The New York Film Festival continues to roll out its 2025 lineup, with the 63rd annual edition of the festival promising to give New York cinephiles access to many of the biggest titles emerging from the world of global cinema this year. In addition to buzzy world premieres like Bradley Cooper’s “Is This Thing On?,” the festival’s main slate includes many of the biggest films premiering at Venice and Telluride, including Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt,” Jim Jarmusch’s “Father Mother Sister Brother, Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly,” and Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice.”
But for movie-goers seeking out hidden gems that fly under the radar of the buzziest festival titles, the Currents section is where it’s at. The sidebar, which prides itself as a showcase of boundary-pushing international cinema, will feature 16 features and 24 shorts representing 28 countries around the world.
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The Currents Centerpiece is “Mare’s Nest,” the newest feature from “Two Years at Sea” director Ben Rivers that will make its U.S. premiere at NYFF after bowing at the Locarno Film Festival. Other notable selections include Tsai Ming-liang‘s documentary “Back Home” and Radu Jude’s subversive new take on “Dracula.”
“In a film landscape that is so often homogeneous by design, this year’s Currents lineup is energizing for being a showcase of the boundless possibilities of cinematic language,” NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim said in a statement. “Resurrecting old technologies and subverting new ones, the filmmakers and artists here use an ingenious array of styles and forms to investigate the past and illuminate the present, in the process reminding us of all that cinema can do.”
The 2025 New York Film Festival will run from September 26 – October 13. Keep reading for the full Currents lineup, with film descriptions provided by NYFF.
“Mare’s Nest”
Ben Rivers, 2025, U.K./France/Canada, 98m
English and Catalan with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A child emerges from a crashed car and picks up a turtle to whom no less than the origin of humanity is explained during an extended walk-and-talk set against a gorgeous sunset. This child is Moon, who wanders a post-apocalyptic world conspicuously devoid of adults, a mystery the movie never answers. The latest feature by Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea, NYFF49) deepens the filmmaker’s longstanding thematic preoccupations (freedom and utopia, alternative existences and imagined futures), at times recalling earlier works like Slow Action and Ah, Liberty! even as it ventures into new realms of narrative exploration. Anchored by newcomer Moon Guo Barker’s magnetic performance, this enigmatic, ever-shifting road movie is also a showcase for Rivers’s awe-inspiring view of the natural world, inhabited by his charismatic young actors across a panoply of sequences—some amusing, some unnerving, and in the case of a stealth Don DeLillo adaptation, both.
“Back Home / Hui Jia”
Tsai Ming-liang, 2025, Taiwan, 65m
North American Premiere
Over the course of three decades, Tsai Ming-liang has mastered a mode of observational, durational filmmaking that reshapes our relation to the space and time we inhabit. This style translates seamlessly to the documentary portraiture of Back Home, where Tsai depicts Anong Houngheuangsy (star of Tsai’s Days, NYFF58) and the daily life of his home village in Laos. We witness buildings in varying states of habitation and disrepair, farm animals, rice fields, religious sites, domestic scenes, a sun-dappled food market, and a dog adorably trying (and failing) to escape a carnival ride. Bestowing a different kind of moving stillness from his recent works, with sequences that convey a radiant atmosphere and buzzing natural life, Back Home draws attention to the brilliance all around, a homecoming of sorts after a string of films about a Walker in exile.
Preceded by:
“Ecce Mole”
Heinz Emigholz, 2025, Italy, 28m
No dialogue
World Premiere
The latest entry in Heinz Emigholz’s (Slaughterhouses of Modernity, NYFF60) incisive, decades-long inquiry into the cinematic representation of space contrasts two Turin landmarks designed by Italian neoclassical architect Alessandro Antonelli: the narrow Casa Scaccabarozzi and the towering Mole Antonelliana, now home to the Museo Nazionale del Cinema. With Emigholz’s signature metrical cutting and oblique framings, Ecce Mole explores cinema’s own spatial and symbolic dimensions through the buildings’ opposing scales and functions—interior and exterior, domestic and civic, modest and monumental.
“Barrio Triste”
Stillz, 2025, Colombia, 84m
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Among a group of violent youths who steal diamonds and burn cars, one of the crew has turned a pilfered camera into an image-making endeavor. Found footage and dead pixels become the texture of a new aesthetic and a new kind of thriller in Barrio Triste, the debut feature from Bad Bunny collaborator Stillz, and the newest production by Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD studio. Amid the callous acts and hopeless rage of these kids—who are resourceful enough to orchestrate a high-speed heist but too disaffected for much else—a supernatural eeriness surfaces through word of mysterious lights in the sky and missing citizens. With this ominous elegy of corrupted youth, the LiveLeak generation meets its Los Olvidados. Featuring original music by Arca.
“Bouchra”
Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani, 2025, Italy/Morocco/U.S., 83m
Arabic, French, and English with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Moroccan filmmaker Bouchra is writing an autobiographical film that reflexively weaves together her own life in New York City with that of her fictional double. Bouchra happens also to be a coyote in a city of anthropomorphic creatures, rendered in nearly photorealistic and hyper-expressive animations. Alongside her creative struggles and attempts to unpack her mother’s unresolved feelings about her queerness are everyday releases—sexual encounters, nights out clubbing, intimate conversations—all brilliantly constructed by directors Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani (Life on the CAPS, NYFF60) through actual phone calls, letters, and characters voiced by friends and family playing versions of themselves. Bridging animation and live action, daily life in New York and the complexities of being home in Casablanca, Bouchra is laced with pathos and familiarity, suffused with the political nuances of inhabiting multiple cultures.
“Dracula”
Radu Jude, 2025, Romania, 170m
Romanian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
An inimitable social chronicler, Radu Jude expands the dystopian visions of Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (NYFF61) and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (NYFF59) by connecting vampire mythos to seemingly everything in our troubled times. His Dracula is less a spin on Bram Stoker and (per the film’s presenter) “more like Frankenstein’s monster,” variously following the madcap chase of two actors, adapting the first-ever Romanian vampire novel, and chronicling blood-soaked misdeeds around a video-game sweatshop. Stinging critiques of AI, capitalism, and cultural degradation are buttressed with meditations on vampire stories (F.W. Murnau, Francis Ford Coppola) and wide-ranging cultural allusions (Beckett, Chaplin). Dracula exhibits a gleeful, chaotic vulgarity, yet Jude’s sideways vampire history concludes on a note of reconciliation and hope. A 1-2 Special release.
“Drunken Noodles”
Lucio Castro, 2025, Argentina/U.S., 83m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The new film from New York–based Argentinean director Lucio Castro—whose time-bending End of the Century (ND/NF 2019) marked one of the past decade’s queer cinematic discoveries—weaves five chapters in the sexual life of a cat-sitting art student named Adnan (Laith Khalifeh), all of them united by an erotic magical realism. While the situations within each of the film’s playful, nonchronological segments seem to represent anecdotal facets of everyday gay life, from urban dating rituals to monogamy anxieties during a weekend upstate, Drunken Noodles consistently pushes things into the realms of the unreal, even the mythic. Like End of the Century, Castro’s latest is both sexy and surprisingly cosmic, but this time with a casual, puckish charm. A Strand Releasing release.
“Dry Leaf”
Alexandre Koberidze, 2025, Germany/Georgia, 186m
Georgian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
In soccer, a “dry leaf” is a kick that produces an unpredictable landing of the ball. Shaken by the disappearance of his grown daughter, a sports photographer goes looking for her through a Georgian landscape strewn with football fields. An invisible companion in tow, he meets potential witnesses whose perspectives prove distorted or contradictory. Confirming his position as one of contemporary cinema’s most intrepid artists, director Alexandre Koberidze (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, NYFF59) shot the film on an antiquated Sony Ericsson phone. What might seem a perverse choice reveals itself, over Dry Leaf’s epic length, as a brilliant thematic gesture that elicits its own temporal register. Set to a haunting score by the director’s brother Giorgi, this melancholic mystery presents Georgia’s open plains and mountain regions in alien, oneiric contexts. One emerges from its transporting rhythms with a fresh perspective on the world.
“Escape / Toso”
Masao Adachi, 2025, Japan, 114m
Japanese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A contemporary of Nagisa Ōshima and Kōji Wakamatsu, Masao Adachi has spent more than six decades as a revolutionary figure on both cinematic and political stages. These personal histories are brilliantly distilled in his biopic of Japanese terrorist Satoshi Kirishima, who, as one of the country’s most wanted men, successfully evaded capture for nearly 50 years before revealing his true identity on his deathbed. Kirishima’s remarkable, often troubling life—from anarchist activities to a new existence under an assumed name, all the while driven by guilt for failing to fulfill his vocation—is told through a dazzling mix of archival footage, staged recreations, and outright fantasy that allows Adachi to trace a history of resistance and terror in Japan. The performances from Kanji Furutachi and Rairu Sugita convey lifetimes of idealism and regret.
“Evidence“
Lee Anne Schmitt, 2025, U.S., 75m
New York Premiere
The United States is built on secret plans and backroom deals, and whether one benefits or suffers from these arrangements is a roll of the dice. Lee Anne Schmitt’s fleet and intricate essay film about the Olin Corporation, a longtime manufacturer of ammunition and chemicals, considers the company’s seemingly bottomless reach in modern life and its place in her own family. Doubling as an account of modern American conservatism (from media gadflies to six Supreme Court justices), the film is punctuated with contemporaneous footage that, viewed through the lens of Olin’s misdeeds, generates the tension and shock of a genre film. Evidence functions as a confession, an exegesis on motherhood, and finally, a film about, in Schmitt’s own words, “being hurt inside your own home by the people who are supposed to take care of you.”
“Hair, Paper, Water… / Tóc, Giấy và Nước…”
Trương Minh Quý, Nicolas Graux, 2025, Vietnam, 71m
Vietnamese with English subtitles
North American Premiere
With Hair, Paper, Water… Trương Minh Quý (Việt and Nam, NYFF62) and Nicolas Graux have made an unassuming yet vivid film about one Vietnamese family living amid extraordinary epochs and personal strife. Born in a cave more than 60 years ago, Mrs. Hậu regales us with a lifetime’s wisdom—local folklore, natural history, personal methods for fighting COVID—while one of her grandchildren, in the here and now, faces a heartbreaking domestic struggle. Graux’s 16mm photography is equal parts raw and opulent, and the sound design, by Trương and Ernst Karel, pays justice to every living creature (bees, monkeys, tigers, bats) under a perpetually clouded sun. Hair, Paper, Water… emboldens one’s love of this earth and the words used to share it.
“Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes / Anoche conquisté Tebas”
Gabriel Azorín, 2025, Spain/Portugal, 106m
Portuguese, Latin, Galician, and Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Gabriel Azorín announces himself as a major new voice in his debut feature, a cosmic hangout film of sorts with a formal control that suggests a director decades his senior. In the vicinity of an ancient Roman thermal bath in the Spanish countryside, several young men boast of victories, confess fears, and look up at the darkening sky; as night falls, another group materializes, their conversations echoing what came before and gradually confounding our very sense of time. A film of lingering mystery and beauty, distinguished by remarkable night photography, a breathtaking drone shot, and an impressive command of blocking, space, and light, Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes is narrative cinema as travelogue and time machine.
“Levers”
Rhayne Vermette, 2025, Canada, 93m
English and French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Something is very wrong in the forests and homes of Levers, the newest feature from Métis filmmaker Rhayne Vermette (Ste. Anne, NYFF59). People speak of unstable events—sunrises are gifts instead of givens, darkness becomes an increasing presence—while tarot-themed chapters point toward a grand theory of discontent. Are these narratives real, or spun from the television and radio broadcasts we hear throughout? Could these events be a local myth beginning to come to life, or a curse? In a work as captivated with pastoral landscapes as the haunting glow of a tube TV, Vermette extracts possibility from every shot, down to crossfading that recalls the expressiveness of silent cinema. Levers is visually resplendent and a sonic marvel.
“Little Boy”
James Benning, 2025, U.S., 73m
North American Premiere
James Benning’s mesmerizing new film spans decades of U.S. history with simple and seemingly minor gestures. Foregrounding its own structural form, Little Boy shows us a series of prefabricated toy models being painted in close-up, accompanied by the rallying cries of folk and pop standards, followed by images of the models’ final construction overlaid with passages of political oratory, from voices inspiring or nefarious. The cumulative image is one of a society doomed to cycles of domestic decline and implicated in international terror in the name of “peace-making” interventionism. A companion piece to American Dreams: Lost and Found, Benning’s 1984 film composed entirely of baseball card memorabilia, Little Boy—its title recalling the lyrics from Pete Seeger’s “What Did You Learn in School Today?”—is an American epic in miniature.
“Pin de Fartie”
Alejo Moguillansky, 2025, Argentina, 106m
Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Produced by El Pampero Cine, the Argentine collective known for its boundless imagination in cinematic storytelling (La Flor, NYFF57 and Trenque Lauquen, NYFF60), Pin de Fartie unfolds as a playful spin on theatrical adaptation and an experiment in character dynamics. The film charts three relationships defined by Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play Fin de Partie (Endgame): one between a blind man and his daughter; another concerning two actors rehearsing that same text; the third following a man who reads his blind mother Beckett’s play and discovers that it reflects their lives. Director Alejo Moguillansky retains much of Fin de Partie’schoreography and structure, then carefully loosens it with comic acts of repetition and musical scoring. Surprises and revelations (a brilliantly staged tennis match, an in-joke based on a Martín Rejtman film) arrive continuously in a delightful film that affirms Pampero regular Laura Paredes as one of the greatest actors working today.
“Windward”
Sharon Lockhart, 2025, Canada/U.S., 70m
World Premiere
D.W. Griffith once opined that cinema had lost “the beauty of moving wind in the trees.” A 21st-century exception, Sharon Lockhart’s Windward comprises 12 tableaux of the fields, shorelines, and coastal structures of Fogo Island off Newfoundland, Canada. Lockhart turns these arresting settings into her own stage, capturing the vivid blues and greens of nature, and the remote island’s distinctive geology and geography, while the children at play within the landscapes bring movement and surprise to her extended static takes. Windward heightens one’s senses and underscores Lockhart’s remarkable eye for color, composition, light, and shadow.
“With Hasan in Gaza / مع حسن في غزة”
Kamal Aljafari, 2025, Palestine/Germany/France/Qatar, 106m
Arabic with English subtitles
New York Premiere
It is 2001 in Gaza, and Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist Kamal Aljafari is traveling from north to south, accompanied by a MiniDV camera and searching for a man he met while briefly imprisoned as a teenager. Aljafari’s footage, now nearly a quarter-century old and unseen by the filmmaker himself until recently, is often tranquil and languid: drives down the highway, walks through the market, a trip to the beach, a card game among friends. But the immediate return of Israeli shelling, captured here in detail, invokes the ever-present background of settler violence. With Hasan in Gaza is an aching witness to the beauty of this land and the struggle of its people, neither of which may soon be recognizable at all.
CURRENTS SHORT FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
Currents Program 1: Below the Surface
This shorts program includes Basma al-Sharif’s Morning Circle, Oscar Ruiz Navia’s Tigers Can Be Seen in the Rain, Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold’s Dooni, Justin Jinsoo Kim’s A Real Christmas, and Maryam Tafakory’s Daria’s Night Flowers.
“Morning Circle / Morgenkreis”
Basma al-Sharif, 2025, Canada/UAE, 21m
German, Armenian, and Arabic with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Drifting through the streets of former East Berlin neighborhoods, Morning Circle traces the unsteady affective terrain of isolation and displacement, assimilation and oppression. In Basma al-Sharif’s (O, Persecuted, NYFF52) film, the bureaucratic condescension and violence of a residency interview sits alongside domestic scenes featuring a father and his young son. The film uncovers the loss and thrumming tensions of exilic life under Western Europe’s smooth gray surfaces.
“Tigers Can Be Seen in the Rain / Ya se ven los tigres en la lluvia”
Oscar Ruiz Navia, 2025, Colombia/Canada, 15m
Spanish and English with English subtitles
World Premiere
Desolate interstitial spaces of a wintry, present-day Montreal—alleyways, bike paths, underpasses, skate parks—contrast with the livelier images of decades-old home videos in Tigers Can Be Seen in the Rain. Drifting between moving-image formats and collaging local textures and bygone voices, Oscar Ruiz Navia’s film reflects on loss and mourning as experiences of temporal dislocation.
“Dooni”
Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold, 2025, U.S., 8m
New York Premiere
Shimmering, kinetic, blue-black images of dancers accompany an impassioned rereading of a eulogy for Sylvester, a.k.a. “Dooni” (1947–1988), the legendary “Queen of Disco.” Weaving mourning with movement, Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold’s (Black Bus Stop, NYFF57) film reanimates gospel singer and preacher Walter Hawkins’s words, which mark a small but pivotal moment in the history of HIV/AIDS, channeling their sense of grief and celebration into the present.
“A Real Christmas”
Justin Jinsoo Kim, 2025, U.S./South Korea, 12m
World Premiere
Collaging text and sound along with the grainy distortions of inkjet-printed imagery, Justin Jinsoo Kim’s (Personality Test, NYFF59) refractory archival dig pieces together the story of Lee Kyung Soo, an orphan of the Korean War adopted by a U.S. Naval officer in Westchester. With its careful manipulation of microhistorical fragments, A Real Christmas summons the neocolonial mythologies of the United States in the 1950s through its news media, uncovering traces of alternate voices and narrative lacunae.
“Daria’s Night Flowers / گلهای شب ِدریا”
Maryam Tafakory, 2025, Iran/U.K./France, 16m
Farsi with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Excavating psychically charged moments and cryptic iconography of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, as well as the opulent illuminated manuscripts of the ancient Greek botanist Dioscorides, Daria’s Night Flowers is an herbarium of a woman’s illicit desire, embellished in voluptuous azure and gold. Deploying images of fire and the sea, blood and flowers, Maryam Tafakory’s (Razeh-del, NYFF62) film weaves a tale of thwarted longing and vengeance.
Currents Program 2: Afterimages
This shorts program includes Yace Sula’s As Told by a Corpse, Mungo Thomson’s Time Life Volume 15. Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived, Lin Htet Aung’s A Metamorphosis, Jorge Caballero and Camilo Restrepo’s 09/05/1982, Marta Popivoda’s Slet 1988, and Whammy Alcazaren’s Water Sports.
“As Told by a Corpse”
Yace Sula, 2025, U.S., 5m
New York Premiere
Deliriously hybridizing fuzzy video, warm analog film grain, and the busy static of digital glitch, Yace Sula’s As Told by a Corpse subjects a home movie of a naming ceremony for a newborn infant to a series of raucous mutations, offering glimpses of bodies and identities in flux, unruly and ungovernable.
“Time Life Volume 15. Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived”
Mungo Thomson, 2025, U.S., 2m
New York Premiere
More than one thousand single-frame images of candles, each a photograph excerpted from reference encyclopedias, production manuals, and how-to guides, mark time’s passage in Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived. A solemn and hallucinatory memento mori, Mungo Thomson’s meticulous reanimation of ephemeral photographs evokes a unique experience of duration, a tension between the moving and the still.
“A Metamorphosis”
Lin Htet Aung, 2025, Myanmar, 17m
Burmese with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Haunted chambers and liminal spaces provide the settings for Lin Htet Aung’s film, which mimics the affective impressions and woozy video textures of a state television broadcast. With the AI-simulated voice of General Min Aung Hlaing, the Prime Minister of Myanmar’s military dictatorship, singing lullabies on the soundtrack, A Metamorphosis surfaces the buried structures of feeling of state propaganda, rendering its subliminal symbolism as an oneiric journey through sinister, jittery tableaux.
“09/05/1982”
Jorge Caballero, Camilo Restrepo, 2025, Spain/Mexico, 11m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Uncovered home movies from 1982, scratched and grainy, of an unidentified Latin American city reveal quotidian scenes as well as faint traces of political violence: streets packed with crowds and armed police, burning tires and smashed windows, and graffiti that commemorates the May 9th Massacre. Jorge Caballero and Camilo Restrepo’s 09/05/1982 explores the occulted processes by which memory, technology, and propaganda rewrite the past, blurring distinctions between the real and the synthetic.
“Slet 1988”
Marta Popivoda, 2025, Germany/France/Serbia, 22m
Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A swarm of bodies and lights clashes with the orderly grids of modernist architecture in Slet 1988, which takes its title from Yugoslavia’s final mass performance-celebration of socialism’s achievements. Through the body of 74-year-old dancer Sonja Vukićević and the late-1980s diaries of a teenage girl, Marta Popivoda’s incisive film contrasts the collective gatherings of the Socialist Federal Republic’s decline with the rise of nationalism and isolation in the present.
“Water Sports”
Whammy Alcazaren, 2024, Philippines, 20m
Filipino with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Sweaty bodies and drought-wracked landscapes collide in Whammy Alcazaren’s (Bold Eagle, NYFF61) frenzied sci-fi fantasy, a tale of love and basketball, earthquakes and tsunamis, treasured pasts and dismal futures. As extreme heat burns the planet and surviving a waterless Philippines becomes increasingly impossible, Jelson and Ipe try to live, laugh, and love their way through a climate catastrophe rendered in addled digital collage and cartoon hysteria. Don’t cry, or you die.
Currents Program 3: Common Ground
This shorts program includes Lucas Kane’s Jacob’s House; Karthik Pandian’s Anoka; and Adam Khalil, Jackson Polys, and New Red Order’s Give It Back: Crimes Against Realty.
“Jacob’s House”
Lucas Kane, 2025, U.S., 16mm, 22m
North American Premiere
A film about spiritual warfare and rentier capitalism, Jacob’s House lingers on a 12-year resident of a Clinton Hill home who has been resisting eviction since 2021. As jackhammers fight to drown out Jacob’s thoughtful voice-over narration on the soundtrack, Lucas Kane’s lovingly detailed 16mm portrait offers at once a dreamy evocation of a dedicated artist, clothing designer, and caretaker, and an incisive treatise on the meaning of home and the violence of private property.
“Anoka”
Karthik Pandian, 2025, U.S./India, 12m
English, Spanish, Tamil, Lakota, and Anishinaabemowin with English subtitles
World Premiere
Distilling riotous energies and vibrant sensations, Karthik Pandian’s discursive and polyphonic film traverses geographic expanses in search of a subterranean spirit of collectivity, kinship, and exchange. Titled with a word that has many homophones across different languages—Dakota, Ojibwa, and Sanskrit—Anoka locates a shared space in which to build anti-colonial solidarity across language, culture, and time.
“Give It Back: Crimes Against Realty”
New Red Order, 2025, U.S., 34m
North American Premiere
“Are you tired of living on stolen land?” Part infomercial, part agit-prop satire, Give It Back: Crimes Against Realty playfully documents and models a Land Back project alongside a cast of allies and accomplices that includes the mayor of Oakland, a college professor, and a “reformed Native American impersonator.” With mischief and formal play, New Red Order navigates the quandary of real estate and the “rematriation” of Indigenous lands from the Redwood Forest to a luxury Park Avenue condo.
Currents Program 4: Model Behaviors
This shorts program includes Sara Magenheimer and Michael Bell-Smith’s Acetone Reality, Nicolas Gourault’s Their Eyes, Toby Lee’s And If the Body, and Carolyn Lazard’s Fiction Contract.
“Acetone Reality”
Sara Magenheimer, Michael Bell-Smith, 2025, U.S., 12m
World Premiere
Images cascade and collide in Acetone Reality, as animation, found images, and the artists’ own video recordings crash against a dialogue between computer-generated voices exploring the wonders of acetone and the nature of meaning. Across Sara Magenheimer (Art and Theft, NYFF55) and Michael Bell-Smith’s (Rabbit Season, Duck Season, NYFF53) teetering montage, blocky pixels, smeared colors, and cryptic iconography constitute an “insane, yet validated reality.”
“Their Eyes”
Nicolas Gourault, 2025, France, 23m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
“We need to annotate everything.” Images of bodies, vegetation, and police vehicles flood the frames of Nicolas Gourault’s film with fields of blocky pixellation, as off-screen voices offer testimony about the work of visual data analysis. Contending with the unknowably vast world of contemporary image production, Their Eyes discloses the human labor—outsourced, remote, poorly paid, and usually invisible—beneath the digital surfaces of visual data.
“And If the Body”
Toby Lee, 2025, U.S., 27m
World Premiere
Gamespace becomes a therapeutic alternate reality in And If the Body, which examines the clinical uses of VR and other imaging technologies to treat patients with severe spinal cord injuries and other neuromuscular disorders. Toby Lee’s film explores the interface between the physical and the technological, a zone in which the real and the virtual body blurs into one.
“Fiction Contract”
Carolyn Lazard, 2025, U.S., 10m
U.S. Premiere
A simulation center inside the maternity ward of Elmhurst Hospital provides the setting for Carolyn Lazard’s astutely observational video, which documents an all-Black obstetrics team of doctors, nurses, and midwives as they rehearse a complex childbirth scenario with a ventriloquized mannequin for a patient. Deriving its title from the shared agreement among participants in a training simulation, Fiction Contract lingers on the careful staging and surreal performance of care during an exercise designed to reduce racial disparities in maternal mortality.
Currents Program 5: Fields of Vision
This shorts program includes Blake Williams’s FELT; Jodie Mack’s Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love; Peter Larsson’s Keyhole Conversation, Victor Van Rossem’s toward a fundamental theory of physics, and Jiayi Chen’s As a Tree Walks to Its Forest.
“FELT”
Blake Williams, 2025, Canada/U.S./Spain, 3D, 15m
U.S. Premiere
Blake Williams’s(Laberint Sequences, NYFF61) 3D travelogue of the American Southwest is a literal adventure in stereoscopy and retrospection, capturing the textured desert landscapes, snaking powerlines, streaming atmospheres, and hazy roadsides in fractured glimpses and headlong motion. Gesturing toward cinema’s roots in 19th-century phantom rides and panoramas, FELT finds a dynamic new form for the sensory experience of space and movement.
“Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love”
Jodie Mack, 2025, U.S., 16mm, 15m
New York Premiere
Vivid floral specimens slosh exuberantly in a water tank, elegantly pirouette in superimposition, pulse and mutate in dizzying stroboscopic single-frame edits. Continuing Jodie Mack’s (The Grand Bizarre, NYFF56) long-term project of animating alternative materials, Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love is an ecstatic and visceral reflection on temporality, both human and botanical, an amorous affirmation of death and life.
“Keyhole Conversation”
Peter Larsson, 2025, Sweden, 6m
North American Premiere
With dazzling abstractions and jerky stop-motion, Keyhole Conversation deploys a barrage of flickering cut-outs and chaotic pencil scratchings in its headlong exploration of color and line. Recalling the deconstructed handmade animations of Robert Breer, Peter Larsson’s film pits riotous, jagged formalism against a haphazard soundtrack of bloops and pings and ramshackle percussion.
“toward a fundamental theory of physics”
Victor Van Rossem, 2025, Belgium, 3D, 13m
U.S. Premiere
Dizzying, otherworldly, and truly experimental, toward a fundamental theory of physics deploys a reconstruction of the Time-Slice camera, a circular rig invented by cinematographer Tim MacMillan, that uses 293 lenses shooting simultaneously to capture different points of view in 16mm. Recalling Eadweard Muybridge’s protocinematic experiments in capturing movement, as well as the abstract lichtspiel of intermedia artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, Thomas Wilfred, and Jim Davis, Victor Van Rossem’s 3D film captures three-dimensional light-objects that are at once spectral and tangibly present, a ballet of abstract radiance and undulant color.
“As a Tree Walks to Its Forest”
Jiayi Chen, 2025, U.S., 8mm/16mm, 18m
World Premiere
A lush, transporting triple-projection, As a Tree Walks to Its Forest loops both double 8 and 16mm hand-processed film to immerse us in a dreamlike journey through wooded landscapes. A mosaic of superimposed fragments and textures, Jiayi Chen’s expanded film work rearranges the spectator’s perception of forest ecology and other natural phenomena—wind, water, bark, grass, overstory—reimagining its topography as a continually shifting woodland reverie.
