New Directors/New Films 2026 at Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art is a film festival of emerging filmmakers, a place to see the future of film.
It screens many festival winners and standouts from Cannes, Sundance, Locarno, Venice, Berlinale, Rotterdam, Toronto, San Sebastián, and more. Lots of directors and filmmakers are present for Q&As.
New Directors/New Films
Emerging talent film festival
Film at Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
Museum of Modern Art, Midtown
Apr 8-19, Wed-Sun
$19+
New Directors/New Films Movies
The opening night film is “Leviticus,” Adrian Chiarella’s gay coming-of-age supernatural horror movie from Australia. 🇦🇺
The closing night film is “Donkey Days,” Rosanne Pel’s dysfunctional family portrait from the Netherlands. 🇳🇱
The Festival presents features from Argentina, France, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Mozambique, Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, and more. 🇦🇷 🇫🇷 🇮🇳 🇮🇹 🇯🇵 🇲🇽 🇲🇿 🇳🇱 🇿🇦 🇪🇸
Chronovisor
I’d like to see “Chronovisor” (2026), an American film by Kevin Walker and Jack Auen about a New York scholar whose library work uncovers a Vatican conspiracy to bury a camera that shows the past. It’s a modern myth based on the true claims of a monk.
The concept reminds me of the Argentine writer Borge’s short story “Library of Babel” about a library that contains all possible combinations of words. Babel is a bewildering story that reads like an Escher painting leading in multiple directions at once. Ironically having access to all information produces a lot of noise. That’s a fair description of the Internet and AI. 🇦🇷
In “Chronovisor,” the camera views the past by reading residual electromagnetic energy. The Church buries the device in fear that it will betray their faith. They deny it by saying its images are false. That’s fake news for you.
This ties into recent scientific theories that if you entered a black hole, from an outside perspective, you would appear to be smeared across the event horizon. Theoretically, you could be reconstructed from the information in that smear.
In Block Universe theory, the past, present, and future all exist at the same time. The Chronovisor relies in part on this concept.
The Prophet
Ique Langa’s “The Prophet” (2026) is a Mozambican story of a Christian pastor whose church is dwindling because he doesn’t inspire. The pastor encounters a holy man in the bush whose folk spirituality inspires the pastor to success, but eventually conflict as the holy man demands greater and greater sacrifices.
This film was made in the filmmaker’s father’s hometown, using the local people as actors. So it’s an interesting look into a world most of us don’t get to see.
This examines a real tension in colonized communities. Traditional and colonial religions conflict because colonizers forced people to convert or be killed, claiming the old religions are evil (they are not). Most people convert, but carry on with the old ways, though the traditions conflict.