Winner of the Venice International Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Lion, Audrey Diwan’s exceptionally well-observed breakthrough is an unsparing, gripping portrait of a young woman’s attempts to secure an illegal abortion in 1960s France.

This frantic, wildly engaging debut feature from Martine Syms lunges through 24 crucial yet wayward hours in the life of Palace (Syms’s fellow visual artist Diamond Stingily).

In her solo debut feature, director Malena Solarz takes a surprising, gentle, altogether gratifying approach to the coming-of-age genre.

Living together in a cramped city apartment, middle-aged single mother Su-kyung and her twentysomething daughter Yi-jung have long since settled into a relationship of simmering mutual resentment.

The large-scale 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and the subsequent crackdown on freedoms provide the urgent anchoring point for this remarkable vision from HK filmmaker Chan Tze Woon, a genre-defying plunge into the political morass that has been ever-widening between the former colony and the controlling Chinese state.

In her extraordinary feature debut which resulted in a Best Directing award in the International Competition at IDFA 2021, Vietnamese filmmaker Diễm Hà Lệ nestles her camera in with a family—members of the indigenous Hmong ethnic minority—living in the country’s northern mountainous region.

Using a radical, endlessly surprising narrative structure and a distinctive stylistic approach, Greek filmmakers Christos Passalis and Syllas Tzoumerkas tell of how the once-thriving Sephardic Jewish community in their native city of Thessaloniki was gradually decimated over the course of the violent 20th century.

One is unlikely to forget the subtle expressivity of Teresa Sánchez, winner of Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Award for Acting and mysterious camera subject of Juan Pablo González’s absorbing, immersive fiction feature debut.

Expertly weaving three seemingly disparate stories set in and around the city of Kigali, Rwandan filmmaker Kivu Ruhorahoza has constructed a rich, poignant story of loss and the various meanings of parentage.

Using a trove of the couple’s monumental, almost otherworldly 16mm footage, filmmaker Sara Dosa consummately constructs the narrative of their remarkable lives of world-famous volcanologists and lovers Katia and Maurice Krafft.

The everyday experiences of a divorced working mother desperately trying to make ends meet supply riveting, ferociously humane drama in Éric Gravel’s marvel of economical storytelling.

An unemployed young couple spirals into ever-escalating economic precarity in Park Song-yeol’s gripping, frequently amusing, and expertly written moral tale, fueled by the desperation of contemporary lower-middle-class living.

In this psychologically complex fable of displacement tinged with supernatural horror, Diop plays Aisha, a woman recently emigrated from Senegal who is hired to care for the adorable daughter of an unbalanced white couple (Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector) living in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood.

The memory of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore looms over this intimate drama of contemporary urban life, an intricately constructed mosaic of people dealing with loss and questions of basic human morality.

In this absorbing epic, Harari immerses the viewer in the true story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer who was stationed in the Philippines during WWII, and marooned there for nearly 30 years.

Skillfully doling out narrative information in scenes marked by elegant, sinister single takes, Bareiša has created a foreboding, yet ultimately hopeful portrait of people racked with unresolved anger.

This formally rigorous, breathlessly paced indictment of an abusive, protected patriarchal society is a tough-minded triumph from Bangladeshi filmmaker Abdullah Mohammad Saad.

Meticulously conceived and masterfully constructed, filmmaker Sierra Pettengill’s documentary exclusively employs archival footage to excavate the racist governmental crackdown on Black Americans in the late ’60s.

Filled with unshakable images, Robe of Gems weaves an ever-expanding web of characters deep in the Mexican countryside touched by violence, trauma, and daily rupture.

In her delicately composed, heartrending debut fiction feature, Majumdar recreates the cloistered world of a young girl growing up in a privileged household in India in the 1960s and her bond with her parents’ servant, Shankar.

In her poignant & thought-provoking documentary, Dongnan Chen follows the rise to national prominence of a Christian choir from the Miao community & how it was co-opted for government party propaganda.

Shô Miyake’s scrupulously studied portrait of a deaf boxer’s life, shot and set during the COVID pandemic, is an entirely physical experience, punctuated by moments of pure feeling.

In her absorbing and insightful feature debut, set largely over a few crucial days in Clara’s life, Pinske has created an acerbic drama about the interrelation of deep-seated class anxieties and personal neuroses.

In this deeply affecting and precisely detailed study of the familial and psychological effects of rapid industrial change, Neang creates a film of tactile vividness and otherworldly beauty set in his hometown of Phnom Penh.

Featuring Sara Szymańska’s Five Minutes Older, Marija Apcevska’s North Pole, Kim Torres’s Suncatcher, Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s Astel, Polen Ly’s Further and Further Away.

Featuring Maria Estela Paiso’s It’s Raining Frogs Outside Jasmin Tenucci’s August Sky Zou Jing’s Lili Alone. Chonchanok Thanatteepwong’s Crystallized Memory, Niranjan Raj Bhetwal’s The Eternal Melody, Tanmay Chowdhary and Tanvi Chowdhary’s Madhu.