screen with images and impressions, enacting an alternately frenzied and melancholic search for meaning in the gap between language, gesture, and sensation.

The End / Վերջը
Artavazd Pelechian, 1992, Armenia, 9m
U.S. Premiere of Restoration
A staggering meditation on landscapes and travel, The End captures a train ride from Moscow to Yerevan, rendered by Pelechian as a kind of hymn outside of time, conjured through the mystery of the human face, the rumbling of mechanized transport, and the revelatory play of light.

Forever…Forever
Johann Lurf, 2026, Austria/France, 70mm, 21m
U.S. Premiere
Space and time expand and contract in Johann Lurf’s film, as time-lapse photography captures a tranquil landscape and the sun’s transit in the mirrored surface of a lake. At once intimate and cosmic, Forever…Forevercollapses the scales of human and geologic time, immersing us in the everyday and the infinite. The film was shot on a specially developed 65mm camera and is presented on 70mm in the Walter Reade Theater and 35mm in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

Screening Room
Morgan Fisher, 1968/2026, U.S., 35mm, 6m
World Premiere
Initiated in 1968, Morgan Fisher’s Screening Room is a site-specific work, a film remade for and shown only in the place in which it was filmed. This latest version (or, to use Fisher’s term, “state”) of the film—with production executed by filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins with the support of Mostly Works and camerawork by Dan Fridman—leads the spectator into Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater in a single tracking shot, a journey that unveils cinema’s enigmatic status as, at once, a physical space, a filmic object, and an ephemeral image. 
Note: Screening Room will be included in this program only at screenings in the Walter Reade Theater.

Currents Program 3: Surface Noise
70m

Procedures
Simon Liu, 2026, Hong Kong/U.S., 17m
World Premiere
A chaotic tapestry of emblems and luminous portals guide us through the warped signage and smearing surfaces of Hong Kong in Simon Liu’s film, a densely layered reverie of civic spaces that appear to be dissolving into irreality. Exploding across uncanny mindscapes, Procedures explores the iridescent somewhere of a city as a labyrinth of gated geometries and stifled energies.

Practice Towards Light / 빛을 향한 수행
Jonathan Seungjoon Lee, 2026, South Korea, 12m
New York Premiere
Working in collaboration with painter Huh Yun-hee, Jonathan Seungjoon Lee documents a year-long practice of filming the sunrise through multiple exposures on four 100-foot rolls of 16mm film, one for each season, with seven separate sunrise shoots layered onto each roll. In lush, dizzying compositions, sea and sunrise, paint and celluloid, line and color collide in thick, vertiginous superimpositions of lilac, gold, and aquamarine.

Interwoven Intervals
Laura Kraning, 2026, U.S., 6m
New York Premiere
Smudged grids and criss-crossing patterns, laser-printed on clear 16mm film leader, cascade in intricate moirés and stuttering geometries in Laura Kraning’s highly tactile film. Interwoven Intervals finds a new form between weaving, drawing, and cinema, intersecting graphic approaches to sound and film materials with the machinic manipulations of textile production, printing, and cinema.

Flim Flam
Siegfried A. Fruhauf, 2026, Austria, 15m
U.S. Premiere
Quivering punctuation, undulant zebras, and spiraling moirés compose Siegfried A. Fruhauf’s hallucinatory exploration of the eye’s grasp on reality. An avalanche of formal confrontations, illusory depths, and tonal contrasts (black-and-white, orange-and-green), Flim Flam at once expands the spectator’s cognitive capacities and returns the cinema to its origins as a child’s optical toy.

Moored Shadow
Karissa Hahn, 2026, U.S., 16mm, 4m
World Premiere
In Karissa Hahn’s enigmatic silent film, a series of dizzying whip-pans seems to reveal a sunlit woodland scene, which quickly dissolves into abstracted shapes, flickers of shadow and light, and curious traces of the natural and human-made. Deceptive in its simplicity, Moored Shadow constructs an impossible landscape from motion and monochrome.

Day One
Cameron Worden, 2026, U.S., 35mm, 16m
World Premiere
Shapes blister and tumble across frame lines, colors splash, bleed, and vanish, machinic noise rumbles and churns. Produced using an entirely photochemical process on 35mm film, with an optical soundtrack generated photochemically, Day One is an odyssey of light and color, an exploration of the primary materials of analog filmmaking, and a miniature cosmos activated inside the cinematic apparatus.

Currents Program 4: The Real World
69m

Certainties
Calum Walter, 2026, U.S., 15m
World Premiere
As California’s wildfires rage and extreme weather drives bears and other animals into the filmmaker’s yard to scavenge, everyday life becomes a series of unnerving omens. In Certainties, snippets of video-diary and home security camera footage from the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains are collaged to reveal an ominous domesticity, with a fruit tree in the yard but nature out of joint.

RW-LO
Martine Syms, 2026, U.S., 23m
North American Premiere
Martine Syms blends recreations with home movies from the life of Brent David Freaney, a lifelong pop girlie who was once, as vintage camcorder footage reveals, a Deep South teenager obsessed with outspoken The Real World: New Orleans castmate Melissa Howard. RW-LO is a nostalgic—and surprising—inquiry into what happens when people start being celebrities, and they stop being real.

Placeholder
Jesse McLean, 2026, U.S., 12m
New York Premiere
At once wry, dreamy, and plaintive, Placeholder follows a woman adrift in the wake of a divorce, navigating isolation while fantasizing about a Swedish movie star. Wandering between a half-empty home and the barren spaces of Antarctica glimpsed in Frank Hurley’s photographs of the ill-fated 1914 Endurance expedition, Jesse McLean’s protagonist follows a path of mourning and reflection in which reality is just beyond her grasp.

Moon Palace / 月宫
Jiaqi Yu, 2026, China/U.S., 19m
Chinese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Jiaqi Yu collages a tattered scrapbook from glitchy home videos and family photos, layered atop each other with superimpositions and further distorted with in-camera effects, as if worried over for years. The moon, cycling through phases of presence and absence, but constant in its distance, becomes a potent object of longing.

Currents Program 5: The Material Ghost
66m

The Wayfinders
Peggy Ahwesh, 2026, U.S., 26m
U.S. Premiere
The uncanny landscapes of Lebanon, Syria, and occupied Palestine provide the setting for The Wayfinders, which turns a 2004 3D flight simulation program into a rumination upon themes of loss, displacement, and the right of return. Combining otherworldly tropospheric excursions with evocative narration, Peggy Ahwesh offers a virtual tour of vanished spaces and expunged histories via simulacra of the now-defunct Jerusalem International Airport, once a hub for air travel and mobility throughout a region now ravaged by war, tight border control, and forced departures.

National Seating
Kevin Jerome Everson, 2026, U.S., 5m
New York Premiere
On the soundtrack of National Seating, Pleas Everson Sr. narrates the history of his many jobs—farming, bus-driving, washing cars, army service, factory work, truck-driving—while the camera explores the beat-up interior and exterior of a 1951 GMC school bus. Taking its title from National Seat, the factory where Pleas worked for 18 years, Kevin Jerome Everson’s film moves from the micro to the macro, connecting one man’s private work history to larger questions of labor, the body, time, and employment—first in detailed close-up, then in unstable stereoscope.

The Flesh of the Mountain
Adam Piron, 2026, U.S., 12m
World Premiere
The ragged, desolate landscapes around eastern California’s Owens Lake are rendered in negative monochrome in the latest entry in Adam Piron’s film cycle about the brutal history of Indigenous land expropriation in the American West. Deploying images from Thomas Edison’s 1894 films of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, The Flesh of the Mountain recounts the violent legacy of white settlers’ claim upon Paiute lands for the mining of silver—an essential component of motion-picture film.

Elegy for the Forgotten, On an Endless War / مرثیه‌ای برای فراموش‌شدگان، در باب جنگی بی‌پایان
Bani Khoshnoudi, 2026, Iran/France, 23m
Farsi with English subtitles
North American Premiere
“An Endless War of Images.” Bani Khoshnoudi juxtaposes photographic testimonials and propaganda from the Iran-Iraq War with ordinary Iranians’ cellphone videos of this year’s government crackdown and subsequent American and Israeli bombardments. The often graphic images of bombed-out streets, dead bodies, and mourners are dizzying in their pain, and in their confusion: with barely any way to distinguish one conflict from another, truth becomes as elusive as justice.

Currents Program 6: Out of the Present
64m

They’re Here
Laura Poitras, Rachel Lauren Mueller, 2026, U.S., 25m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Opening with a cat and mouse car chase between ICE agents and neighborhood observers, They’re Here is a searing and dystopian dispatch from occupied Minneapolis. The film follows Edén Villa (pseudonym) and anonymous residents as they evade, resist, and surveil a masked paramilitary force abducting friends and neighbors. Using dashcam footage, crowdsourced data, and POV cinema, They’re Here takes the viewer inside the occupation of an American city.

Another Earth
Ben Russell, 2025, France, 11m
New York Premiere
An affective excavation of the present, Another Earth captures what it feels like to be both here and elsewhere: the fractured experience of a moment in which live-streamed genocide and lived reality clash in frenzied cacophony. Layers of time and embodiment converge in Ben Russell’s film, uncovering a buried alternative history of humanity.

This Suffocating Now
Vika Kirchenbauer, 2026, Germany, 15m
U.S. Premiere
This Suffocating Now examines the compromises and indignities of contemporary life in Germany via a series of vignettes: a basketball injury that results in a hospital stay, the silencing of inconvenient voices, unusual intimacies observed in the midst of protest and police aggression. Moving from the individual to the state to the various publics that emerge between them, Vika Kirchenbauer exposes undercurrents of contradiction and violence in public life and what now passes for normal.

Morne Fortune
Mara Chavez, doris duhennois, 2026, Austria/Saint Lucia/Martinique/U.K., 13m
English and French with English subtitles
World Premiere
The British colonial government erected the Inniskilling Monument atop Morne Fortune, in St. Lucia, to commemorate a 1796 military victory over the French. But to many islanders, it’s also a monument to their enslaved ancestors, who took up arms alongside the First Republic. Challenging received histories, Mara Chavez and doris duhennois assemble testimonies on celluloid and digital scraps into an alternative monument.