Mia Hansen-Løve made her feature debut with this sensitive chronicle of estrangement, redemption, and the indissoluble parent-child bond, in which a man’s self-loathing and addiction take their toll on his wife and young daughter.

Alice Rohrwacher’s extraordinarily impressive debut feature chronicles 13-year-old Marta’s private duel with the Church in the small seaside Calabrian town to which she, her mother, and older sister have just moved from Switzerland.

Portuguese fabulist Miguel Gomes explores the bitter realities of adulthood and the eternal wonder of youth in this imaginatively loopy, anything-goes take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Nonprofessional actor Dore Mann plunges himself into the role of a self-described “troll” who lives with an arrogant roommate in a wretched Brooklyn apartment and sells disability benefit coupons door-to-door in Ronald Bronstein’s film, shot with a tiny crew and a ragtag style on 16mm.

An elementary-school teacher moves to a new city to start over following a breakup, but shoots herself in the foot at every turn in The Forest for the Trees, which announced the arrival of Maren Ade’s idiosyncratic cinematic perspective.

The film that kickstarted the DIY revolution known as “Mumblecore,” Andrew Bujalski’s wry portrait of post-college aimlessness and ennui is the prototype for the lo-fi audiovisual style and realer-than-real life naturalism that would define the movement.

Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning horror phenomenon gave American viewers a powerful racial allegory for the ages, sending Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris to a terrifying white suburban enclave that seems intent on capturing his body and soul for some unknown purpose.

Jennifer Kent’s visually stunning horror debut—in which a young widow and her disturbed 7-year-old son are haunted by the sudden presence of a sinister children’s book—reminds us that the things that go bump in the night may be buried deep inside our psyches, not just in the basement.

Shot on black-and-white 16mm, and featuring original songs by Justin Hurwitz, Damien Chazelle’s first film is a resourceful, low-budget Boston-set musical about a jazz trumpeter with a wandering eye and his introverted, out-of-work ex-girlfriend.

Shot in luscious sepia tones, Barry Jenkins’s feature debut—with Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins as hipsters whose one-night stand stretches into a 24-hour odyssey through the city—considers what it means to be young, black, and bohemian in rapidly gentrifying San Francisco.

Thick with incident and ironic twists, this novelistic, endlessly engrossing experience from the director of La Flor plays out as a series of nested Borgesian narratives that zigzag across different characters, locations, and genres.

Unfolding within the unfree time between casual jobs, Eduard Williams’s wildly original rumination on labor and leisure in the global digital economy seems to take place in both the immediate present and the far horizon of the foreseeable future.

Friends Theresa, a German, and Josefina, an Argentinian, spend a weekend together on the North Sea, taking long walks on the beach and stopping at snack stands. Eventually they separate and the film gives way to a transfixing and delicate meditation on the poetics of space.

One of the all-time great debut films, La Ciénaga announced the arrival of Lucrecia Martel, a daring new voice in Argentine cinema, and constituted a mesmerizing portrait of the privileged class far gone in decay, unanchored from religion, nature, marital or blood ties.

Over the course of 23 carefully choreographed shots, we watch young filmmaker Liu Jiayin, her parents, and their cat act out a thinly fictionalized version of the life they share in a cramped Beijing apartment, where her father makes leather handbags.

The landmark feature debut by Lisandro Alonso chronicles the stark facts and repetitive actions of the largely solitary existence of a young woodcutter in the Argentinean pampas.

Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light) first emerged on the international film landscape with this visually intoxicating tale of a suicidal man from Mexico City who finds renewed love and desire when he meets an elderly village woman; Japón reaches for the sublime as it ponders sex, suffering, and spirituality.

In Apichatpong’s first feature—part road movie, part folkloric exercise, part surrealist party game—a camera crew travels through Thailand asking villagers to invent episodes in an ever-expanding story that ends up incorporating witches, tigers, surprise doublings, and impossible reversals.

A country doctor is concerned for the well-being of his nephew, Weiwei, whom he believes his thug brother intends to sell; Weiwei soon vanishes, and Chen sets out to find him. Bi Gan’s endlessly surprising shape-shifter comes to assume the uncanny quality of a waking dream as it poetically and mysteriously interweaves the past, present, and future.

A young girl comes home one day to an empty house, her mother mysteriously missing, in this unsettlingly ambiguous anti–fairy tale.

Anocha Suwichakornpong (By the Time It Gets Dark) debuted with this beautiful and narratively digressive film that’s ostensibly about a filmmaker paralyzed after an accident and the male nurse taking care of him, but morphs into a dazzling existential odyssey.

In his thrilling debut, Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius) delves into the lives of a group of prosperous middle-class families residing on a quiet street in Recife, close to a low-income neighborhood.

Portugal’s João Pedro Rodrigues The Ornithologist has gone on to be one of the most exciting, unabashedly queer directors working today, and his invigoratingly kinky debut O Fantasma is a grimy psychosexual odyssey and a deeply felt howl of queer anguish and alienation.

A boldly conceived drama pivoting on the initially unrelated activities of an elite anti-terrorist police unit and some wealthy young anarchists, Policeman is the striking first feature from Israeli director Nadav Lapid, a powerfully physical film in its depiction of the muscular, borderline sensual way the macho cops relate to one another.

On December 22, 2005, a group of characters commemorate the 16th anniversary of Ceausescu’s fall. What seems like a formally simple and straightforward story is actually a sophisticated and wryly funny reflection on the scope of the Romanian Revolution of 1989 that ended communism in Romania.

Few American debuts of the 21st century have been bolder than this lo-fi sci-fi by multi-hyphenate auteur Shane Carruth, in which a circle of anonymous, white-shirt scientists turn their suburban garage into a time-travel portal.

Haunted by visions of a doomsday rabbit, a troubled teen spirals through alternate realities in Richard Kelly’s darkly funny sci-fi classic of fractured identities and millennial angst.

In the 2007 debut from Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir), middle-aged, discontented Anna decides to spend her summer holiday apart from her husband, in Tuscany with her friends, only to find herself more attuned to their teenage children. Tom Hiddleston co-stars.

The celebrated debut of Ulrich Köhler (In My Room, NYFF56) is a minimalist portrait of a young German soldier named Paul (Lennie Burmeister) who goes AWOL and returns to his childhood home in the countryside.

Join us to discuss the leading voices of this pivotal era in cinema and how they have changed the landscape.