One of the rarest items in this series, director Yolande du Luart’s documentary about legendary political activist Angela Davis began shooting in 1969, when she was a subject of increasing scrutiny after coming out as a Communist, provoking the ire of administrators and governor Ronald Reagan.

Varda’s casual, open-air portrait of the Black Panthers during her 1968 L.A. journey is made with delicacy, grace, and political urgency. This double bill moves eastward with a contemporaneous work by Varda’s comrade Chris Marker: his evocative essay on the October 1967 Mobilization to End the War demonstrations.

Bush Mama, by Ethiopian-born director Haile Gerima, about the experiences of a black mother living in Watts, is a signal achievement of the renaissance of African-American independent cinema that developed around UCLA in the 1970s. Preceded by Tomonari Nishikawa’s hand-processed, in-camera-edited Super-8 exploration of Manhattan’s architectural rhythms.

Nick Broomfield and co-director Sandi Sissel capture the everyday activities of the eponymous Nevada brothel and the people employed there in the first of several documentaries Broomfield has made about sex work in America.

One of Straub and Huillet’s supreme accomplishments—inspired by Kafka’s never-completed Amerika—follows a teenage immigrant from Europe who arrives to this strange new land rife with swindlers and hypocrites, though it was largely shot in Hamburg.

In Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier’s spellbinding deconstruction of sacred American values, a beautiful, seemingly naive fugitive named Grace (Nicole Kidman), on the run from gangsters, arrives at a small town in the Rocky Mountains, where she is first welcomed and then mistreated, a convenient scapegoat for their own moral shortcomings.

It’s January 1992, and conceptual artist Sophie Calle plans to travel cross-country to California, where she’s to begin teaching, and to symbolically bury her friend, the writer Hervé Guibert; she’s joined by her then-boyfriend Greg Shephard, and the two chart a course in his temperamental Cadillac. Preceded by video art pioneer Shigeko Kubota’s rather different kind of diary, chronicling a month-long stay in the Navajo Nation.

An FBI agent and a terrorist—played in highest octane by John Travolta and Nicolas Cage— surgically swap faces, each confronting a version of himself embodied by his adversary in John Woo’s action hit, which transpires on an alternate plane of sheer irrationality, offering unrelenting, highly stylized, and choreographed physical violence.

Raúl Ruiz’s first film made in the U.S. freely borrows from American police dramas and telenovelas in transforming downtown New York into a phantasmagorical labyrinth of noirish intrigues, inexplicable menace, and metaphysical quagmires.

Shot amidst the snowy expanses of the Dolomites, Sergio Corbucci’s spaghetti western is a genre outing like few others, a grim, grand, anti-capitalist allegory influenced by the deaths of Malcolm X and Che Guevara, and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Klaus Kinski.

Terence Davies’s exquisite adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel—an unsparing survey of the New York aristocracy at the turn of the 20th century—stars Gillian Anderson as the ill-fated Lily Bart, a well-born woman who watches her social status slowly crumble as she refuses to marry for money.

In How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck, Werner Herzog visits the World Championship of Livestock Auctioneers in New Holland, Pennsylvania, where contestants compete in feats of tongue-twisting verbal dexterity; in God’s Angry Man he profiles L.A. televangelist Gene Scott, for whom faith is big business.

After learning about the brutal murder of a young woman in her neighborhood, an English professor (Meg Ryan) begins an affair with one of the investigating police detectives (Mark Ruffalo) in Jane Campion’s adaptation of the novel by Susanna Moore, which renders the erotic thriller with a haunting, meditative gaze.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg director Jacques Demy’s tenure in Hollywood would begin and end with this, one of his most underrated pictures, starring Gary Lockwood as an aspiring architect and full-time layabout in Los Angeles who comes face-to-face with his own mortality when he learns he’s been called in for the draft.

A trio of distinctive works made by young expats in ’70s New York: Chantal Akerman’s plangent News from Home, wherein precisely composed street scenes are paired with recited letters from the filmmaker’s mother in Belgium; Manuel DeLanda’s Ism Ism, in which he elaborately defaces subway advertisements, grafting bits of one model’s face onto another to yield charmingly grotesque collages; and Guerillère Talks by Super-8 luminary Vivienne Dick, assembled as a suite of portraits featuring different women from Dick’s downtown demimonde.

Wim Wenders’s emotionally overwhelming, Palme d’Or–winning odyssey stars Harry Dean Stanton as a lonely amnesiac seeking out his estranged wife and son, and Nastassja Kinski giving what might be her finest performance to date.

J.P. Gorin’s utterly beguiling documentary feature was inspired by a news item about twin girls, Grace and Virginia Kennedy, believed to be communicating in a language of their own invention; Gorin casts his amused yet penetrating gaze on the family’s lean economic situation and the mass-media cult intent on exploiting their story.

Alain Resnais’s first film in English, featuring John Gielgud, is a “documentary about imagination,” set on a Victorian-era estate known as Providence; inside we’re privy to the fevered dreams and emotional reckonings of an aging writer whose body is succumbing to cancer.

In this probing essay film, German filmmaker Farocki appropriates the internal surveillance recordings of the U.S. prison system, considering the far-reaching architecture of social control, and making visible an America designed to be hidden.

Shot in a documentary style, with non-actors cast partly according to their political sympathies, Watkins’s dystopian fantasy imagines a near-future where due process in America has been suspended as a response to increasing civil unrest, and the fates of political dissidents are instead determined by tribunal.

Nomi, a tough-as-nails drifter with a go-it-alone attitude and a murky past, arrives in Las Vegas and fights her way up from stripper in a sleazy club to star showgirl. Unbound by musty notions of “good taste,” Showgirls goes further than any other film of the 1990s in its orgiastic depiction of consumerism, crass spectacle, and the dark side of the American dream.

In The Sky on Location, French-born Babette Mangolte, feeling the pull of the American West, sets out to map the region through its shifting seasonal palette, resulting in a chromatic geography of the landscape as well as a keen-eyed meditation on its history. Preceded by Ute Aurand’s lyrical portrait of America To Be Here.

German director Werner Schroeter drove out to a ghost town near Rosamond known as Willow Springs, where in just two weeks he shot a film about a trio of women who rob and kill men who pass through their remote corner of the Mojave. Preceded by Laida Lertxudi’s gnomic, emotionally charged Footnotes to a House of Love, likewise set in a desolate, sun-soaked locale.

Sylvia Chang’s Xiao Yu centers upon a young garment worker who’s come to New York from China to be with her boyfriend and enters into a green card marriage with an alcoholic writer. Preceded by Jonas Mekas’s Williamsburg, Brooklyn, composed of some of the very first images he shot in America, conjuring the atmospheres of his newfound immigrant milieu.

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s infamous, spectacular counterculture studio production, a student radical finds himself on the run after a violent clash with the police, escaping to Death Valley in a stolen plane.

An-My Lê’s installation 29 Palms, part of a larger project about a California military base where service members train for combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, is as an elegant black-and-white diptych, a portrait of troops rehearsing America’s imperial project abroad.

The Otolith Group’s Medium Earth takes the shape of an audiovisual essay on the anthropocene, specifically the parched terrain of California, the human interventions which engineer its environment, and the awesome forces at play beneath its surface.

Join Another Country co-organizers Thomas Beard and Shanay Jhaveri (editor of America: Films from Elsewhere) for a wide-ranging discussion of the series, the representation of America by foreign and immigrant auteurs, and more.