At long last we found a home (the New York Film Fest’s Currents section) for Carlos Reygadas‘ latest work (formerly titled Wake of Umbra) has arrived. Clocking in at precisely two and a half hours, Heil Jupiter! was perhaps so esoteric and explicit that it was possibly shunned by Cannes, Venice and Toronto selection committees. The NYFF posits this as the tale of 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. Also joining the festivities we have carry overs from the Berlinale in Sebastian Brameshuber‘s London, Cannes in Bruno Dumont‘s Red Rocks, plus the Lido in A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra by Jacqueline Lentzou and Life of Jorge Luis Borges by Mariano Llinás. The Currents Centerpiece selection is Bardi by Tala Hadid who is best known for 2014’s The Narrow Frame of Midnight (selected for TIFF). Here are the selections in the Currents buffet menu plus the numerous shorts.
Bardi (Currents Centerpiece)
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 Night” is a shapeshifting, feminist meditation on the mind and body.
A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra
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
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
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
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., 110m, 16mm
World Premiere of New Restoration
Silent with no subtitles
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
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
“Branching 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 Invisible
“Fevers” (James Richards)
“The End” (Artavazd Pelechian)
“Forever…Forever” (Johann Lurf)
“Screening Room” (Morgan Fisher)
Currents 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)
Currents Program 4: The Real World
“Certainties” (Calum Walter)
“RW-LO” (Martine Syms)
“Placeholder” (Jesse McLean)
“Moon Palace” (Jiaqi Yu)
Currents 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)
Currents Program 6: Out of the Present
“They’re Here” (Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller)
“Another Earth” (Ben Russell)
“This Suffocating Now” (Vika Kirchenbauer)
“Morne Fortune” (Mara Chavez and doris duhennois)
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