Spotlight
Spotlight Shorts
Kleber Mendonça Filho, Kamal Aljafari, Camilo Restrepo, Jia Zhangke, Morgan Fisher
This shorts program includes the world premiere of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s South of Tehran, Kamal Aljafari’s Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo, the world premiere of Camilo Restrepo’s A Stolen Movie, Jia Zhangke’s Torino Shadow, and the world premiere of Morgan Fisher’s Screening Room. Note: Screening Room will be included only at screenings in the Walter Reade Theater.
- Runtime
- 85 min
- Country
- Brazil/
U.S./ Germany/ France/ Japan/ Colombia/ China/ Italy/ - Language
- Mandarin Chinese,
Farsi, Japanese, Spanish, Italian - More information
- Official film page
Screenings
South of Tehran
Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2026, Brazil/U.S., 8m
Farsi with English subtitles
World Premiere
South of Tehran. Courtesy of Kleber Mendonça Filho.
South of Tehran is the first film in the new NYFF Encounters initiative, a commissioning program that invites a filmmaker in the lineup to create an original short during the course of the festival. This prismatic reflection on cinema and memory emerged from conversations between Kleber Mendonça Filho (The Secret Agent) and Jafar Panahi (It Was Just an Accident), both of whom screened films at the 2025 New York Film Festival.
Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo / 足立正生、パスポート写真を撮る
Kamal Aljafari, 2026, Germany/France/Japan, 27m
Japanese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo
Now 87, the Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi (Escape, NYFF63) does not have a passport, as a consequence of his 1970s involvement with the revolutionary Japanese Red Army. In a last-ditch attempt to apply for one, he obtains his photos from a small neighborhood shop, maintained for decades by an elderly widow at the mercy of her ancient, fiddly printer. Shot by Neo Sora (Happyend, NYFF62), Aljafari’s film is a work of deadpan hilarity and, like his 2025 feature With Hasan in Gaza (NYFF63), a search for lost time.
Travel support generously provided by the German Film Office.
A Stolen Movie / Una película robada
Camilo Restrepo, 2026, Colombia, 12m
Spanish with English subtitles
World Premiere
A Stolen Movie
Camilo Restrepo, the director of 2020’s Los conductos (New Directors/New Films 2020), reappropriates and remixes a real General Motors promotional film depicting an early-1960s exhibition across the Darién Gap in Chevrolet Corvairs. As the representatives of the global North’s industrial might bridge the same chasm that stands between today’s migrants and the United States, Restrepo considers the unequal flows of people and property between the Americas.
Torino Shadow
Jia Zhangke, 2026, China/Italy, 32m
Mandarin Chinese and Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Torino Shadow. © 2026 Jia Zhang-Ke Art Center.
An anniversary commission of Torino’s Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Jia Zhangke’s (Caught by the Tides, NYFF62) latest spans the past, present, and future of moving-image culture, from the shadow puppets made by a girl in Guangdong to the smartphone videos her mother sends her from Torino, where she’s traveled to reunite with her husband, but found only a stranger. As in her spouse Jia’s features, Zhao Tao is the still point in a turning, globalized world, with all its disconnections and surprising symmetries.
Screening Room
Morgan Fisher, 1968/2026, U.S., 35mm, 6m
World Premiere
Screening Room
Initiated in 1968, Morgan Fisher’s Screening Room is a site-specific work, a film remade for and shown only in the place in which it was filmed. This latest version (or, to use Fisher’s term, “state”) of the film—with production executed by filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins with the support of Mostly Works and camerawork by Dan Fridman—leads the spectator into Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater in a single tracking shot, a journey that unveils cinema’s enigmatic status as, at once, a physical space, a filmic object, and an ephemeral image.
South of Tehran
Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2026, Brazil/U.S., 8m
Farsi with English subtitles
World Premiere
South of Tehran. Courtesy of Kleber Mendonça Filho.
South of Tehran is the first film in the new NYFF Encounters initiative, a commissioning program that invites a filmmaker in the lineup to create an original short during the course of the festival. This prismatic reflection on cinema and memory emerged from conversations between Kleber Mendonça Filho (The Secret Agent) and Jafar Panahi (It Was Just an Accident), both of whom screened films at the 2025 New York Film Festival.
Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo / 足立正生、パスポート写真を撮る
Kamal Aljafari, 2026, Germany/France/Japan, 27m
Japanese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo
Now 87, the Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi (Escape, NYFF63) does not have a passport, as a consequence of his 1970s involvement with the revolutionary Japanese Red Army. In a last-ditch attempt to apply for one, he obtains his photos from a small neighborhood shop, maintained for decades by an elderly widow at the mercy of her ancient, fiddly printer. Shot by Neo Sora (Happyend, NYFF62), Aljafari’s film is a work of deadpan hilarity and, like his 2025 feature With Hasan in Gaza (NYFF63), a search for lost time.
Travel support generously provided by the German Film Office.
A Stolen Movie / Una película robada
Camilo Restrepo, 2026, Colombia, 12m
Spanish with English subtitles
World Premiere
A Stolen Movie
Camilo Restrepo, the director of 2020’s Los conductos (New Directors/New Films 2020), reappropriates and remixes a real General Motors promotional film depicting an early-1960s exhibition across the Darién Gap in Chevrolet Corvairs. As the representatives of the global North’s industrial might bridge the same chasm that stands between today’s migrants and the United States, Restrepo considers the unequal flows of people and property between the Americas.
Torino Shadow
Jia Zhangke, 2026, China/Italy, 32m
Mandarin Chinese and Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Torino Shadow. © 2026 Jia Zhang-Ke Art Center.
An anniversary commission of Torino’s Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Jia Zhangke’s (Caught by the Tides, NYFF62) latest spans the past, present, and future of moving-image culture, from the shadow puppets made by a girl in Guangdong to the smartphone videos her mother sends her from Torino, where she’s traveled to reunite with her husband, but found only a stranger. As in her spouse Jia’s features, Zhao Tao is the still point in a turning, globalized world, with all its disconnections and surprising symmetries.
Screening Room
Morgan Fisher, 1968/2026, U.S., 35mm, 6m
World Premiere
Screening Room
Initiated in 1968, Morgan Fisher’s Screening Room is a site-specific work, a film remade for and shown only in the place in which it was filmed. This latest version (or, to use Fisher’s term, “state”) of the film—with production executed by filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins with the support of Mostly Works and camerawork by Dan Fridman—leads the spectator into Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater in a single tracking shot, a journey that unveils cinema’s enigmatic status as, at once, a physical space, a filmic object, and an ephemeral image.