Drunken Noodles by Lucio Castro
Film at Lincoln Center has announced its Currents slate for the 63rd New York Film Festival, comprising 16 feature films and 24 short films across five programs from 28 countries, including five South American films—three features and two shorts—from Argentina and Colombia. Embracing a spirit of innovation, Currents complements the previously announced Main Slate with an international showcase of adventurous new voices and inventive artists reshaping the language of cinema.
Produced by El Pampero Cine, the Argentine collective renowned for its boundless imagination in cinematic storytelling (La Flor, Trenque Lauquen), Alejo Moguillansky’s Pin de Fartie unfolds as a playful spin on theatrical adaptation and an experiment in character dynamics. The film charts three relationships defined by Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play Fin de Partie (Endgame): one between a blind man and his daughter; another between two actors rehearsing the play; and a third following a man who reads Beckett’s work to his blind mother and begins to see their lives reflected in the text.
New York-based Argentine filmmaker Lucio Castro returns to Currents with Drunken Noodles, which weaves five chapters in the sexual life of a cat-sitting art student named Adnan (Laith Khalifeh), all bound by an erotic magical realism. While each of the film’s playful, non-chronological segments appears to portray anecdotal facets of everyday gay life—from urban dating rituals to monogamy anxieties during a weekend upstate—Drunken Noodles consistently slips into the realms of the unreal, even the mythic.
In Barrio Triste, the debut feature from Bad Bunny collaborator Stillz and the latest production by Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD studio, found footage and dead pixels form the texture of a new aesthetic—and a new kind of thriller. Among a group of violent youths who steal diamonds and burn cars, one has turned a stolen camera into an image-making endeavor. Amid their callous acts and hopeless rage—resourceful enough to pull off a high-speed heist, yet too disaffected for much else—a supernatural eeriness surfaces through talk of mysterious lights in the sky and missing citizens.
The Currents shorts program includes two Latin American films across two categories: Tigers Can Be Seen in the Rain (Ya se ven los tigres en la lluvia) by Colombian director Oscar Ruiz Navia (in Currents Program 1: Below the Surface), and 09/05/1982 by Colombian filmmakers Camilo Restrepo and Jorge Caballero (in Currents Program 2: Afterimages).
Desolate interstitial spaces of present-day wintry Montreal—alleyways, bike paths, underpasses, skate parks—contrast with the livelier images of decades-old home videos in Tigers Can Be Seen in the Rain. Drifting between moving-image formats and collaging local textures and bygone voices, Oscar Ruiz Navia’s film reflects on loss and mourning as experiences of temporal dislocation.
Jorge Caballero and Camilo Restrepo’s 09/05/1982 explores the occulted processes by which memory, technology, and propaganda rewrite the past, blurring distinctions between the real and the synthetic. Uncovered home movies from 1982—scratched, grainy, and shot in an unidentified Latin American city—reveal quotidian scenes and faint traces of political violence: streets packed with crowds and armed police, burning tires and smashed windows, graffiti commemorating the May 9th Massacre.
The 63rd New York Film Festival will take place September 26 – October 13, 2025.
