Following their Main Slate announcement, the 63rd New York Film Festival has unveiled its Currents lineup, featuring 40 boundary-pushing films from around the world. Highlights include Tsai Ming-liang’s new feature Back Home; Radu Jude’s second feature of the festival, Dracula; Ben Rivers’ Mare’s Nest; Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf; Lucio Castro’s Cannes favorite Drunken Noodles; Trương Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux’s Hair, Paper, Water…; Pin de Fartie, from El Pampero Cine of La Flor and Trenque Lauquen, and much more.
“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,” said Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, New York Film Festival. “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.”
See the Currents lineup below.
Currents Centerpiece
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’s choreography 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.
Explore the Currents shorts programs, featuring films by Blake Williams, Jodie Mack, Kevin Jerome Everson, Maryam Tafakory, and more, here.
The 63rd New York Film Festival will take place from September 26 through October 13, with passes on sale now. Tickets go on sale September 18.