The sensational winner of the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival is a wildly entertaining and continually revealing immersion into a week-long annual program in which a thousand Texas high school seniors gather for an elaborate mock exercise: building their own state government.

Sergio is a dapper widower in his early eighties who gets hired by a private detective to go undercover in a nursing home. His investigative journey yields unexpected emotional results in this clever, entirely unexpected delight, which weds a spy movie conceit to an observational documentary framework.

Nimble Canadian filmmaker Kazik Radwanski dives headlong into the daily struggles of Anne (a sensational Deragh Campbell), a young daycare worker in Toronto whose seemingly steady life gives way to increasing anxiety and recklessness. This is a cleansing emotional experience that coaxes our compassion for a difficult, complicated character.

Set five years into the future, this all-too-real dystopia, set in the wartorn Donbass in Eastern Ukraine, follows Sergiy, a Ukrainian soldier suffering from PTSD as he tries to restart his life amongst these scourged, uninhabitable lands.

In a poignant and tersely funny domestic drama that moves to its own special rhythms, first-time feature filmmaker Shannon Murphy achieves an impressive tonal balancing act, distinctively capturing the wild ups and intense downs in the life of a teenage girl (Little Women’s Eliza Scanlen) who knows she doesn’t have long to live.

This mesmerizing debut feature from Chinese filmmaker Zheng Lu Xinyuan—winner of the Rotterdam Film Festival’s top prize—is an autobiographically tinged portrait of a 22-year-old woman drifting through her days and nights after returning to her hometown to celebrate the New Year with her parents, and unable to let go of her past.

In October 2015, a devastating fire broke out at the Bucharest nightclub Colectiv, killing 27 people that night; in the following weeks, while the country was still reeling, nearly 40 more people who had suffered burns and other injuries died in hospital. What begins as a seeming exposé into a tragic accident gradually turns into something deeper and more shocking in this heartrending and revelatory documentary.

A former criminal and cult member living under cloak of night in the crevices and corners of the Colombian city of Medellín makes his way back into civilization, yet is gripped by a shadowy past, in this first feature from Camilo Restrepo, a work of off-handed, fragmented beauty.

South Africa-raised filmmaker Teboho Edkins’s remarkable documentary—looking at an emerging and competitive global trade relationship—starts in the Chinese port city of Guangzhou and moves to Lesotho, a mountainous, landlocked region in the middle of South Africa. This expansive and immersive work of nonfiction redefines the rules of the “western” genre.

Factory workers Paloma (Paloma Petra) and Lobo (Armando Hernandez) share a tender, loving relationship, though as their story unfolds it grows ever clearer that something from long ago is obstructing their happiness. The terrors of the past haunt the present in the astonishing debut feature from Mexican filmmaker Carlos Lenin.

Taking its title from a renowned 14th-century Chinese scroll painting, this debut feature from Gu Xiaogang is a panoramic evocation of one year in the life of a provincial family, shot over the course of two years—the declared first in a trilogy of films about life along the Yangtze River.

In her first feature, Brazilian director Maya Da-Rin centers on the working and home lives of a father and daughter of indigenous Desana descent who have moved from their community to the northwestern city of Manaus. The film is at once realist and mythic, modern and spiritual.

A finely observed burgeoning romance between an ethnologist in her late thirties (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and a laborer in his twenties (Jakub Gierszal) is set against a rapidly changing landscape in Anna Sofie Hartmann’s spare and humane portrait of the dissolving boundaries of our ever more globalized world.

Middle-aged Magdalena (Mercedes Hernandez) has lost contact with her son after he took off for the U.S. border to find work. Desperate to find out what happened to him, she embarks on an ever-expanding and increasingly dangerous journey to discover the truth. Fernanda Valadez has crafted a lyrical, suspenseful slow burn, equally constructed of moments of beauty and horror.

Set in a desolate landscape in which people and their dogs, cats, and fish live together in a kind of liminal state, Greek director Janis Rafa’s first film, a top prizewinner at this year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival, surveys the grim but matter-of-fact day-to-day lives of a young, unfettered couple who work for a crematorium service.

An evocative and atmospheric transmission from wintry Utah, this impressive new work of American independent cinema is a compact, economical portrait of a husband and father trying to keep it together while seething with rage during a trial separation from his wife.

A highly unorthodox documentary that has the feel of a precious heirloom, this impressionistic yet emotionally rich generational saga finds Portuguese filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos sifting through the memories and dreams of her ancestors.

A personal conflict between brothers escalates into a political, religious, and moral crisis in the gripping debut from Senegalese filmmaker Mamadou Dia, winner of the Best First Feature award at the Locarno Film Festival.

A day-in-the-life portrait expands into something else entirely in this patient yet ultimately startling sophomore breakthrough from Tamil filmmaker Arun Karthick, which takes place in Coimbatore, a town in Tamil Nadu, where a small Muslim community lives alongside the Hindu population.

Spanish filmmaker Lois Patiño is singularly brilliant at creating transfixing ghostly images of enormous power. With Red Moon Tide, he has made his most haunting film yet, a journey into a phantom world, set on Spain’s Galician coast, where Rubio, a diver who retrieved bodies from shipwrecks, has gone missing.

Set in totalitarian Czechoslovakia in 1980, Servants takes place at a Catholic seminary that is being put under increasing pressure by the ruling Communist party to fall in line. Slovak filmmaker Ivan Ostrochovsky turns a politically fraught moment in his nation’s history into a spare, tense morality tale that moves like a thriller.

A visually entrancing fable with a core of steel, Pushpendra Singh’s The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs centers on the unforgettable Laila, a ferociously independent young Bakarwal woman who wants to be free to make her own decisions in a modernizing world.

Ben Whishaw commands the center of every frame in the propulsive feature debut of British filmmaker Aneil Karia, a drama about a young man’s mental breakdown that takes off as if from a slingshot and never lets up.

Austrian director Sandra Wollner’s eerily placid work of science fiction—which begins as though a summer idyll in an isolated forest house between a middle-aged man (Dominik Warta) and what appears to be his adolescent daughter (Lena Watson)—becomes a disturbing, unsentimental vision of the fracturing effects of technology on human life and memory.

In her fiction debut, which she also wrote and co-stars in, French documentary filmmaker Nadège Trebal masters a series of radical tonal shifts for a wildly entertaining, sexually unapologetic portrait of a couple contending with economic instability and the fight to maintain equality in their relationship.

In his intensely moving middle-aged queer romance, first-time feature filmmaker Filippo Meneghetti casts Martine Chevallier and the legendary Barbara Sukowa as Madeleine and Nina, two women who live in the same apartment building and have been carrying on a love affair in secret for decades.

Enter a world of the unexpected in this exceptional surrealist debut from Uruguayan poet and filmmaker Alex Piperno, a delightful fantasia for our moment in which doors never lead to where they’re supposed to and the world is a lot smaller than it appears.

Featuring Sonia K. Hadad’s Exam, Agustina San Martin’s Monster God, Wong Ping’s Wong Ping’s Fables 2, Rajee Samarasinghe’s The Eyes of Summer, and Dorian Jespers’s Sun Dog.

Featuring Agustina Comedi’s Playback, Steffen Goldkamp’s After Two Hours, Ten Minutes Had Passed, Simon Liu’s Happy Valley, Arda Çiltepe’s Black Sun, and Keisha Rae Witherspoon’s T.