Barry Jenkins’s three-part narrative spans the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of a gay African-American man who survives Miami’s drug-plagued inner city, finding love in unexpected places and the possibility of change within himself.

Shot in luscious sepia tones, Barry Jenkins’s feature debut—with Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins as hipsters whose one-night stand stretches into a 24-hour odyssey through the city—considers what it means to be young, black, and bohemian in rapidly gentrifying San Francisco.

This retelling of Billy Budd, set among a troop of Foreign Legionnaires, is one of Denis and Godard’s finest collaborations: a sensuously photographed story of misplaced longing and frustrated desire.

Nagisa Ôshima returned, fourteen years after his previous feature, Max mon amour, with a final film. Set in a 19th century samurai school, Gohatto concerns an impossibly handsome new recruit (Ryûhei Matsuda) who spreads trouble and desire through the ranks of enlisted men and officers alike.

Filmed entirely in the German-derived Plautdietsch language, Silent Light weaves a poetic and affecting tale of marital and spiritual crisis, revolving around the affair of a married farmer as his wife suffers, knowingly, in silence. An NYFF45 selection.

This rapturously beautiful 2005 feature by Hou Hsiao-hsien is a triumph about the melancholy play of time and memory. The action is broken into three different love stories set in different eras—a 1966 pool hall, a prosperous 1911 brothel, and contemporary Taipei—but starring the same leads, the impossibly glamorous Shu Qi and Chang Chen.