MoMI announces 15th First Look festival—36 films, including 21 features, April 23–May 3

First Look 2026, Museum of the Moving Image’s festival of new and innovative international cinema, announces lineup

The festival’s 15th edition opens with James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s The Misconceived and closes with Isabel Sandoval’s Moonglow, both North American premieres, framing a lineup of 21 features and experimental shorts programs

Special showcase screenings include New York premieres of Rachel Lambert’s Carousel, starring Chris Pine and Jenny Slate; Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend, starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai; and Ramzi Bashour’s Hot Water

April 23–May 3, 2026

Museum of the Moving Image

Opening Night film The Misconceived / Closing Night film Moonglow

Astoria, New York, March 24, 2026 — Museum of the Moving Image is pleased to announce the complete lineup for the 15th edition of First Look, the Museum’s festival of new and innovative international cinema, which will take place over two weekends from April 23–May 3, 2026. Each year, First Look offers a diverse slate of major New York premieres, discussions and panels, and fresh perspectives on the art and process of filmmaking.
 
First Look 2026’s presenting sponsor is MUBI.
 
The 2026 lineup will present 36 films, of which 21 are features, including three world premieres and eight U.S. or North American premieres. The festival will open and close with the North American premieres of two accomplished films from a pair of our most exciting voices in independent cinema, with wildly different aesthetic approaches: James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s satirical, visually inventive take on the economic labor of creativity The Misconceived and Isabel Sandoval’s lush, noirish period piece Moonglow. These screenings bracket the festival’s centerpiece showcase presentations, including the New York premieres of Rachel Lambert’s Carousel, a small-scale romantic drama featuring exquisite performances from Chris Pine and Jenny Slate; Ramzi Bashour’s offbeat comic road trip odyssey Hot Water; and Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend, an ambitious, time-traversing film about humans and nature, starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai.
 
The festival also features a selection of world premieres, including from one of the most important voices in the history of the American avant-garde, the late Ken Jacobs’s never-before-seen final long-form work A Date with Shirley, as well as from exciting new voices in documentary filmmaking: Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus’s delicate and profoundly felt family portrait It Goes That Quick and Charlie Birns’s wily and wildly entertaining hybrid film about an acting class mutiny The Whole World Is a Lie.
 
“In this, First Look’s fifteenth edition, we are excited to bring some fresh perspectives and ideas to the festival, and the idiosyncratic and utterly independent artists behind our opening and closing night films, James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Isabel Sandoval, are the perfect representations of the adventurous ethos of First Look,” said Michael Koresky, MoMI’s Senior Curator of Film and head programmer of First Look. “It’s also been such a pleasure to work with an expanded number of programmers, whose perspectives and voices shine through these films and have created a wonderful, democratic selection process. This year, we are pleased to offer titles from an array of genres, from horror to documentary to romance to films from a crop of ‘new cult’ filmmakers.”
 
First Look is also proud to present a selection of major documentaries and fiction hybrid films, including Itab Azzam and Jack Macinnes’s remarkable documentary following ten years in the life of a young Syrian refugee, One in a Million (Sundance 2025, World Cinema, Directing and Audience Awards); Robb Moss’s deeply moving The Bend in the River, the follow-up to his decades-spanning The Same River Twice; Ukrainian director Valentyn Vasyanovich’s urgent and deeply personal latest, To the Victory! (TIFF 2025 Platform Award); Kunsang Kyirong’s striking character drama set in Toronto’s Tibetan community, 100 Sunset (TIFF 2025, Canadian Discovery Award); G. Anthony Svatek’s feature debut Humboldt USA, which looks at three disparate environments in the United States connected by their namesake, “grandfather of ecology” Alexander von Humboldt; Hansel Porras Garcia’s Tropical Park, a one-take, Miami-set wonder following a single conversation between two Cuban immigrant siblings, a trans woman and her conservative, married brother; and Carlos Casas’s dazzling big-screen sensory odyssey Krakatoa.
 
This year, First Look expands to include a trio of accomplished international thrillers, shining a light on different national expressions of horror. From Algeria, there’s Yanis Koussim’s Roqia, an unsettling horror fable of historical trauma that reshapes the exorcism genre; from Thailand, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s highly original and chilling culinary revenge tale Morte Cucina; and from Hungary, the blood-chilling, political-minded Feels Like Home from director Gabór Holtai. And for fans of MoMI’s ongoing Disreputable Cinema series, this is also the first year with selections geared toward devotees of the latest in international cult cinema, including Romanian filmmaker Adrian Țofei’s found-footage head trip We Put the World to Sleep and Japanese director Kenichi Ugana’s low-budget meta horror/romcom I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn.
 
The festival’s ongoing Science on Screen section, in conjunction with Sloan Science and Film, includes Erin Espelie’s visually stunning documentary on the microscopic world of bacteria, Ideas of Order; and Rachael J. Morrison’s delightful documentary Joybubbles, about Joe Engressia, dubbed the “Peter Pan of phone hackers,” who was born blind and discovered at a very young age that he could manipulate the phone system with a series of whistles. Joybubbles will mark, for the first time, a First Look/ReelAbilities Film Festival co-presentation. The film will be presented in an accessible screening with open captions and open audio descriptions.
 
The First Look 2026 programming committee includes MoMI staff members Jesse Berberich, Associate Director of Visitor Experience and Programmer of Disreputable Cinema; Sonia Epstein, Curator of Science and Technology; Michael Koresky, Senior Curator of Film; Sarah Luciano, Associate Director of Special Programs; Rose Vincelli Gustine, Associate Director of Public Programming; as well as guest curators Laura Kern, Jeff Reichert, David Schwartz, and Genevieve Yue.
Additional support was provided by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
 
Preview screeners and interviews with programmers are available.
Please inquire with Tomoko Kawamoto (tkawamoto@movingimage.org).
 
 
FIRST LOOK 2026 LINEUP
 
Features:
100 Sunset (Dir. Kunsang Kyirong)
The Bend in the River (Dir. Robb Moss)
Carousel (Dir. Rachel Lambert)
Feels Like Home (Dir. Gabór Holtai)
Hot Water (Dir. Ramzi Bashour)
Humboldt USA (Dir. G. Anthony Svatek)
I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn (Dir. Kenichi Ugana)
Ideas of Order (Dir. Erin Espelie)
It Goes That Quick (Dirs. Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus)
Joybubbles (Dir. Rachael J. Morrison)
Krakatoa (Dir. Carlos Casas)
The Misconceived (Dir. James N. Kienitz Wilkins)
Moonglow (Dir. Isabel Sandoval)
Morte Cucina (Dir. Pen-Ek Ratanaruang)
One in a Million (Dir. Itab Azzam, Jack Macinnes)
Roqia (Dir. Yanis Koussim)
Silent Friend (Dir. Ildikó Enyedi)
To the Victory! (Dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych)
Tropical Park (Dir. Hansel Porras Garcia)
We Put the World to Sleep (Dir. Adrian Țofei)
The Whole World Is a Lie (Dir. Charlie Birns)
 
Shorts:
Afternoon Hearsay (Dir. Peng Zuqiang)
A Date with Shirley (Dir. Ken Jacobs)
Dissonance (Dir. Jordan Strafer)
E-Minor (Dir. Callum Hill)
El Sistema (Dir. Marco Godoy)
(for once I dreamed of you) (Dir. Kate Solar)
Late September (Dir. Lewis Klahr)
Make Heaven Crowded (Dir. Steve Reinke)
The More I Zoom in on the Image of These Dogs, The Clearer It Becomes That Old Masters (Dir. Basma Al-Sharif)
Orpheus (Dir. Lewis Klahr)
Slideshow (Dir. Janie Geiser)
Super, Natural (Dir. Kyath Battie)
They Are Related to the Stars (Dir. Alexandre Koberidze)
The Tree (A árvore) (Dir. Ana Vaz)
Veronique (Dir. Friedl vom Gröller)
 
All screenings take place at Museum of the Moving Image, located at 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria, NY, in the Sumner M. Redstone Theater and/or the Celeste and Armand Bartos Screening Room.

FIRST LOOK 2026 FILM DESCRIPTIONS
 
OPENING NIGHT  
The Misconceived
Dir. James N. Kienitz Wilkins. 2026, 88 mins. U.S. A social satirist whose work rejects fixed genres and forms, James N. Kienitz Wilkins (The Plagiarists) offers entertaining, if slippery critiques of the creative class, and his latest, which the director calls, somewhat beguilingly, “a tragicomedy about Millennials in crisis,” is a merciless yet provocative take on contemporary culture and the state of the “indie” film itself. Co-written by Robin Schavoir, The Misconceived centers on a forty-something carpenter who never cracked the code to become a movie director and whose new job, renovating the vacation home of a more successful college friend, triggers a series of confrontations and realizations about his own dwindled creativity and persistent economic precarity. But wait: Wilkins renders this seemingly tried-and-true low-budget, character-driven scenario using motion capture and 3D animation via a computer graphics game engine, a beautiful-hideous technique that blurs lines between the authentic and the false, and which forces viewers to constantly confront the entirely constructed non-reality of the highly entertaining world he’s devised—and the deeply unsettled one we’re all living in. North American premiere
 
CLOSING NIGHT
Moonglow
Dir. Isabel Sandoval. 2026, 107 mins. Philippines/Taiwan/Japan/U.S. In English and Tagalog with English subtitles. With her sinuous, lush new period piece, set in late-1970s, Ferdinand Marcos–era Manila, Filipino filmmaker Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca) has sculpted her most accomplished film yet, a delicately crafted, film noir–tinged historical fable with vaporous echoes of Wong Kar-wai and Fassbinder but an identity and rhythm all its own. Sandoval also stars as Dahlia, a police officer embroiled in her private Robin Hood–like scheme to steal from her corrupt superior officer and redistribute the wealth to the city’s desperate underclass. When she is tasked with investigating her own crimes, she falls back into a tentative affair with her boss’s handsome nephew (Arjo Atayde), a morally upstanding lawyer and her former flame. Set to the languid, humid pace of summer nights, this stylized, romantic crime drama offers classical expressionistic cinematic flourish in its dramatization of fragile lives caught in the sweep of history. North American premiere
 
SHOWCASE SCREENING  
Carousel
Dir. Rachel Lambert. 2026, 103 mins. U.S. With her discerning visual sense and gratifyingly unsentimental approach, filmmaker Rachel Lambert brings a genuine emotional tangibility to her tale of two fortysomethings embarking on a tentative, rekindled affair amidst the unforgiving churn of everyday life. Noah (Chris Pine) is a divorced doctor and single parent of an anxiety-ridden teenager; Rebecca (Jenny Slate), his high-school sweetheart, has temporarily relocated back to town to assist her aging parents. Together they must navigate midlife disappointments, regrets, and fears, while balancing their own needs and desires. Beautifully performed with psychological clarity by its entire cast, especially Pine and Slate, and shot in Cleveland with a distinct sense of place, Lambert’s follow-up to her memorably melancholic 2023 film Sometimes I Think About Dying is a resonant portrait of people trying to overcome life’s uncertainties. New York premiere
  
SHOWCASE SCREENING
Hot Water
Dir. Ramzi Bashour. 2026, 97 mins. U.S. In English, Arabic, and French with English subtitles. A Lebanese American mother and son reconnect as they drive from the Midwest to California in Ramzi Bashour’s unconventional yet deeply satisfying road odyssey. Lubna Azabal (Incendies) gives a riveting, live-wire performance as a tightly wound Arabic language teacher whose troubled teenage son (Daniel Zolghadri) is expelled from high school after a violent incident; she then decides to escort him to the home of his estranged father, leading to meaningful encounters with people and places along the path, most memorably Dale Dickey (Winter's Bone) as an eccentric yet warm family friend in touch with nature. Poetically shot by Alfonso Herrera Salcedo (Rebuilding) against the grand, wide-open vistas, motels, gas stations, and diners of the country's beautiful and forbidding west, Hot Water upends traditional ideas of home and belonging with cutting humor and remarkable beauty. New York premiere
 
SHOWCASE SCREENING
Silent Friend
Dir. Ildikó Enyedi. 2025, 148 mins. Germany/Hungary. In English and German with English subtitles. In this exquisite, meditative journey through time and nature—from Ildikó Enyedi, director of the Academy Award-nominated On Body and Soul—
a ginkgo biloba tree serves as a silent observer to human experience for more than a century. This unlikely yet majestic protagonist lives amidst the comings and goings of humble, lonely  academics visiting or studying at a German university, including a present-day neuroscientist (played by the legendary Tony Leung Chiu-wai) studying plant consciousness, a shy student in the 1970s who falls for a captivating young botanist nurturing a geranium, and a turn-of-the-20th-century  female student facing the sexism of her academic superiors while discovering the pleasures of photography. Utilizing 16mm, 35mm, and digital video to capture different eras, Enyedi has created a cross-pollination of moods and textures, and a delineation of how scientific progress and human desire exist in a continuum with the natural world. A 1-2 Special release. New York premiere
 
100 Sunset
Dir. Kunsang Kyirong. 2025, 99 mins. Canada. In English and Tibetan with English subtitles. Set in the Tibetan neighborhood of Parkdale, Toronto, this debut feature from breakthrough Canadian filmmaker Kunsang Kyirong is a spellbinding and mischievous immersion into an enclosed immigrant community that creates a naturalistic narrative of fascinating, oblique emotion. The film centers on the mysterious and passive Kunsel, a petty thief and amateur filmmaker who becomes fixated upon another young woman named Passang, who has recently arrived to the neighborhood and confides her disillusionment in Kunsel. Toggling between the home video aesthetic of Kunsel’s stolen camcorder and Kyirong’s austere, omniscient camera, 100 Sunset, named after the address of the women’s high-rise building, in an enigmatic portrait of loneliness told from a fresh perspective. U.S. premiere
 
The Bend in the River
Dir. Robb Moss. 2025, 82 mins. U.S. A moving record of time passing and a specific generation caught in its forward march, this funny and overwhelmingly poignant documentary from nonfiction pioneer Robb Moss, and executive produced by Frances McDormand and Joel Coen, weaves footage from almost fifty years in the lives of a group of free-spirited baby boomers, from their days as guides on the Colorado river to bourgeois middle age and into their seventies. Catching up with these friends, and seeing the divergent paths their lives have taken, Moss has constructed a teeming portrait of life that is as richly observed and deeply emotional as his beloved 2003 film about the same group, The Same River Twice. Reminiscent of Michael Apted’s Up entries or Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, The Bend in the River confirms cinema as the ultimate art form for capturing the human moment as it disappears. New York City premiere
 
A Date with Shirley
Dir. Ken Jacobs. 2025, 48 mins. U.S. Digital. This colorful and cubist record of a Chinatown haircut is the final long-form work by the great avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, who died last October. As with his first film, Orchard Street (1955), made 70 years earlier, A Date with Shirley is a slice of New York City life that transforms urban energy into cinematic spectacle. Three cameras capture the action, one operated by Ken as he is having his Einstein-ian locks shorn, and the others by his children, Aza and Nisi. A loving and poignant family scene, the film is also a dazzling work of art—and a tribute to a fine barber whose phone number is offered in the credits. The screening will be followed by a book launch event for the Film Desk reprinted edition of Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective, the catalogue for his landmark 1989 show at MoMI. World premiere
 
Preceded by
The Tree (A árvore)
Dir. Ana Vaz. 2022, 21 mins. Spain/Brazil. DCP. At once a diary film and a contemplative landscape study focusing on a lone tree that sits atop a rugged seaside hill, The Tree is also a dreamlike portrait of the filmmaker’s father. New York premiere
and
Veronique
Dir. Friedl vom Gröller. 2025, 4 mins. Silent. Austria. 16mm. Friedl vom Groller’s intimate, unassuming films are portraits of people and places in her life; here she looks at three women who work together at a hair salon.
 
Feels Like Home
Dir. Gabór Holtai. 2025, 124 mins. Hungary. In Hungarian with English subtitles. In this blood-chilling, political-minded thriller, workaday shoe salesperson Rita (Rozi Lovas) descends into psychological horror when she is snatched from the street and imprisoned in a nearby apartment. There she is forced to become a member of a sinister family, all of whom appear to be under the delusion that she is their patriarch’s lost daughter. As she gradually succumbs to their intimidation, all the while planning her escape, Rita learns truths about the family and the community at large. An unrelentingly tense experience, Feels Like Home is also a multilayered portrayal of the interconnected mechanisms of oppression—familial, social, and economic—that keep us in our circumscribed places while dangling the hope for transcendence. U.S. premiere
 
Humboldt USA
Dir. G. Anthony Svatek. 2026. 89 mins. U.S. Endangered bighorn sheep in the Nevada desert. Encroaching urban highways in Buffalo, New York. Ecologically at-risk redwood forests in Northern California. What do these environments have in common? These three disparate places—Humboldt County, Humboldt Parkway, and the Humboldt Redwoods, respectively—were all named after 19th-century gay scientist Alexander von Humboldt (often called the “grandfather of ecology”). And in this new film, they are braided together by filmmaker Anthony Svatek into a mosaic of contemporary Americans struggling for basic environmental protections. While touching upon climate change, our evolving relationship to—and alienation from—technology, and the gradual disappearance of our natural world, Svatek’s improbably entertaining documentary also shows a genuine love for the everyday people caught in the eroding tides of history: the educators, the scientists, and the activists who have humbly, essentially tasked themselves with nurturing their small corners of the planet. North American premiere
 
I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn
Dir. Kenichi Ugana. 2025, 86 mins. Japan/U.S. In English and Japanese with English subtitles. Cynical screen star Shina Mizuhara has already lost her passion for filmmaking when she also loses her boyfriend in New York City. Unceremoniously dumped and left adrift in the sea of the Big Apple with no money, no phone, and no fluency in English, Shina is at the end of her rope until she meets a wildly passionate low-budget horror filmmaker named Jack, and he and his crew convince her to star in their latest film. The ensuing creative journey reignites Shina's love for cinema. Rising cult filmmaker Kenichi Ugana applies his kinetic style, unique humor, and undying enthusiasm for independent cinema to the romantic comedy genre, and the result is a celebration of the hard, often thankless work that goes into the creation of art and cinema. U.S. premiere
 
Ideas of Order
Dir. Erin Espelie. 2026, 71 mins. U.S.  Filmmaker, writer, and (ex)scientific researcher Erin Espelie has created a marvelous visual experience with Ideas of Order, a magnified portrait of cyanobacteria (the first organisms known to have produced oxygen) created in collaboration with a biochemistry lab. As we face the anxieties of climate change, her film reminds us that these persistent colonies, which live off light and grow by ingesting carbon dioxide, might function as models for the future of life on this planet. Ideas of Order investigates these contradictions—the macro-collapse of ecosystems and the minutiae of cellular colonies—for a work of visual invention, literary rumination, and scientific rigor. A Science on Screen presentation. New York premiere
 
It Goes That Quick
Dir. Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus. 2026, 70 mins. U.S. The word “personal” doesn’t begin to describe the profound intimacy of this unconventional family portrait, constructed with delicacy and humor by married filmmakers Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus. Neither can that description reveal the artful and intelligent self-awareness of their approach: It Goes That Quick is neither confessional nor exposé but rather something singular and rich—a timeless mosaic of American life, filmed over the course of eight years within one extended Northeastern network of aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents, adults and newborns in which everyone plays a dramatic role that’s no less constructed for being real. By the end of this fleet, loving feature, you feel like a member of the family. World premiere
 
Joybubbles
Co-presented by ReelAbilities
Dir. Rachael J. Morrison. 2026, 79 mins. U.S. Dubbed the “Peter Pan of phone hackers” by The New York Times, Joe Engressia discovered at a very young age that by whistling a specific tone into the telephone, he could manipulate the entire system. Born blind in 1949, Joe, who legally changed his name to “Joybubbles” in 1991, was a whiz kid with an IQ of 172. Partly as a result of childhood trauma, he rejected the idea of adulthood and preferred to think of himself as an eternal five-year-old. His abilities as a “phone phreak” not only got him into occasional hot water with the law but also set the stage for the growing culture of computer hacking. In telling his extraordinary story, Morrison’s delightful, enriching documentary, bursting with archival footage and audio recordings of its protagonist, is a tribute to an individual who overcame our ableist society in a most unusual and subversive manner. New York premiere
NOTE: This screening, co-presented by ReelAbilities Film Festival, will feature open captions and open audio descriptions.
 
Krakatoa
Dir. Carlos Casas. 2026, 74 mins. Spain/France/U.K./Poland. It has been called “the loudest scream ever”: in 1883, the Indonesian Krakatoa volcano erupted and created an explosion of sound, fury, and color whose effects could be felt and seen around the globe for weeks to follow. In his intense and dazzling sensory odyssey, filmmaker Carlos Casas has created a wordless descent into the mad, apocalyptic beauty of nature, centering on the character of Kesuma, a lone fisherman who, following a tsunami triggered by the volcanic explosion, finds himself in the thick of danger—and on the verge of transcendence. A survival tale that transforms into a work of hallucinatory experimentation, Krakatoa is an overwhelming theatrical experience and a total blast. North American premiere
 
Morte Cucina
Dir. Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. 2025, 96 mins. Thailand. In Thai with English subtitles.
Writer/director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s first film in nearly a decade conceives a deliciously fresh and divinely twisted take on the rape/revenge thriller. When an aspiring chef (a radiant yet coolly collected Bella Boonsang) encounters a man dining at the restaurant where she’s waitressing, she instantly recognizes him as a sexual abuser from her teenage past; he, wealthy, smug, and no doubt practiced in such violations, is oblivious to their connection. She sets in motion a wholly immersive payback plot, with her delectable cooking playing a major part. Meals she prepares as her scheme progresses, and scenes from her complicated past, are stunningly captured by renowned cinematographer Christopher Doyle. He and the noted Thai New Wave filmmaker, in their third collaboration, craft a work that both challenges and haunts the mind. New York premiere
 
One in a Million
Dirs. Itab Azzam, Jack Macinnes. 2026, 100 mins. U.S./U.K. In English, Arabic, and German with English subtitles. Shot over the course of a decade, this spellbinding documentary follows the life of a young Syrian refugee named Israa and her family, who escaped to safety from Aleppo to Turkey and finally to Germany, following the war in their homeland. Co-directors Itab Azzam and Jack Macinnes portray the magnetic Israa with uncommon sensitivity, charting her from age 11 to her early twenties, an ordinary teenage girl who happens to have gone through extraordinary circumstances. As she adjusts to suburban European life, she and her family must constantly negotiate their cultural identity, religious traditions, and the pain of exile.  Encompassing moments of startling familial intimacy within the overarching sweep of years, One in a Million brings the world’s ongoing refugee crises to eye-level with rich, complex humanity. Winner of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Directing and Audience Awards. New York premiere
 
Roqia
Dir. Yanis Koussim. 2025, 89 mins. France/Algeria/Qatar/Saudi Arabia. Algerian filmmaker Yanis Koussim makes his feature debut with this unsettling horror fable that reshapes the exorcism genre to its own disturbing and politically meaningful ends. A film that seems to emerge from the fog of a nightmare, Roqia moves between narratives set in different time periods that reckon with the violent stretch of recent history known as Algeria’s “Black Decade,” when a civil war broke out between the country’s government and groups of Islamist rebels. In one, a Raqi tends to the possessed while battling his own dementia; in another, husband and father Ahmed returns home after a car crash and is unrecognizable to his own fearful child. As with his startling, Rotterdam-winning short Khouya (My Brother), Koussim shows his abilities for electrifying, physical filmmaking, and Roqia achieves its creeping terror with mastery and originality. North American premiere
 
To the Victory!
Dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych. 2025, 105 mins. Ukraine/Lithuania. In Ukrainian with English subtitles. Valentyn Vasyanovych has been one of contemporary cinema’s most brilliant and unflinching chroniclers of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, which has been under bombardment from Russia since its full-scale invasion more than four years ago. In films like Atlantis and Reflection, Vasyanovych uses an accomplished single-take aesthetic to make some kind of moral sense of the violence experienced by his countrymen. He switches gears for his latest, which maintains his highly sophisticated tableau approach while applying it to a more personal, metacinematic conceit, in which the director stars as himself in a speculative, depopulated, near-future version of Ukraine after the war has ended. Feeling disconnected from his work and his family—including both the emotionally distanced son who lives with him and the wife and daughter who moved to Vienna—Vasyanovych tries to make sense of his future self as both a father and a filmmaker. New York premiere
 
Tropical Park
Dir. Hansel Porras Garcia, 2025, 85 mins. U.S. In Spanish with English subtitles. In this rigorously achieved and deeply poignant two-hander, the viewer is invited to take a backseat—literally—to the complex, irreconcilable drama of love and resentment that gradually emerges between two grown siblings (Lola Bosch, Ariel Texido). Frank’s a socially conservative Cuban immigrant living a modest but comfortable suburban married life; Fanny's a politically outspoken trans woman who has recently joined him after two decades following the death of their parents. Over the course of a single drive through the streets of Miami, captured in one take by filmmaker Hansel Porras Garcia, Frank and Fanny try and come to terms with what they don’t understand about one another—what unites them and also keeps them apart. With remarkable skill, Porras Garcia and their actors (using just a script outline rather than a written screenplay) have made a film that feels entirely of the moment but refrains from didacticism, focusing on the small beauties of human connection. New York premiere
 
We Put the World to Sleep
Dir. Adrian Țofei. 2025, 83 mins. Romania. Adrian Țofei and Duru Yücel play fictional characters also named Adrian and Duru, who are making an apocalyptic film. Things take a darker turn when they embark on a secret mission to end the world for real— working within the film’s budget. What follows goes beyond their wildest imaginations in this subversive take on the “found footage” film genre that combines the realism of The Blair Witch Project with the metaphysics of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Shot over the course of nine years, despite numerous unforeseen setbacks, from the pandemic to financial and creative obstacles, We Put the World to Sleep is a metatextual psychotic trip that is in conversation with very real everyday horrors such as AI and our disintegrating grasp on reality in an increasingly fabricated world. New York premiere
 
The Whole World Is a Lie
Dir. Charlie Birns. 2026, 90 mins. U.S. In his brilliantly slippery new meta-documentary, filmmaker and actor Charlie Birns takes the viewer inside a New York Method acting class in entirely unexpected fashion. Wishing to capture on film the “spiritual experience” he professed to have had under the tutelage of acting teacher Tony Greco, Birns finds something entirely different: a classroom revolt against his own cinematic methods. As a result, Birns’s entertainingly volatile film keeps changing form, encouraging the viewer to figure out what’s authentic and what’s fabricated, what’s performance and what’s reality, and whether there is—or should be—a line at all between the two. Executive produced by Robert Greene (Procession), The Whole World Is a Lie is a tricky yet emotionally resonant, and often very funny, exploration of the difficulty of capturing the “truth” within an environment of shifting power dynamics and foregrounded ego. World premiere
 
FIRST LOOK 2026 EXPERIMENTAL PROGRAM:
 
Little Stabs (Avant-Garde Shorts)
With a title that pays tribute to Ken Jacobs’s avant-garde landmark Little Stabs at Happiness (1960), this eclectic program features films that take their own stabs–sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully–towards new cinematic forms. Several works literally guide the viewer through a set of instructions; all of them invite us to reconsider our relationship to the images onscreen. Co-programmed by David Schwartz and Genevieve Yue. Total running time: 103 mins., plus a ten-minute intermission.
 
Part One:
 
The More I Zoom in on the Image of These Dogs, The Clearer It Becomes That They Are Related to the Stars
Dir. Alexandre Koberidze. 2023. 4 mins. Georgia.
 
Dissonance
Dir. Jordan Strafer. 2026. 12 mins. Germany.
 
Make Heaven Crowded
Dir. Steve Reinke. 2025. 12 mins. U.S.
 
Super, Natural
Dir. Kyath Battie. 2025. 7 mins. Canada. 16mm.
 
Slideshow
Dir. Janie Geiser. 2024. 8 mins. U.S.
 
E-Minor
Dir. Callum Hill. 2024. 12 mins. UK.
 
Orpheus
Dir. Lewis Klahr. 2024. 4 mins. U.S.
 
Part Two:
 
Late September
Dir. Lewis Klahr. 2025. 3 mins. U.S.
 
El Sistema
Dir. Marco Godoy. 2014. 2 mins. Spain. 16mm.
 
Old Masters
Dir. Basma Al-Sharif. 2025. 13 mins. Germany.
 
Afternoon Hearsay
Dir. Peng Zuqiang. 2025. 19 mins. China/UK/Italy.
 
(for once I dreamed of you)
Dir. Kate Solar. 2025. 6 mins. Canada. 16mm.

About Museum of the Moving Image
MoMI celebrates the history, art, technology, and future of the moving image in all of its forms. Located in Astoria, New York, the Museum presents exhibitions; screenings; discussion programs featuring actors, directors, and creative leaders; and education programs. It houses the nation’s most comprehensive collection of moving image artifacts and screens over 500 films annually. Its exhibitions—including the core exhibition Behind the Screen and The Jim Henson Exhibition—are noted for their integration of material objects, interactive experiences, and audiovisual presentations. For more information about MoMI, visit movingimage.org.