Kleber Mendonça Filho’s ‘South of Tehran’ Featuring Jafar Panahi to Premiere at New York Film Festival

South of Tehran, a new short film by Kleber Mendonça Filho featuring Iranian director Jafar Panahi, made during the 63rd New York Film Festival in 2025, will world premiere at the 64th New York Film Festival.

In the eight-minute South of Tehran, Jafar Panahi recalls the cinephilia of his youth from the surreal remove of the 2025 New York Film Festival, where his It Was Just an Accident screened alongside Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (both were later nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 2026 Academy Awards). Crosscutting glimpses of Tehran as seen through a windshield in Panahi’s Taxi with 16mm footage of NYC movie palaces past and present, South of Tehran is a prismatic reflection on moviegoing and memory, an urban ghost tour. The film is produced by Emilie Lesclaux.

The film is the first in a new annual initiative titled NYFF Encounters, a new annual commissioning program that invites one filmmaker with a film in the New York Film Festival to create an original short during the course of the festival. Selected by the festival’s Artistic Director and programming team, the participating filmmaker will produce a short film shot at least in part at NYFF. The completed work will premiere at the following year’s festival, creating an ongoing artistic dialogue across editions of NYFF.

NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim said, “The New York Film Festival is, above all, a place of encounter—among filmmakers, audiences, films, and the city itself. We invite each commissioned filmmaker to capture that spirit while leaving the choice of subject and style up to them. Our hope is that these films become lasting records of the spontaneous, stimulating moments that are central to the festival experience and, over time, form a historical archive as significant as our iconic poster collection.”

“I love the fact that my next film was suggested by Dennis Lim, much like a challenge,” said Mendonça Filho. “I accepted the challenge and got to shoot a little film at NYFF last year with the wonderful Jafar Panahi. Happy to screen it at NYFF this year. Thank you, Dennis.”

The NYFF Encounters project takes its inspiration from a four-minute short film by Agnès Varda, Pier Paolo Pasolini — Agnès Varda — New York — 1967, shot when the two legendary filmmakers were in town for the 4th New York Film Festival in 1966. Varda trained her 16mm camera on Pasolini one day as the two of them walked through the crowds of midtown Manhattan. She later edited the footage together with Pasolini’s wide-ranging reflections on filmmaking, belief, and the nature of reality. (The elements of the film were discovered in 2021, after Varda’s death, and the restoration has since played widely, including on the Criterion Channel and at the 61st New York Film Festival in 2023, where it was paired with new features by Mendonça Filho and Alice Rohrwacher and new restorations of short films by Man Ray with original music by Jim Jarmusch’s band Sqürl.)

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center in partnership with Rolex, NYFF64 will take place from September 25 through October 12.