Writer-director-star Amalia Ulman’s delightful and slyly dark breakthrough presents a captivating portrait in miniature of a mother and daughter barely scraping by in Spain’s northwestern seaside town Gijón.

Set in the Tamil regions of southern India, P.S. Vinothraj’s visceral feature debut tells the economical and anxious story of an impoverished, alcoholic man on a mission with his young son to retrieve his wife who has left him on account of his abusive behavior.

Featuring Sameh Alaa’s I Am Afraid to Forget Your Face, Tebogo Malebogo’s Heaven Reaches Down to Earth, Ana Elena Tejera’s A Love Song in Spanish, Manuela Eguía’s Hola, abuelo (Hi, Grandpa), Morgan Quaintance’s Surviving You, Always, and Livia Huang’s More Happiness.

In this continually surprising, stylistically wild road movie, a young singer-songwriter, reeling from a recent, mysterious trauma, suddenly finds kinship, or perhaps inspiration, in the brightly colored rainbow lobster on display in a tiny aquarium in her hotel lobby.

Australian director James Vaughan examines the fumbling, hesitant overtures of wayward young people seeking romantic and professional satisfaction in this structurally surprising film that gently pushes the boundaries of comic realism.

A hardworking Maltese fisherman is faced with an agonizing choice: whether to repair his leaky luzzu boat or instead cast his lot with a black-market operation in this gripping work of latter-day neorealism.

Belgrade-born, globe-hopping artist Iva Radivojević’s magical, unpredictable second feature is a labyrinthine vision inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges.

Debut feature filmmaker Christos Nikou finds unexpected slices of joy, pain, and eccentricity in this gently drawn dystopian vision about a man who falls victim to an ever-widening pandemic of amnesia.

Hawaii’s swirling, roiling flow of volcanic lava provides the anchor for this energetic, visually and sonically bold cinematic essay by experimental filmmaker Fern Silva, breaking temporal and generic boundaries to show viewers familiar worlds made alien.

Swiss director Andreas Fontana brings an astonishingly assured eye and a finely tuned sense of impassive anxiety to this gripping debut feature set in the cloistered world of high finance in Argentina in the 1970s.

A remarkable, rare combination of frightening and tender, Jane Schoenbrun’s accomplished narrative debut is a hypnotic and destabilizing tale of the fragility of online existence and the human capacity for change.

A German woman (played by the filmmaker’s own mother) dreams of spending time with her grown children, including her uncommunicative and elusive son who has been living for years in Hong Kong, in this gentle, ambiguous tale of becoming.

In this hauntingly oblique yet vivid moral drama, set in a rural Brazilian town, three characters’ lives are affected in different ways by the death of Madalena, a trans woman whose body is found in one of the vast soybean fields that stretch across the region.

Firouzeh Khosrovani’s profoundly immersive dual-portrait of her parents is a valuable document of the history of contemporary Iran and a loving and evocative reminder of the human-scale fragility beneath every epochal social movement.

A delightful meditation on young people’s discovery of the world around them, Short Vacation follows four girls (members of their school’s photography club) who decide to spend a bit of their summer holiday seeking out the very ends of the earth.

Dominican filmmaker Nino Martinez Sosa uses a prismatic storytelling approach to recount the legend of a farmer who disappeared from his village near the beginning of the 20 century, only to be resurrected as a figure of spiritual healing and political rebellion, in this consummate debut feature.

Salomé Jashi’s spellbinding, lyrical documentary follows a former Georgian prime minister and his heaven-and-earth-moving project to transport centuries-old trees from his country’s coastline to his own personal garden.

In her strikingly filmed black-and-white debut, Juja Dobrachkous crafts a story of transformation, tradition, and identity, concerning a model who is summoned home to her rural Georgian village for her grandmother’s funeral.

Featuring Denise Fernandes’ Nha Mila, Saulė Bliuvaitė’s Limousine, Ostin Fam’s Binh, Damian Kocur’s Beyond Is the Day, and Fernando Criollo’s Summits and Ashes.

Kateryna Gornostai’s penetrating study of the confusions and beauty of youth takes enormous emotional care as it observes a class of Ukrainian 11th graders over the course of one year.

In this nuanced, sophisticated, and wonderfully engaging documentary, filmmaker Alice Diop creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of people from largely Black and immigrant communities in the Parisian suburbs.

Mexican filmmaker Pablo Escoto Luna’s All the Light We Can See begins as the tale of a woman who runs off into the forest when forced to marry a bandit in some indeterminate past before revealing itself as a time-bending work of metaphysical beauty and folkloric power.

A work of visual awe and matter-of-fact spiritual inquiry, Dark Red Forest is a majestic documentary portrait that details the annual retreat of thousands of Tibetan nuns on the vast Tibetan Plateau.

In Greek filmmaker Jacqueline Lentzou’s boldly experimental, nakedly emotional feature debut, a twentysomething tentatively reunites with her estranged father after he is diagnosed with a debilitating illness.

A small town in southwestern Spain provides the setting for Ainhoa Rodríguez’s singular vision, a prismatic, alternately realist and uncanny rendering of lives in the rural Extremadura region.

In Kim Mi-jo’s searing drama, anchored by a multifaceted performance by Jeong Ae-hwa, a fish-market worker in her early 60s responds to her sexual assault by a coworker and the violent, misogynistic culture surrounding her.

Inspired by the legacies of neorealism, the Esiri brothers’ fluid and precise Eyimofe is a tale consisting of two parallel narratives, following a pair of characters trying to transcend their daily struggles in teeming Lagos.

Theo Anthony’s breakthrough sophomore feature uses the increased regularity of body cams in U.S. law enforcement as the anchor point for an ever-expanding treatise on perception, power, and policing.

In her hypnotic documentary feature, Ethopian-Mexican filmmaker Jessica Beshir explores the coexistence of everyday life and its mythical undercurrents, focusing on her hometown of Harar, its rural Oromo community of farmers, and the harvesting of the country’s most sought-after export: the euphoria-inducing khat plant.

5/2 at 2PM ET – Longtime former FLC program director Richard Peña will sit down virtually with Kleber Mendonça Filho to discuss the filmmaker’s singular narrative feature debut, Neighboring Sounds (ND/NF 2012), and his landscape-altering follow-ups, Aquarius (NYFF54) and Bacurau (NYFF57).

5/4 at 6PM ET – Founding ND/NF programmer and former senior film curator at MoMA Larry Kardish will chat with Ramin Bahrani about the director’s breakout feature, Man Push Cart (ND/NF 2006), and his multifaceted career, which includes producing ND/NF 2021 selection Luzzu.

5/7 at 6PM ET – Founding ND/NF programmer and current FLC board member Wendy Keys will moderate an extended conversation with Sara Driver about her acclaimed first feature, Sleepwalk (ND/NF 1987), and its place in Driver’s distinctive, idiosyncratic oeuvre.

Wim Wenders’s second feature, adapted from Peter Handke’s novel of the same name, is a tautly constructed, Hitchcockian tale of anomie and isolation about a goalkeeper enduring an existential crisis.

Charles Burnett’s deeply humanist follow-up to Killer of Sheep (1978) observes a man adrift, Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas), navigating friendship and familial obligation in South Central Los Angeles.

A landmark work of the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s and a lovers-on-the-run fever dream quite unlike any other, Gregg Araki’s third feature marked a visionary reinvention of the road movie, suffused with the ambient irony, despair, and anger in the wake of the AIDS crisis.

In Chantal Akerman’s fourth feature, a Belgian filmmaker on a promotional tour through a featureless northern Europe fluctuates between intimacy and disengagement with a series of figures, including a one-night stand, a former lover, and her distant mother.

Horace Ové’s wry satire, centering on a cricket match for charity between posh Suffolkers and a West Indian team from Brixton, is a never-less-than-entertaining send-up of cultural mores and a genuinely and incisively political examination of the state of multiculturalism in mid-’80s Britain.

Christopher Nolan’s wickedly clever feature debut charts the increasingly labyrinthine descent of a wannabe writer who spends his considerable free time tailing people, picked at random, through the streets of London.

A hypnotic and enigmatic ghost story derived from a Rajasthani folktale, Duvidha endures as a seminal contribution to the Indian cinema of the 1970s.

Twenty years after his film about a man murdered by police for organizing farm workers in northeast Brazil was shelved due to the 1964 military coup, Eduardo Coutinho returned to its material and crafted this prismatically reflexive, genre-defying essay on political commitment and life under dictatorship.

Among the most revered works of Cuban cinema, Humberto Solás’s masterful Lucía is a vast black-and-white triptych about three women negotiating their oppressive circumstances at three critical moments in Cuban history.

A beguiling and enigmatic nocturnal adventure set at the intersection of SoHo, Chinatown, and Tribeca, Sara Driver’s first feature begins in mundane daily life but imperceptibly drifts into the dreamlike realm of the trance film.

Lee Chang-dong displays an extraordinarily deft touch in interweaving complex historical events and private life, national trauma and personal failure in this melodrama about a man on the verge of suicide at a 20-year reunion with friends.