I sat down to interview Brooklyn Film Festival Director Brandon Harrison to deep dive into the official selection. Harrison previously served as a features programmer for DOC NYC and an assistant programmer for Tribeca.
The rest of this article contains the 2026 Brooklyn Film Festival program lineup.
Typically, when you see lineups, it is a long list spread across multiple web pages. What we have done is broken it up into categories:
Brooklyn Film Festival Actor Spotlight, highlighting the top talent at the festival.
Brooklyn Film Festival Indie Filmmaker Spotlight, showcasing first and second-time filmmakers.
Brooklyn Film Festival International News, showing the top international filmmakers at Brooklyn.
All titles are linked to the Brooklyn Film Festival’s website, which has first look photos and trailers.
Enjoy!
Brooklyn Film Festival brings together hidden gems from around the globe. They’re playing films from larger international film festivals like:
Berlinale
Sundance
SXSW
As well as films from smaller regional festivals that have yet to screen in the US and in NYC.
The most interesting film I saw on the line-up was Tony Odyssey, which looks like a cross between the films of Spike Lee and Buñuel.
Synopsis:
After robbing the bar where he works, Tony and his best friend Ivy steal a hallucinogenic drug that sends them on a surreal Brazilian odyssey—where crime, faith, and illusion collide in a search for God.
I couldn’t stop looking at the trailer.
BROOKLYN ACTOR SPOTLIGHT:
In A Mosquito In The Ear, Jake Lacy (The White Lotus) gets himself into another loaded relationship drama about economic imbalance. In The White Lotus, Lacy played a privileged man who could check out of the relationship with Alexandra Daddario. In this film he plays a father who adopts a 4-year-old Indian girl who doesn’t want to leave her home behind.
Synopsis:
Andrew and Daniela travel to Goa, India, to meet their newly adopted 4-year-old daughter, Sarvari, and bring her back to the US. However, their world begins to crumble when Sarvari refuses to leave the orphanage that she calls home behind.
We look forward to seeing Lacy playing at the edge of his comfort zone. That’s where he becomes really profound.
Lukas Haas (Witness, Brick, Inception) co-stars in Crystal Cross.
Synopsis:
Two unlikely companions are on a doomed but beautiful road trip across America. Dotty, a Christian singer in trouble, believes she’s received a sign from God when she meets James, a man who looks strikingly like Jesus.
Haas doesn’t play either, yet he shifts their relationship in an interesting way.
Jessica Alba is also EPing Valentina.
Synopsis:
A series of bureaucratic mishaps plagues Valentina as she tries to tackle a simple to-do list at the El Paso-Juarez border.
The film is a hybrid doc/live-action, which may have attracted Alba to champion the project.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
Helena Ganjalyan and Bartosz Szpak direct a taut and unsettling film, Glorious Summer, which premiered at SXSW in 2025.
Synopsis:
A sun-drenched Renaissance palace. Three women exist in an airy state of suspension, a liminal, responsibility-free bubble, where summer never ends. An enigmatic system fulfills all their needs - providing food, entertainment and a daily routine focused on wellness affirmations.
It’s surreal, angular and enigmatic. Trailer.
Josh Peters (prod: Didi, Josephine EP: The Last Showgirl) is producing a film at the BK film festival, which premiered at Sundance, If I Go Will They Miss Me.
Synopsis:
Twelve-year-old Lil Ant struggles to connect with his father when he begins to see surreal, almost spectral visions of boys drifting around his neighborhood. Their presence reveals a link between father and son, laying bare the threads that bind family, legacy, and place
Based on the 2022 short (video) won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize.
Nick Butler’s film Lunar Sway looks like Paris, Texas, with a Brooklyn vibe.
Synopsis:
Cliff is a young man looking for love in all the wrong places in a small desert town. When his birth mother, Marg, arrives unexpectedly they start to connect. But her secrets soon catch up with them.
There’s the longing western wide shots, the unspoken truth, and the reconnection to family. The neon-drenched night (trailer).
Mini Tidbits:
And a doc that really hits MÀQUINA about a father and son on a road trip where the dad’s alcoholism leads them to a psychedelic-assisted addiction treatment in Colorado. The trailer (above link) shows us a pretty raw vision for their relationship.
We love high school follow-up docs. From Iron Maidens to Prime’s Crime 101. And now we have Rocket Girl, which plays like the doc version of October Sky. What attracts people to these types of films?
There’s something harrowing about the animation in Your Attention Please. Maybe because it so abstractly and poignantly reflects the doom loop destructive, vacuum-like quality of social media. Featuring an interview with Tristan Harris (Center for Humane Technology).
INTERNATIONAL SPOTLIGHT
Two projects that caught our attention:
Synopsis:
The lonely 17-year-old outcast AIKE (Guus Blanken) craves attention and finds it online where he conducts dangerous chemistry experiments. Hoping to pull Aike out of his internet bubble, his mother (Jelka van Houten), a hardworking nurse,
1001 Frames (Premiere - Berlinale Panorama 2025)
Synopsis:
In the studio of a well-known director, female actors audition for the role of Scheherazade in “A Thousand and One Nights”. But the women gradually realize that the director has more in mind than just casting the leading role.
See the full list of 2026 Brooklyn films here.
Written and edited by Gabriel Miller.
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