Patti Cake$, aka Killa P, is a burly and brash aspiring rapper with big plans to get out of Jersey. This raucous and fresh tale from first-time writer-director Geremy Jasper follows Patti from gas station rap battles to her shifts at the lonely karaoke bar with homegrown swagger and contagious energy.

Jérôme Reybaud’s fiction feature debut is a mysterious, humorous, and erotic road movie in which a man sets out without any clear destination, guided only by the connections he forges with strangers on a hookup app, with his lover in hot pursuit.

A self-involved couple initiates an elaborate ruse to alter the facts about how they came to have a family in this shrewd and visually accomplished social satire from Turkish filmmaker Mehmet Can Mertoglu.

Invigorating and ever surprising, Arábia recounts the story of ex-con and eternal optimist Cristiano, as he journeys across Brazil in search of work and self-knowledge.

Jang Woo-jin’s sophomore feature, a delicate tale of human connection about three strangers on a train from Seoul to Chuncheon, recalls Hong Sang-soo and Apichatpong Weerasethakul in its surprising structure and understated yet bravura long takes. Screens with Léthé (Dea Kulumbegashvili, 15m).

Chloé Robichaud’s stylish sophomore feature centers on three women trying to square their political careers with complicated personal lives amid negotiations over the untapped natural resources of a fictitious island country off the eastern coast of Canada.

In the beguiling, mysterious second feature by Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong, the story of a young film director researching a project about the 1976 massacre of Thai student activists at Thamassat University is just the beginning of a shape-shifting work of fictions within fictions.

Video artist Ancarani’s visually striking documentary, a sly meditation on the pursuit of idiosyncratic desires, follows wealthy Qatari sheikhs who moonlight as amateur falconers, with no expenses spared along the way.

Making his feature-length fiction debut, Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou renders the ecstasies and agonies of late youth with remarkable attention to detail in this stylish coming-of-age story.

Chance, emotion, and dreams determine the trajectories of two couples whose lives become unexpectedly entwined in this enigmatic film of mesmerizing shots and indelible gestures.

Best First Feature winner at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival, Wohlatz’s playful, assured debut concerns a Chinese teenager newly arrived in Argentina and enrolled in Spanish classes. As she learns the language’s conditional tense, she imagines a constellation of possible futures. Screens with Three Sentences About Argentina (Nele Wohlatz, 5m).

A true original, this provocative, grittily realist sports movie following a severely deformed and autistic man who lives to play petanque (a kind of lawn-bowling) is suffused with compassion and humor.

Uncannily melding fiction and documentary, Happiness Academy transports us to a retreat for the real-life Raelian Church for a humorous and enigmatic meditation on the peculiar ways in which people strive to give their lives meaning.

Alessandro Comodin’s sophomore feature, set deep in the northern Italian woods and drawing on local folklore, is the work of a true original.

A young woman enters into an arranged marriage—and a passionate affair with one of her new husband’s servants. This rousing parable about the price of freedom relocates Nikolai Leskov’s play Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District to Victorian England.

This sort-of biopic of Polish surrealist artist Zdzisław Beksiński and his eccentric family tracks the near-death experiences, psychodramatic blowouts, and brilliant artworks that emerged from all the sturm und drang.

Ala Eddine Slim’s mysterious, entrancing, dialogue-free film chronicles an unnamed man’s inadvertent journey into nature, speaking powerfully about both contemporary migration and the ancient struggle between man and nature.

Something like Woody Allen meets neorealism in Borough Park, Brooklyn, Joshua Z Weinstein’s feature debut is a poignant and funny parable concerning a hapless Hasidic widower struggling with his faith and his ability to raise for his ten-year-old son.

The funny and perceptive second feature by Ekvtimishvili and Gross follows a middle-aged woman as she aims to leave her husband and escape from her multi-generational, obligation-laden living situation.

This absorbingly intimate third feature by Julia Murat is a moving portrait of a couple—a male sculptor and a female dancer—caught between rivalry and the desire to build a future with each other.

A chronicle of eight years in the lives of an African-American family in Philadelphia, beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, Jonathan Olshefski’s documentary Quest is an absorbing vérité epic, rooted in today’s political realities.

Main competition winner at this year’s International Rotterdam Film Festival, this tense nocturnal thriller chronicles a long, bad trip taken by a young couple on the run.

A haunting and stylized investigation into the murder of a young Black man in 1992, Yance Ford’s gripping, achingly personal Strong Island tells one of the most remarkable stories in recent documentary cinema.

Set in the early 1990s as China settles into its new market economy, Dalei Zhang’s atmospheric debut feature is intimate and far-reaching, creating ripples of uncertainty from the microcosm of one family’s everyday life.

The second feature by Nepali filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar sensitively explores the damage done to the fabric of his nation’s society by the decade-long civil war between the Maoists and Nepal’s monarchical government.

In a mountainous corner of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, an age-old Xhosa ritual introducing adolescent boys to manhood continues to this day. This is the backdrop for the stark and stirring first feature by John Trengove.

An exciting and consummately made gangster picture with a pointed political resonance, Wùlu tracks the rise to power of a young van driver who adopts a life of crime as the 2012 Malian Civil War looms on the horizon.

The particular, at times peculiar, rhythms of work and everyday life fuel this selection of bold shorts from around the world: from Brooklyn to Athens, from Mozambique to Romania to India.

A medium-length musical excavating a tragic event in Chile and an experimental short about the different ways of looking at objects make up this unique pair.