Film at Lincoln Center has unveiled the 34 films that make up the Main Slate of the 64th New York Film Festival, taking place 25 September through 12 October 2026. The lineup spans 31 countries and brings together 17 directors making their Main Slate debut alongside returning auteurs including Pedro Almodóvar, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Lee Chang-dong, Mike Leigh and Hong Sangsoo. The festival opens with James Gray's Paper Tiger, a 1980s-set New York crime drama starring Miles Teller, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson. Tony Gilroy's Behemoth!, a world premiere featuring Pedro Pascal as a cellist rebuilding his life, serves as the Centerpiece selection, and Ava DuVernay's 14th, a documentary examining challenges to the 14th Amendment built around voices including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Anna Paulina Luna, closes the festival as its second world premiere alongside Guadagnino's Artificial and Mani Haghighi's I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies. "It's hard to recall a prior Main Slate program in which the state of the world has been as urgently reflected in so many creative ways," said Dennis Lim, artistic director of the New York Film Festival. "You could take any cross section of this lineup and come away with a vivid picture of what our present looks, sounds, and feels like." ## Cinema Confronting the Present The slate leans deliberately into the political moment. It includes Valeska Grisebach's The Dreamed Adventure, a crime saga about immigrant lives on the edges of Europe; Radu Jude's The Diary of a Chambermaid, following a Romanian woman working for a well-off couple in France; Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love, a study of two married couples in crisis in South Korea; and Mike Leigh's reportedly final film, Tender Loving Care, a portrait of resilient lives in post-Brexit England's fragmented care sector. Julia Loktev's My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile traces outspoken Russian journalists dispersing across the globe, while Isabelle Stever's I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming is set in Ukraine during Russia's invasion. Historical works function as contemporary commentary too, from Emmanuel Marre's A Man of His Time, about a conservative bureaucrat in Vichy France, to Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland, set in postwar Germany, and Ira Sachs's The Man I Love, about marginalized queer lives during the 1980s AIDS crisis. ## Cannes Favorites and First-Timers The Main Slate collects multiple prizewinners from this year's Cannes Film Festival: Everytime, which won the Un Certain Regard prize; Minotaur, winner of the Grand Prix; Fatherland, which took Best Director; A Man of His Time, awarded Best Screenplay; The Dreamed Adventure, with the Jury Prize; and All of a Sudden, whose lead actresses Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared Best Actress. Sandra Hüller won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for her performance in Rose. First-time Main Slate directors include Chris Rock, with Misty Green, and Tony Gilroy. The festival expands beyond Lincoln Center this year, with screenings at BAM in Brooklyn, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, Alamo Drafthouse in Staten Island and AMC Bay Plaza in the Bronx. Single tickets went on sale to the general public on Tuesday, 15 September, at noon Eastern time.