New York Film Festival Unveils Currents Lineup: 15 Features and 28 Shorts from Across the Globe
Film at Lincoln Center has revealed the Currents section of the 64th New York Film Festival — a slate of 15 feature films and 28 shorts that runs the gamut from a 16th-century Moroccan equestrian ritual to a five-and-a-half-hour dive into the life of Jorge Luis Borges. Variety published the full lineup on 13 August 2026.
Currents is the festival's strand for formally adventurous work — films that sit outside the Main Slate's more conventional selections. The Main Slate, announced earlier in August, comprises 32 films from 31 countries, including three world premieres (Film at Lincoln Center; ABC7 NY).
The Currents centerpiece is Tala Hadid's Bardi, which makes its world premiere at the festival. The film follows an equestrian military ritual called Tbourida among horse-riders in central Morocco — a tradition that dates back to the 16th century. Hadid's selection as centerpiece places her work at the structural heart of the section.
Several other world premieres dot the feature slate. Carlos Reygadas returns to the festival with Heil Jupiter!; his Silent Light screened at NYFF45. Tiffany Sia's Overt Listening confronts the Cold War legacy of China and Taiwan through landscape cinematography. Éric Baudelaire's For the Moon is an improvisatory collaboration with children at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. Dan Sallitt's What Can't Be Mentioned revisits characters from his 2021 film The Unspeakable Act.
The remaining features span continents and tones. Bruno Dumont's Red Rocks takes an observational approach to a fanciful story of children on the French Riviera. Luise Donschen's Tomorrow a Long Time Ago is a supernatural tale set amid the 1990 German reunification. Sebastian Brameshuber's London follows a driver connecting with ride sharers on the Westautobahn between Vienna and Salzburg. Beatrice Gibson's At Night is described as a feminist meditation. John Torres contributes the neo-noir The Remotes; Jacqueline Lentzou offers the coming-of-age story A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra; and Ana Vaz's Hanabi is a diaristic journey through contemporary Japan.
Two selections carry particular scale. Mariano Llinás' Life of Jorge Borges runs 330 minutes, delving into the writer-poet through archives and irreverent narration. Llinás' La Flor screened at NYFF56. Ted Fendt's Foreign Travel follows four friends engaging with the books of Anna Maria Ortese over a year in Berlin.
The shorts programme brings festival debuts from Yixuan Zhang (Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness), Jiaqi Yu (Moon Palace) and Cameron Worden (Day One). Collaborative works include Josh Weissbach and Ben Balcom's A Correspondence, Jonathan Seungjoon Lee and painter Huh Yun-hee's Practice Towards Light, and Laura Poitras alongside Rachel Lauren Mueller and anonymous Minneapolis residents on They're Here. Established names appear too: Artavazd Pelechian's The End, Johann Lurf's Forever…Forever, James Richards' Fevers and Peggy Ahwesh's The Wayfinders.
Fred Camper's Suicide Notes, a diaristic work shot largely in New York in the late 1970s, will screen as a new restoration — a joint Currents and Revivals selection.
The 64th New York Film Festival runs 25 September through 12 October. Screenings take place across all five boroughs: Lincoln Center in Manhattan, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema on Staten Island and AMC Bay Plaza Cinema in the Bronx. The festival is presented in partnership with Rolex (NYFF Instagram).
What makes this Currents slate notable is its reach — 15 features touching five continents, from the Moroccan desert to a Paris institute for the blind, from Argentine literary archives to a Japanese diary. For audiences willing to venture past the Main Slate, the section offers the festival's widest lens on what cinema looks like in 2026.
