NYFF 2026 Lineup: Sam Altman Biopic, Holmes Doc Premiering — SkimNews
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- NYFF's 64th edition opens Friday at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall with James Gray's Paper Tiger and runs through October 12, programming 119 films total (75 features, 44 shorts) across Main Slate, Spotlight, Currents, and Revivals sections.
- Luca Guadagnino's Sam Altman biopic Artificial, a nearly finished $50 million film originally at Amazon, moved to Neon after Amazon invested heavily in Altman's OpenAI, with Neon acquiring global rights in June.
- Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything Elizabeth Holmes documentary world premiered as a secret screening at Telluride after Holmes granted the filmmakers unfettered access to her San Diego home in 2023 before reporting to prison for defrauding investors.
- NAZA by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, which world premiered in Venice, investigates Israel's mass killing of civilians in Gaza and was shot at night on Tel Aviv rooftops where the filmmakers interviewed Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers.
- Godzilla Minus Zero by Takashi Yamazaki world premieres at NYFF after the previous Godzilla film—a huge success for Gkids and Toho—skipped festivals, with NYFF seeing an unfinished version in the summer.
- Ava DuVernay's 14th, a direct follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 documentary 13th (which opened NYFF that year), is the closing-night selection.
- Artistic director Dennis Lim credits the New York audience for attracting world premieres, saying this year's films are "directly in conversation with the real world" and tackling contemporary reality head-on.
Why it matters: The lineup shows NYFF positioning itself as a launchpad for politically engaged, high-profile premieres rather than just prestige holds—the $50 million Amazon-to-Neon shuffle over the Sam Altman biopic alone is a notable case of a tech company's AI investments reshaping its film slate, while the inclusion of NAZA about Gaza civilian casualties signals major US festivals are willing to platform Israel-Gaza war documentaries as centerpieces.
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