MoMI’s First Look Festival Sets ‘Silent Friend,’ ‘Carousel,’ and Isabel Sandoval’s New Film ‘Moonglow’

The Museum of the Moving Image will soon bring two weekends of adventurous new cinema to Queens and New York — this year, from April 23 – May 3 with First Look 2026. IndieWire shares the exclusive announcement of this year’s lineup, which marks the event’s 15th edition.

The festival opens with James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ “The Misconceived” and closes with Isabel Sandoval’s new film “Moonglow,” both North American premieres fresh from Rotterdam. The lineup overall boasts 21 features and experimental shorts programs. Special showcase screenings include New York premieres of Rachel Lambert’s “Carousel,” a Sundance competition premiere starring Chris Pine and Jenny Slate; Ildikó Enyedi’s acclaimed Venice entry “Silent Friend,” starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Léa Seydoux; and Ramzi Bashour’s 2026 Sundance competition title “Hot Water.”

“We are excited to bring some fresh perspectives and ideas to the festival, and the idiosyncratic and utterly independent artists behind our opening and closing night films, James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Isabel Sandoval, are the perfect representations of the adventurous ethos of First Look,” said Michael Koresky, MoMI’s senior curator of film and head programmer of First Look, who assumed his role in 2025. “It’s also been such a pleasure to work with an expanded number of programmers, whose perspectives and voices shine through these films and have created a wonderful, democratic selection process. This year, we are pleased to offer titles from an array of genres, from horror to documentary to romance to films from a crop of ‘new cult’ filmmakers.”

World premieres include the late Ken Jacobs’ never-before-seen final long-form work, “A Date with Shirley,” plus documentary filmmakers Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus’ “It Goes That Quick,” and Charlie Birns’ hybrid film about an acting class mutiny, “The Whole World Is a Lie.”

A slate of films devoted to genre also round out the festival. From Algeria, there’s Yanis Koussim’s “Roqia,” an “unsettling horror fable of historical trauma that reshapes the exorcism genre,” per the fest; from Thailand, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s culinary revenge tale “Morte Cucina”; and from Hungary, “Feels Like Home,” from director Gabór Holtai. For fans of MoMI’s ongoing Disreputable Cinema series, cult cinema selections include Romanian filmmaker Adrian Țofei’s found-footage “We Put the World to Sleep” and Japanese director Kenichi Ugana’s low-budget meta horror/rom-com “I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn.”

The festival’s ongoing Science on Screen section, in conjunction with Sloan Science and Film, includes Erin Espelie’s documentary on the microscopic world of bacteria, “Ideas of Order”; and Rachael J. Morrison’s documentary “Joybubbles,” about Joe Engressia, dubbed the “Peter Pan of phone hackers,” “who was born blind and discovered at a very young age that he could manipulate the phone system with a series of whistles.”

See the full lineup below.

Features

100 Sunset (Dir. Kunsang Kyirong)

The Bend in the River (Dir. Robb Moss)

Carousel (Dir. Rachel Lambert)

Feels Like Home (Dir. Gabór Holtai)

Hot Water (Dir. Ramzi Bashour)

Humboldt USA (Dir. G. Anthony Svatek)

I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn (Dir. Kenichi Ugana)

Ideas of Order (Dir. Erin Espelie)

It Goes That Quick (Dirs. Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus)

Joybubbles (Dir. Rachael J. Morrison)

Krakatoa (Dir. Carlos Casas)

The Misconceived (Dir. James N. Kienitz Wilkins)

Moonglow (Dir. Isabel Sandoval)

Morte Cucina (Dir. Pen-Ek Ratanaruang)

One in a Million (Dir. Itab Azzam, Jack Macinnes)

Roqia (Dir. Yanis Koussim)

Silent Friend (Dir. Ildikó Enyedi)

To the Victory! (Dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych)

Tropical Park (Dir. Hansel Porras Garcia)

We Put the World to Sleep (Dir. Adrian Țofei)

The Whole World Is a Lie (Dir. Charlie Birns)

Shorts

Afternoon Hearsay (Dir. Peng Zuqiang)

A Date with Shirley (Dir. Ken Jacobs)

Dissonance (Dir. Jordan Strafer)

E-Minor (Dir. Callum Hill)

El Sistema (Dir. Marco Godoy)

(for once I dreamed of you) (Dir. Kate Solar)

Late September (Dir. Lewis Klahr)

Make Heaven Crowded (Dir. Steve Reinke)

The More I Zoom in on the Image of These Dogs, The Clearer It Becomes That Old Masters (Dir. Basma Al-Sharif)

Orpheus (Dir. Lewis Klahr)

Slideshow (Dir. Janie Geiser)

Super, Natural (Dir. Kyath Battie)

They Are Related to the Stars (Dir. Alexandre Koberidze)

The Tree (A árvore) (Dir. Ana Vaz)

Veronique (Dir. Friedl vom Gröller)

All screenings take place at Museum of the Moving Image, located at 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria, NY, in the Sumner M. Redstone Theater and/or the Celeste and Armand Bartos Screening Room. Tickets and passes are now on sale right here.