The New York Film Festival is NYC’s big fall film festival. It’s one of America’s longest-running film festivals, and lands just as studios are preparing to release their best films into the holiday and Oscar seasons.
Each edition surfaces new work from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Iberia, and Asia, filmmakers carrying the same roots and migrations that shaped this city.
It’s a great place to see new and restored films, filmmakers, movie stars, and industry people. There are lots of filmmaker Q&As.
64th New York Film Festival 2026
Latin and global roots films
Film at Lincoln Center
BAM: Fort Greene, Brooklyn
Museum of the Moving Image: Astoria, Queens
September 25-October 12, 2026
$22+
#NYFF64
These are some of the Latin and global roots films you want to see.
Behemoth!
Pedro Pascal stars in Tony Gilroy’s Centerpiece selection, playing a cellist rebuilding a fractured life in what critics are calling a career-best performance from the Chilean-American actor.
Gilroy, the writer-director behind Michael Clayton, brings the same intelligence and grace to this American drama, making its world premiere at Alice Tully Hall on Friday, October 2 with Gilroy, Pascal, and additional cast in attendance.
It’s a rare chance to see one of the most in-demand Latin actors working today anchor a Lincoln Center world premiere.
La libertad doble (Double Freedom)
Argentine director Lisandro Alonso returns to NYFF with a sequel of sorts to his early feature La Libertad, again following the woodcutter Misael, now navigating life with his mentally unstable sister.
Argentina has a small, but vibrant filmmaking community. Argentine films tend to be very contemplative, the perfect antidote to Hollywood formula.
Alonso is one of the defining voices of contemplative Argentine cinema, and this Chile, Argentina, Luxembourg, Germany, and U.K. co-production extends a story he first began telling nearly two decades ago. Catch it for a masterclass in patient, elemental filmmaking from one of Latin America’s most singular directors.
Heil Jupiter!
Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, the visionary behind Silent Light, brings a dreamlike new film shot partly in an invented language, a co-production spanning Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Norway, and Sweden.
Reygadas has built his career on images that blur the line between the physical and the mythic, and this world premiere pushes that instinct further than ever. It’s essential viewing for anyone who follows Mexican cinema’s boldest experimental edge.
Mexican is a very surreal place where you regularly see things that make you think you are in a movie. The film isn’t about this, but renowned Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali once said, “There is no way I’m going back to Mexico. I can’t stand to be in a country that is more surreal than my paintings.”
Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges (Life of Jorge Luis Borges)
Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás, known for the epic La Flor, turns his lens on the life of literary giant Jorge Luis Borges, assembling the story from rediscovered documents, manuscripts, and sketches. At over five hours, it’s less a conventional biography than an act of archival excavation. For anyone drawn to Latin American letters, this U.S. premiere is a rare chance to see Borges’s life reconstructed on screen.
Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) completely transformed modern literature by pioneering the structures that defined postmodernism, magical realism, and the digital age long before the internet existed.
Though he never wrote a full-length novel, his brief, mind-bending short stories fundamentally altered how twentieth and twenty-first-century writers approached narrative, time, and reality. His storytelling style offers insights to filmmakers too.
Just don’t read “The Library of Babel” (1941) after a wild night because it will drive you insane. The moral of the story is that too much information leads to a total absence of meaning. It’s like repeating the same word over and over until you explode. Borges described doomscrolling a half century before the internet.
Lo demás es ruido (Everything Else Is Noise)
Mexican director Nicolás Pereda offers a feminist-minded domestic comedy about a composer whose apartment becomes the site of an unexpectedly revealing television interview. Pereda has quietly built one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary Mexican cinema, mixing realism with subtle absurdity. This U.S. premiere is a compact, sharply observed entry point into his filmmaking.
Morne Fortune
Filmmakers Mara Chavez and doris duhennois bring a world premiere short rooted in Saint Lucia and Martinique, screening as part of the Currents Program 6 shorts block. They turn a story about the Inniskilling Monument at Morne Fortuné into a story about the Black freedom fighters whose contributions were lost to history when human slavery returned.
Caribbean voices are rare at this scale of international festival programming, which makes this a genuinely special inclusion. It’s a chance to see francophone Caribbean filmmaking get a real spotlight on a Lincoln Center screen.
Dao
French Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis, whose Félicité premiered at NYFF55, returns with an ecstatic epic cutting between a memorial in Guinea-Bissau and a wedding in Paris, spoken in French, Wolof, Manjak, and Portuguese Creole.
Gomis has become one of the most vital chroniclers of West African life and its diasporas. This North American premiere is a sweeping, deeply felt piece of filmmaking not to be missed.
Clarissa
Twin filmmakers Arie and Chuko Esiri transplant Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to contemporary Nigeria, starring Oscar nominee Sophie Okonedo. The Esiris hold onto the emotional core of Woolf’s novel while giving it an entirely new cultural setting. This U.S. premiere is a striking example of how Nigerian filmmakers are reshaping literary adaptation on their own terms. Nollywood rocks!
Once Upon a Time in Harlem
In 1972, documentarian William Greaves gathered artists, writers, actors, and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance on film. More than fifty years later, his son David Greaves has completed the movie.
This is New York film history in the most literal sense, a documentary about Harlem’s cultural explosion, finished by the next generation and premiering blocks from where it was shot.
The Harlem Renaissance was part of the Jazz Age that defined US American culture. This is more than a Black story, it’s an American story.
Bitter Christmas
Pedro Almodóvar explores an actress writing a script inspired by the people around her, itself the invention of an Almodóvar-like filmmaker within the film. Almodóvar remains Spain’s most internationally recognized director, and this U.S. premiere continues his decades-long fascination with the blurred edges between fiction and life. It’s a must for anyone tracking contemporary Spanish cinema.
Almodóvar has a long relationship with the New York Film Festival. Though a man, he is one of the filmmakers with the most profound understanding of the interior lives of women. He attributes it to his mother. She must have been a real force of nature.
Sixteen Moments of My Life
Albert Serra, the Catalan director behind Afternoons of Solitude, trains his camera on Ingrid Caven in a concert film shot in Paris, a France and Spain co-production.
Serra’s work consistently blurs documentary and performance, and this North American premiere is no exception. It’s a hypnotic addition to the festival’s Iberian slate.
Report to Mother
Restored for its U.S. premiere, John Abraham’s 1986 Malayalam-language film captures the political tumult of 1970s Kerala in stark black and white. It stands as one of South Indian cinema’s most essential works, and this new 4K restoration gives New York audiences a rare chance to see it on the big screen.
This is an important film in the development of Mollywood, the Indian film industry in Kerala. The region at the southern tip of India is a special place because it connects Africa, the Arab world, and Southeast Asia, but has its own culture.
In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones
This 1989 English-language Indian film features the first screenplay by celebrated writer Arundhati Roy, who also stars, bouncing between hope and cynicism to portray youth in 1970s New Delhi. Its new 4K restoration marks a North American premiere for a film that helped shape a generation of Indian storytelling.
63rd New York Film Festival 2025
The 63rd New York Film Festival 2025 (#NYFF63) brings international filmmakers, movie stars, and film lovers to red carpet premieres, screenings, Q&As, and talks at Lincoln Center and partner venues in each of NYC’s boroughs, for a little over two weeks from September 26 to October 13, 2025.
New York film fans will like Rebecca Miller’s “Mr. Scorsese,” a portrait of the iconic New York filmmaker (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Irishman), produced by his wife Helen Morris.
“Sirât,” by Oliver Laxe, a father’s psychological journey searching for his missing daughter in the Moroccan desert, was a joint winner of the Cannes Jury Prize. The film in Spanish and French with English subtitles, is Spain’s entry for Best International Feature at the 2025 Academy Awards.
“Magellan,” a monumental film by Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, stars Mexican actor Gael García Bernal as the Portuguese captain who died in the Philippines on the first expedition to circumnavigate the world. It’s in Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, and French with English subtitles.
“La Grazia,” by Italian Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), is the story of a fictional ruler who faces his age, power, and morals as his political career winds to a close. This recalls a certain American president’s statement that “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible.” Do politicians go to heaven?
“Barrio Triste,” by Colombian music video director Stillz (Bad Bunny, Rosalía), is a high-style gangland tale.
Argentine director Lucrecia Martel offers “Nuestra Tierra” (Landmarks), a feature documentary about an Indigenous Chuchagasta who was killed during a forced eviction.
“The Fence” by acclaimed French director Claire Denis, stars the renowned Ivorian American actor Isaach de Bankolé and Matt Dillon in a story of post-colonial tensions in West Africa, in English and Yoruba. 🇨🇮
“Mortu Nega” is a revival of the 1988 Flora Gomes film about a devoted wife’s journey to support her husband in the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence (1963-1974) the long guerrilla war known as Portugal’s Vietnam. It’s in Portuguese and Guinea-Bissau Creole.
There are 13 films in Spanish, 13 in French, 5 in Portuguese, 5 in Italian, 3 in Romanian, 1 in Yoruba, 1 in Wolof, 1 in Hindi, 1 in Bengali, 1 in Tagalog, 2 in Lakota (Sioux), and 1 in Anishinaabemowin (Indigenous Algonquin of the Northeast).
It’s at Film at Lincoln Center’s home ground at Alice Tully Hall, the Walter Reade Theater, and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, but also in each borough. In the Bronx, it’s at AMC Bay Plaza Cinema. In Brooklyn, it’s at BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In Queens, it’s at the Museum of the Moving Image. In Staten Island, it’s at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema.
62nd New York Film Festival 2024
The 62nd New York Film Festival 2024 brings international filmmakers, movie stars, and film lovers to red carpet premieres, screenings with Q&As, and talks at Lincoln Center and partner venues in each of NYC’s boroughs, from September 27 to October 14, 2024.
This season’s films are: African American, Argentine, Beninese, Brazilian, British, Dominican, French, Filipino, Italian, Mexican, Palestinian, Portuguese, Romanian, Senegalese, Spanish, Zambian.
The Opening Night film is “Nickel Boys” by RaMell Ross. It’s the story of two Black teens stuck in a violent Jim Crow-era Florida juvenile reformatory. It’s based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Ross’ filmmaking is beautifully surreal. The movie is considered a “New American Masterpiece.” Many American stories are really tragic, but the greatest tragedy is that this kind of thing still goes on. We need stories like this to break the wall of silence, get people to understand and accept what has been done, so we can work on a better future together.
The Centerpiece film is U.S. Premiere of “The Room Next Door,” Pedro Almodóvar’s highly anticipated first English-language feature. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton star in this story of a best-selling author who reconnects with her long-lost war correspondent mother. It just won the Golden Lion at Venice, a first for a Spanish film. Like most Latins Almodóvar is strongly attached to his mother. He has a profound understanding of the lives of women and family dynamics. He also has a vibrant and retro visual style related to “La Movida Madrileña” cultural movement when Almodóvar came up in 1970s Spain.
The Closing Night film is “Blitz” by African British director Sir Steve McQueen (“12 Years a Slave”). It stars Saoirse Ronan as a mother separated from her pre-teen son during the Blitz on London during World War II. The only people who want war are those who never fought or lived through one. 🇬🇧
Latin Highlights
Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” is the most anticipated Latin film. Ironically, it’s in English.
“Pepe” (2024) is the US Premiere of Dominican director Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias’ film about Colombian narco Pablo Escobar’s famous hippos, told from the point of view of a sentient hippo.
“San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood” (2024) is Stanley Nelson’s documentary about The Jungles, the African American, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican neighborhood that was redeveloped into Lincoln Center. “West Side Story” was set in The Jungles. It was a hard, but vibrant place. If you could make it there, you could make it anywhere. That’s still true of Lincoln Center.
“You Burn Me” (2024) is the North American Premiere of Argentine director Matías Piñiero’s latest study of women. Piñiero is famous for doing Shakespeare in Spanish and making it sound like Shakespeare. Like Almodóvar, Piñiero has a profound understanding of women and is able to draw out great performances.
Lincoln Center Venues
- Alice Tully Hall
- Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
- Walter Reade Theater
Partner Venues
- Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Staten Island
- Bronx Museum of the Arts in Concourse Village, The Bronx
- Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in Fort Greene, Brooklyn
- Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens
New York Film Festival
The Festival is one of the longest-running and most respected film festivals in the United States. New York is a film city. The American film industry began here. New York is also closer to Europe than most of the US, so the festival leans European as well. But it also shows great Latin films, and is close to Spanish film legend Pedro Almodóvar, and the small, but vibrant Argentine film community.
There are Main Slate, Currents, Spotlight, Revivals sections and Talks.
Film at Lincoln Center produces film festivals all year long, but this is the big one with lots of filmmakers, movie stars, and industry people on the red carpet. Many filmmakers do Q&As at their screenings. Industry talks are free and open to the public.
Some of the films have already done well on the festival circuit. Many will be released this holiday season or in the coming year. The New York Film Festival is important because the media is here, and it comes just as studios are preparing to release their best films into the holiday season for Oscar consideration.
Tickets
Buy tickets early because many films sell out.