Cold Metal by Clemente Castor
The 55th edition of New Directors/New Films, the long-running showcase organized by Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, once again brings together a slate of emerging filmmakers from across the globe. With 24 features and 10 shorts, the program continues to position itself as a key platform for discovery—one that favors formal rigor, singular voices, and works that resist easy categorization. This year’s lineup, running April 8–19, includes two Latin American feature films and one short.
Having its U.S. premiere at the festival, Cold Metal / Frío metal, the second feature by Mexican filmmaker Clemente Castor, unfolds as an entrancing modernist drift through suburban Mexico City, tracing the fractured psyches of two brothers navigating absence—one physical, the other mental. Winner of the Prix Georges de Beauregard at FIDMarseille, the film moves—through its nonlinear structure, subterranean imagery, and ominous sound design—between the oneiric and the observational, mapping a terrain where displacement is both social and psychological.
From Argentina come two markedly different works that nonetheless share a sensitivity to performance and transformation. The River Train / El tren fluvial, a North American premiere by Lorenzo Ferro and Lucas A. Vignale, follows a nine-year-old Malambo prodigy who flees his rural home for Buenos Aires. What begins as a coming-of-age journey unfolds as a playful, gently surreal urban fable, blending naturalism with a sense of wonder. A Berlin Film Festival standout, the film—echoing the French New Wave and marked by a literary deadpan humor—constructs a city of encounters where identity remains in flux and discovery is constant.
In a darker, more allegorical register, Renzo Cozza’s short Time to Go / La hora de irse reimagines the vampire myth through the lens of familial obligation. Its protagonist works for his sisters and feels trapped in a life that no longer fits him. Searching for change, he agrees to go on a date with a mysterious man.
Also screening is Next Life, a U.S.–Mexico co-production directed by Tenzin Phuntsog and executive produced by Carlos Reygadas, presented in its New York premiere. Drawing inspiration from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the film is a spare and moving meditation on exile and spirituality, following a Tibetan American family as they prepare for the impending death of its patriarch.
