Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas will return to the New York Film Festival with the world premiere of his highly anticipated new feature, Heil Jupiter!, screening in the Currents section of the festival’s 64th edition, running September 25 through October 12.
The first feature from Reygadas since Our Time / Nuestro tiempo (2018), the 150-minute film is an international co-production between Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Norway, and Sweden. Heil Jupiter! marks the celebrated filmmaker’s return to NYFF, where his acclaimed Silent Light screened in 2007.
Set against a remote coastline of crashing waves and monumental rock formations, Heil Jupiter! follows two young couples who enter a realm of shifting realities, unaware that a mysterious entity is observing them from above with Godlike judgment. Moving between the modern and the primitive, the technological and the rural, and the corporeal and the mythic, the film explores a world suspended between elemental beauty and authoritarian violence.
The New York Film Festival describes Heil Jupiter! as a “dreamlike astonishment” and “a work of feral cinematic expression,” highlighting the profound contrast between its elemental pleasures and its depiction of authoritarian brutality. The film is presented in an invented language and Spanish with English subtitles.
One of the most distinctive figures in contemporary Mexican cinema, Reygadas made his feature debut with Japón in 2002, followed by Battle in Heaven / Batalla en el cielo, Silent Light, Post Tenebras Lux, and Our Time. His films have been celebrated at major international festivals, including Cannes, where Post Tenebras Lux earned him the Best Director prize in 2012 and Silent Light received the Jury Prize in 2007.
Film at Lincoln Center also announced the North American premiere of Hanabi by Brazilian director Ana Vaz and the U.S. premiere of Life of Jorge Luis Borges / Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges by Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás as part of this year’s Currents lineup.
The 64th New York Film Festival will take place at Film at Lincoln Center and four venues across the city: BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens), Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), and AMC Bay Plaza Cinema (Bronx). Screening dates and ticket information will be announced by the festival.
