The 25th Tribeca Film Festival in New York City puts Latin America and the Latino diaspora are front and center. Running June 3–14, 2026, this milestone edition brings 10 films from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic — spanning political thrillers, coming-of-age dramas, electrifying music stories, and intimate documentaries.
This is one of the strongest Latin slates Tribeca has assembled in years.
Latin Films at Tribeca Film Festival 2026
Killing Castro — Eif Rivera, director
Puerto Rican director | Political thriller
World premiere | Spotlight Narrative
One of the buzziest films at the festival, Killing Castro reimagines Fidel Castro’s actual 1960 stay in Harlem as a charged collision between surveillance and solidarity. Diego Boneta plays Castro alongside Al Pacino and Xolo Maridueña — who is of Mexican, Cuban, and Ecuadorian descent — in a high-stakes story told through the eyes of a young translator caught between two worlds of power.
Americans probably see this film in a geopolitical point of view, but Caribbeans know that the sugar economy, American economic control, and use of Havana as a naughty playground needed to end. In spite of all that, Cuba before Castro was one of the most advanced and developed societies in Latin America. Only God knows how a different American response to him might have created a different Cuba then, and today.
For a New York City audience, the Harlem setting gives this thriller an extraordinary local resonance.
Summer of Three / Verano de tres — Carlitos Ruiz-Ruiz, director
Puerto Rican filmmaker | Narrative drama
World premiere | U.S. Narrative Competition
Puerto Rican filmmaker Carlitos Ruiz-Ruiz returns to Tribeca with a deeply personal project: his own son, Marcel Ruiz, stars as Javi, a teenager who travels back to Puerto Rico for a family funeral and finds his world turned upside down by two unforgettable social misfits. The casting of father and son gives the film an intimacy that pulses through every frame.
New York and San Juan, one people, two very different worlds.
Sad Girlz / Chicas tristes — Fernanda Tovar, director
Mexican filmmaker | Coming-of-age drama
North American premiere | International Narrative Competition
This Mexican coming-of-age drama arrives at Tribeca with serious momentum: it won both the Grand Prix of the International Jury for Best Film in Generation 14plus and the Crystal Bear for Best Film from the Youth Jury at the Berlinale.
Director Fernanda Tovar follows two best friends whose bond fractures when they respond in opposite ways to a traumatic shared experience. Raw, precise, and utterly necessary.
Summer War / Guerra de verano — Alicia Scherson, director
Chilean filmmaker | Narrative drama
World premiere | International Narrative Competition
Adapted from Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Third Reich, Chilean director Alicia Scherson sets her film in 1989, as Pinochet’s regime nears its end. A wargame champion arrives for a beach vacation that darkens into something stranger and more dangerous. Bolaño’s world, transposed to the final gasps of a dictatorship, makes for a thriller soaked in historical dread.
The Pinochet dictatorship deeply scarred two generations of Chileans. They understand the cost of dictatorship in a visceral way that we Americans would be wise to learn from. If we continue down that route, we will be equally scarred for generations.
Funk — Aly Muritiba, director
Brazilian filmmaker | Musical drama
World premiere | International Narrative Competition
Brazilian funk — that thunderous, proudly working-class Rio de Janeiro music form — gets its festival close-up in Aly Muritiba’s electrifying drama. Starring Duda Santos alongside real-life musicians Lellê and MC Nem, Funk follows a young woman’s climb through the vibrant and unforgiving world of baile funk.
Equal parts music film and social portrait, it’s essential viewing for anyone who loves the intersection of street culture and cinematic storytelling.
R&B, soul, and funk aren’t just fun party music. Their social commentary had a global impact. Rio’s baile funk is one of their richest echoes.
The Tropic Sun and His Eyes — Elisée Junior St Preux, director
Haitian filmmaker | Drama
World premiere | International Narrative Competition
A young man journeys through Haiti in search of a father he barely knows in this debut feature from Haitian director Elisée Junior St Preux. Intimate and visually alive, the film is a reminder that Haitian cinema — one of the Caribbean’s most vibrant and underscreened film traditions — deserves a major platform. Tribeca is giving it one.
Ever since Haitians freed themselves and founded a republic, the world has harassed them endlessly. Haiti has a beautiful culture that is one of the taproots of African American culture which defines us as Americans through the Jazz Age.
It’s challenging now for outsiders to visit what was once the richest land in the Caribbean, but you can visit through this film.
Mexicanamerican — Eddie Sánchez, director
Mexican American filmmaker | Documentary
World premiere | Documentary Competition
Eddie Sánchez makes his documentary debut with one of the most personal films at this year’s festival. Using his family’s own VHS home movies, Sánchez reconstructs his parents’ journey from Mexico to the United States — a story of migration, memory, and the particular longing that lives inside a cassette tape found in a closet. The kind of film that makes you think about your own family’s archives differently.
Mexicans and Americans fight like family because we are. About two-thirds of our country was once Mexico, and we have the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking population, after Mexico. When we leave the place we were born or grew up, we disconnect a part of our self, but that empty hole never leaves you.
Jean-Michel — Quinn Whitney Wilson and Viridiana Lieberman, directors
Subject: Jean-Michel Basquiat (Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage) | Documentary Competition
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Haitian and Puerto Rican roots are central to this intimate documentary co-directed by Viridiana Lieberman. Drawing on the people who knew Basquiat closest — his family — Jean-Michel offers a view of the Brooklyn-born artist that bypasses the myth-making and gets to something truer and more human. For New York audiences, this is a homecoming story as much as an art film.
A lot of people see Basquiat as African American, but the highest-selling Black artist in history, and first American artist to have a painting sell for more than $100 million, was Haitian Puerto Rican from Brooklyn.
His mom got him interested in art by taking him to the Brooklyn Museum. When hospitalized after being hit by a car at seven years old, she gave him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, the standard medical textbook. You can see it in his work. So in the Latin way, family is everything. And the distribution of genius is equal across all races, places, and time.
Matininó — Gabriela Díaz Arp, director
Puerto Rico–Dominican Republic co-production | Documentary
World premiere | Viewpoints
A Puerto Rican filmmaker and a Puerto Rico–Dominican Republic co-production, Matininó follows a multi-generational family of outspoken Puerto Rican women who create fantastical film vignettes together as a way of processing painful family history. Kaleidoscopic, inventive, and emotionally layered, it’s one of the most formally daring works in the festival’s Latin slate.
Well, Puerto Rican and Dominican women are naturally outspoken, and have no problem getting up in your face. Creativity is healthy way to process pain, and women are the guardians of human culture. Ay mi madre. Ay bendito.
Here I’m Alive — Joshua Z Weinstein, director
New York City | Neo-realist urban drama
World premiere | U.S. Narrative Competition
Over the course of a single night in New York City, Here I’m Alive moves through a landscape of migrants, dreamers, and survivors navigating the city’s digital margins — with testimonies in both English and Spanish and a soundtrack drawing on underground NYC rap and spiritual jazz. Not a Latin film in the traditional sense, but unmistakably shaped by Latino New York. A portrait of the city from the inside out.
New York isn’t one city. It’s about eight and a half million cities mashed together. Some of us have no clue how the other half lives, but you can have a look at the edges of the city of dreams right here.
Get Tickets
Single tickets and festival passes are available. A 20% discount is available at the box office for students, seniors 62 and older, filmmakers, and downtown Manhattan residents with valid ID. The festival runs June 3–14, 2026.