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The 64th New York Film Festival (NYFF64) begins on September 25, bringing new films from around the world to New York City through October 12. Though anchored at Lincoln Center, the festival continues to partner with venues in each of the city’s five boroughs, with Museum of the Moving Image representing Queens. Listed below, with descriptions quoted from the festival programmers, are 12 of the festival’s science or technology-related films.
The selection boasts six world premieres, including two new films from high-profile filmmakers probing two of the most pressing issues in STEM today: AI and climate change. Luca Guadanigno returns to the festival for the fourth time with ARTIFICIAL, starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman alongside Mark Rylance and Yura Borisov as real-life scientists Geoffrey “Godfather of AI” Hinton and Ilya Sutskever respectively. NEON recently acquired rights to the film.
A decade after Tom McCarthy’s SPOTLIGHT took home the Academy Award for Best Picture, the writer-director returns to helm another star-studded ensemble with A STATEMENT. Inspired by Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth, the black comedy features Paul Rudd, Evan Peters, Amy Ryan, Paul Giamatti, and John Turturro as a group of environmental activists, scientists, and U.S. policymakers convened in 1980 to advise congress’s response to the effects of CO2 emissions on the climate. Sony Pictures Classics will release the film theatrically in early 2027.
Sloan Science & Film will be covering the festival citywide, so stay tuned.
FEATURE FILMS
MAIN SLATE
ARTIFICIAL. Dir. Luca Guadagnino. World Premiere. “Anchored by brilliant lead performances by Andrew Garfield and Yura Borisov, Luca Guadagnino’s thrilling, funny, and very human drama propels audiences through the two decades of machine learning research that have brought us to our current AI crisis point.”
SPOTLIGHT
A STATEMENT. Dir. Tom McCarthy. World Premiere. “In 1980, a group of environmental activists, scientists, and policymakers convened to discuss an alarming government study on climate change. Tom McCarthy (SPOTLIGHT) re-creates this historical moment with a brilliant ensemble cast including Paul Rudd, Amy Ryan, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, and more.”
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Still from A STATEMENT. Courtesy of NYFF.
CURRENTS
HANABI. Dir. Ana Vaz. North American Premiere. “In this diaristic journey through the combustible heart of contemporary Japan, filmmaker Ana Vaz uses Yoko Hasuke’s essay ‘Journal of a Radioactive Brain’ as the inspiration and anchor for a freeform inquiry into living amidst natural and manmade disasters.”
LONDON. Dir. Sebastian Brameshuber. New York Premiere. “Sebastian Brameshuber draws a delicate, perceptive portrait of the contemporary gig economy with the story of a good-natured yet solitary driver in his early seventies who shuttles back and forth between Vienna and Salzburg alongside strangers met via a ride-share app.”
OVERT LISTENING. Dir. Tiffany Sia. World Premiere. “Hong Kong–born artist Tiffany Sia confronts the Cold War legacy of China in this landscape film shot amidst the serene environs of Taiwan’s Kinmen archipelago, where a major battle took place at the end of the Chinese Civil War.”
Still from OVERT LISTENING. Courtesy of NYFF.
THE REMOTES. Dir. John Torres. U.S. Premiere. “Manila-based filmmaker John Torres’s ambitious, visually striking sci-fi neo-noir about a mysteriously deadly driver-app functions as a thought-provoking inquiry into the larger forces—political, technological—that conspire to control our bodies and identities.”
SHORT FILMS
SPOTLIGHT: NEW YORK SHORTS
EE. Dir. Heather Landsman. New York Premiere. “A girl in a collectibles store covets a rare figurine in Heather Landsman’s sexy hyperpop vignette. Online communities, fandom, shoplifting, and the stealth action video game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty become interlocking, quicksilver metaphors for the furtive, grasping workings of identity and desire under surveillance. Featuring local cult heroes Isobel Fox and Will Menaker in key supporting roles.”
CURRENTS SHORTS
BRANCHING STREAMS FLOW IN THE DARKNESS. Dir. Yixuan Zhang. World Premiere. “A garden path, a billiards room, a solarium, a parlor—historical photographs of these shadowy scenes and spectral atmospheres are subject to strange and subtle transformations in Yixuan Zhang’s evocative stereoscopic film, which explores the uncanny space-time and illusions of depths hidden within the two-dimensional surface of the screen.” (PROGRAM 1: THE HIDDEN DIMENSION)
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Still from BRANCHING STREAMS FLOW IN THE DARKNESS. Courtesy of NYFF.
CERTAINTIES. Dir. Calum Walter. World Premiere. “As California’s wildfires rage and extreme weather drives bears and other animals into the filmmaker’s yard to scavenge, everyday life becomes a series of unnerving omens. In CERTAINTIES, snippets of video-diary and home security camera footage from the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains are collaged to reveal an ominous domesticity, with a fruit tree in the yard but nature out of joint.” (PROGRAM 4: THE REAL WORLD)
DAY ONE. Dir. Cameron Worden. World Premiere. “Shapes blister and tumble across frame lines, colors splash, bleed, and vanish, machinic noise rumbles and churns. Produced using an entirely photochemical process on 35mm film, with an optical soundtrack generated photochemically, DAY ONE is an odyssey of light and color, an exploration of the primary materials of analog filmmaking, and a miniature cosmos activated inside the cinematic apparatus.” (PROGRAM 3: SURFACE NOISE)
FLIM FLAM. Dir. Siegfried A. Fruhauf. U.S. Premiere. “Quivering punctuation, undulant zebras, and spiraling moirés compose Siegfried A. Fruhauf’s hallucinatory exploration of the eye’s grasp on reality. An avalanche of formal confrontations, illusory depths, and tonal contrasts (black-and-white, orange-and-green), FLIM FLAM at once expands the spectator’s cognitive capacities and returns the cinema to its origins as a child’s optical toy.” (PROGRAM 3: SURFACE NOISE)
FOREVER…FOREVER. Dir. Johann Lurf. U.S. Premiere. “Space and time expand and contract in Johann Lurf’s film, as time-lapse photography captures a tranquil landscape and the sun’s transit in the mirrored surface of a lake. At once intimate and cosmic, FOREVER…FOREVER collapses the scales of human and geologic time, immersing us in the everyday and the infinite.” (PROGRAM 2: THE VISIBLE INVISIBLE)
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