Sebastian Stan delivers an ingeniously embodied performance as Edward, an aspiring actor with severe facial disfigurement who jumps at the chance for a new lease on life. Aaron Schimberg’s hotly anticipated third feature is a social satire that wrangles thorny questions of identity and authenticity with slyly virtuosic storytelling flair.

The bewilderment of the early days of COVID is given a manic queer twist in Theda Hammel’s propulsive, brilliantly discombobulating comedy set in Brooklyn in the summer of 2020, evoking the hapless rules of engagement in the ever-shifting borders of queer politics.

The innovatively conceived and constructed feature debut from Chinese filmmaker Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang takes place entirely within the overwhelming, majestically artificial confines of the vertical “Global Harbor” shopping mall in Shanghai, where pairs of strangers nurse or run from romantic crushes on each other.

Writer-director Elene Naveriani’s third feature tells the funny, tender, and erotic story of 48-year-old Etero (Eka Chavleishvili), an unmarried shopkeeper in a Georgian village who is mocked as a spinster by her gossipy friends even as she secretly carries on a torrid affair with a married man.

Widowed 70-year-old schoolteacher Blaga (a brilliant Eli Skorcheva) falls prey to a frightening telephone scam, setting off a chain of events in a tautly conceived thriller that skillfully captures the feeling of a bleak post-Communist society beset by corruption.

Personal and political histories are ever-present in this tender yet commanding feature debut by Pham Ngoc Lân, in which Mrs. Nguyên (Minh Châu) returns to her Vietnamese hometown to spread the ashes of her estranged husband and reconnect with her niece, Vân (Hà Phuong), resentful of her aunt’s absence.

This micro portrait of two individuals finding comfort in each other’s company follows Zeca (Renato Novaes), whose job, body, and mind have all gone out of whack, and Louisa (Grace Passô), his colleague at a local school, as the pair spend a few impromptu hours together outside of work.

At midlife, three high school friends appear in a peculiar love triangle, unclear if they are grappling with unresolved desires from the past or repressed yearnings of the present in Singaporean director Nelson Yeo’s debut feature.

One of the contemporary art world’s most important painters, Titus Kaphar brings the same sense of profoundly felt dynamism to his startlingly accomplished cinematic debut, Exhibiting Forgiveness, a wrenching work of emotional depth and visual flair starring the magnificent André Holland as a painter wrestling with the scars of his childhood after his father’s sudden return.

A minor confrontation between a high school senior and a teacher during the student’s final exams becomes a talking point in an escalating generational and political conflict in Gábor Reisz’s gripping drama about the anxieties of living in a contemporary world beset by political side-taking.

Spanish artist and curator Víctor Iriarte’s debut feature unfolds across four epistolary chapters, following middle-aged Vera (Lola Dueñas) as she emerges from a years-long search for the biological son whom she gave up for adoption at birth.

A seemingly small incident has monumental implications in the extraordinary feature debut of India Donaldson, in which high school senior Sam (a revelatory Lily Collias) joins her father (James Le Gros) and his longtime buddy (Danny McCarthy) on a tense weekend camping trip in the Catskills.

Two young women, Güte (Clara Schwinning) and Margarita (Céline De Gennaro), eke out a living in a remote, sparsely inhabited farming village as radio broadcasts describe an unfolding global crisis—and count down to the launch of a spacecraft that might save humanity—in Katharina Huber’s feature filmmaking debut.

A father and daughter duo traverse the backroads of rural Russia in a rusted, rambling van in Ilya Povolotsky’s debut fiction feature. Clandestine DVD sales, fleeting sexual encounters, and checkpoint-avoiding detours signal the outlaw lifestyle these two share as they slowly, inevitably drift apart.

The unwelcome intrusion of law and society in affairs of the heart is a story grippingly told in writer-director Selman Nacar’s sophomore feature, following 24 stressful hours in the life of a Turkish criminal lawyer torn between her allegiances to her murder-suspect client, her convalescent mother, and the judge, a man of questionable principles.

Ukrainian-Canadian documentarian Oksana Karpovych charts a photojournalistic course across Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion, pairing fragments of intercepted conversations between Russian soldiers and their families back home with observational footage capturing the unsettled aftermath of occupation.

In a home perched high in the wooded hills outside Taipei, aging married couple Khim-Hok (Jason King) and Siu-Tuan (Yang Kuei-Mei) bicker, gripe, and commiserate, inhabiting the familiar rhythms of a well-trod daily routine—until a sudden death throws their world into a state of muted disarray.

In Serbian filmmaker Vladimir Perišić’s compelling coming-of-age story, 15-year-old Stefan (Jovan Ginić), a teenager in mid-’90s Serbia, has begun to notice a harrowing chasm opening between the way he idealizes his mother (Jasna Đuričić) and how many of his fellow classmates and citizens have begun to see her in her role as the public spokesperson for president Slobodan Milošević.

A blistering performance by Yara de Novaes, volatile and poignant all at once, is the magnetic centerpiece of Brazilian filmmaker Pedro Freire’s passionate and intensely moving feature debut about a free-spirited actress constantly at odds with the world and herself.

Filmmaker Shahab Mihandoust’s portrait of the fishing industry in Iran’s Khuzestan province—home to Abadan, the first oil company-town in the Middle East and a site of mass destruction and migration during the Iran-Iraq War—is at once an immersive process film about labor and a rich, sensorial account of a former combat zone reorganized by decades of industrialization.

Merit navigates a rapidly deteriorating relationship with her girlfriend Eva while rehearsing a play with her ex-husband in Katharina Lüdin’s penetrating feature debut, which interrogates love and art with a singular expressiveness, embodying the mercurial nature of romantic relationships in all their contradictory facets—hope and despair, joy and cruelty.

When Koffi (Marc Zinga) and his white Belgian fiancée Alice (Lucie Debay) embark on a family reconciliation trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the kinetic chaos of their return voyage sets the stage for a visceral reimmersion tale.

In Francisco Rodríguez Teare’s form-defying feature debut, the maybe-true tale of thief Alberto Candia, who stole priceless ancient artifacts from a cathedral in Cádiz, Spain, provides the unstable center of an absorbing inquiry into mythmaking.

Catalan writer-director Laura Ferrés’s alternately tender, clever, and mysterious debut feature mixes realism with melodrama in the story of a fiftysomething casting director who unwittingly befriends the woman who gave birth to and abandoned her as a teenager.

Told in elliptical fashion and moving to a surreal rhythm all its own, director Alberto Gracia’s grimy and dazzlingly dissonant vision takes place in the port city of Ferrol, where Damian, unkempt and barely scraping by, becomes the inexplicable victim of mistaken identity.

This program of short films features Rachel Gutgarts’s Via Dolorosa (France), Shuli Huang’s Goodbye First Love (U.S.), Inês Teixeira’s Shimmering Bodies (Portugal), Aliha Thalien’s Nos Îles (France), and Fatima Kaci’s The Voice of Others (France).

This program of short films features Lei Lei’s Break no. 1 & Break no. 2, Juliana Zuluaga Montoya’s The night of the minotaur, Sebastian Molina Ruiz’s Kill ’Em All, Lou Fauroux’s The Porn Selector, and Cameron Worden’s Digital Devil Saga.