One of the discoveries of the 2011 Cannes Critics Week, Pablo Giogelli’s road movie with a difference takes a 900-mile trip from Asunción in Paraguay to Buenos Aires in the company of Rubén, a gruff, taciturn truck driver and the two illegal immigrants—a young woman, and her new-born daughter—he is reluctantly transporting.

Anca Damian’s documentary utilizes hand drawn, cutout and collage animation techniques, combined with some very dark humor to create a striking documentary about a young Romanian’s hunger strike in a Polish jail.

The original title, which translates as “stories that only exist when remembered,” beautifully expresses the theme and core sentiment of Julia Murat’s poetic rendering of the fictive town of Jotuomba. A magical confluence of generations and cultures is occasioned by the visit of Rita, a young photographer, to this place where time has seemingly stood still and life is rooted in the fixed roles of tradition soon to be rendered obsolete. A Film Movement release.

Twilight Portrait is a powerhouse collaboration co-written and co-produced by Angelina Nikonova, who directed, and Olga Dihovichnaya, who stars in this very dark, provocative and constantly surprising debut feature film. In a modern Russian city where corruption, apathy and class warfare are the norm, a woman is raped, rather casually, by the police. What follows explodes the conventions of sexual politics—and will certainly have filmgoers talking.

Daylight lingers at the end of August in Oslo, but sunlight is not a friend to Anders, a semi-recovered addict, facing a new life, which may not be appealing without former habits. Adapted from the same novel as Louis Malle’s The Fire Within (1963), Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st follows Anders as he tries to adjust—making love, wandering through Oslo, having a job interview, seeing old friends, and trying to get comfortable with his situation. A Strand Releasing Film.

The consummate agent-provocateur—his method fittingly described as “Graham Greene meets Borat”—Brügger (The Red Chapel, NDNF 2010) shocks and mightily entertains by performing an artistic intervention in reality using role-playing and hidden cameras to expose an awful truth about life in central Africa.

The remarkably assured directorial debut from veteran Austrian actor Karl Markovics (The Counterfeiters) creates a slipstream between the perilousness of youth and the inevitability of death as it tells the story of an inmate at a juvenile detention center whose last hope of parole rests on his ability to hold down a job… as a morgue assistant. A Kino Lorber release.

Rumored to have been shot for about $200, Donoma announces the arrival of an intriguing new talent on the French scene, Haitian-born, Paris based Djinn Carrénard. Devised, shot (often guerrilla-style) and edited over a period of years, the film is a choral piece that chronicles the romantic destinies of three women, offering a fresh, funny portrait of an emerging French generation.

Directed, photographed, and edited by the talented and ambitious 24-year-old Kubrick, Fear and Desire was written by his high school classmate, Howard Sackler, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in playwriting. Some Kubrick scholars see this wartime drama of five soldiers behind enemy lines and their encounter with a native woman as a dry run for Paths of Glory; others see it as the original to the second half of Full Metal Jacket. A Kino Lorber release.

Emad Burnat’s and Guy Davidi’s documentary began five years ago in the Palestinian town of Bil’in when Burnat bought a camera to record the birth of his son Gibreel. Gibreel’s arrival, however, coincided with a period of great unrest in the area, which is witnessed by five video cameras, each subsequently damaged by bullets or rocks. A Kino Lorber release.

In his feature film debut, Adam Leon has created a raucous, car-less road trip that is an homage to street-smart kids and New York City. Malcolm and Sofia, two determined teens from the Bronx, are the ultimate graffiti writers. When their latest masterpiece is wiped out by a rival gang, they must hustle, steal and scheme to get spectacular revenge and become the biggest graffiti writers in the city.

Sacha Polak’s Hemel features Hannah Hoekstra as a strong-willed, complicated, and vulnerable heroine who longs (perhaps too much) to connect with her elusive father and ultimately find herself. The film is a powerful investigation of a sexually-empowered woman and her search for physical and intellectual intimacy.

Pierre Schöller’s political thriller focuses on a cabinet minister (Olivier Gourmet) in charge of national transportation who believes himself to be a man of the people. He wants both to be and do good, but in order to get anything done he must, given the exigencies of compromise, cajole, bend and even betray.

A thrilling debut from a breakout talent, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds delves into the lives of a group of prosperous middle-class families residing on a quiet street, close to a low-income neighborhood. A private security firm hired to police the street becomes the catalyst for an exploration of the neighbors’ discontents and anxieties, which are exacerbated by a palpable sense of unease over their society’s troubled past and present inequities.

A quiet tale about the search for integrity and the perfect mushroom, Jason Cortlund’s and Julia Halperin’s Now, Forager follows Lucien and Regina, an urban couple living off the land foraging for fungi in upstate New York with a dream of following the seasonal emergence of exotic varieties across the country. That is, until Regina’s decision to take a job in the kitchen of a hip restaurant offers a more solid opportunity, even as it betrays Lucien’s off-the-grid ethos.

Actor-turned-director Roschdy Zem’s Omar Killed Me tells a story of racism, politics, and injustice with the clarity of a documentary and the pacing of a thriller. When a rich widow was murdered in the south of France 20 years ago, her Moroccan gardener was convicted and jailed with no evidence; it took a committed journalist to try to unravel the rush to judgment that laid bare the racism that was hidden in the French justice system.

Frank, funny, and bracingly contemporary, visual artist Terence Nance gleefully bends the cinematic rules for his personal meditation on love in the new millennium with his film, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. Passages of live action sequences and direct-to-camera interviews are accented with a wide variety of animation styles as Nance analyzes his amorous history as well as his current circumstances.

Adapted from the graphic novels by Joann Sfar, The Rabbi’s Cat is a vivid, lively, and imaginative animated film co-directed by Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux . Set in 1920’s Algiers, a widower rabbi lives with his voluptuous and dutiful daughter and their pesky cat who swallows a parakeet and begins to speak, driving everyone crazy and moving the plot ahead by insisting on having a bar-mitzvah.

Mads Matthiesen’s character-based and understated comedy, Teddy Bear tells the story of a gentle giant of a body builder who self sculpts his muscles by day and lives quietly at home with his mom at night. But at 38, he really wants a proper girlfriend, and despite his mother’s resistance (she is a master of emotional manipulation) and his own profound awkwardness, he draws up the courage to find one–even if he has to leave Denmark to do so.

Labaki’s film focuses on a group of women of different religions in a remote Lebanese village that band together and invent schemes to prevent their men from killing each other in the intractable religious conflict that surrounds their community. This entertaining and unlikely near-musical tears down stereotypes of women in the Middle East and uses humor to explore serious subjects, with one eye toward Aristophanes’s Lysistrata and the other toward Bollywood. A Sony Pictures Classics Release.

In Gareth Huw Evans’ sensational thriller, The Raid: Redemption, a police SWAT team storms a housing project ruled by gangsters and inhabited by machete-wielding lowlifes—but the mission has been leaked, the tables are turned, and a dwindling band of elite fighters find themselves massively outnumbered in a lethal game of cat and mouse. What ensues is a relentless and savage succession of close-quarters shoot-outs and punishing martial-arts combat sequences, each jaw-dropping smackdown unbelievably topping the previous one. This film is wild! A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Song Chuan’s first feature captures the dreams and desires, disappointments and regrets, of a life not fully lived via the title character. In a rural Chinese village, a young woman who is the local doctor’s mistress struggles against her family, government bureaucracy and social mores to move away and create a life for herself.

Ginzburg’s Generation P could be described as a metaphysical Mad Men from the go-go 1990s – a wonderland of images and ideas that emerged from the rebirth of a nation as a marketer’s paradise. The film offers a “view” of post-Communist Russia as the arrival of democracy and Pepsi-Cola brought the advance of capitalism with all of its mechanisms and fuzzy messages.

Paralyzed from the waist down by a stray police bullet, the title character in Alejandro Landes’ remarkable film spends his days selling minutes on his cell phone when not flirting with his comely neighbor, and secretly plotting his revenge. Landes worked on the film for five years, creating a tale that joined the most intimate details of Porfirio’s day-to-day life with an astonishing re-creation of his attempt to hijack an airplane.

When Claudiu Crulic, a young Romanian in Poland, was arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, he became a pawn in a Kafkaesque miscarriage of justice and went on a hunger strike to protest his treatment in jail. Anca Damian’s documentary is by turns chilling and heartbreaking — Crulic himself “narrates” the film posthumously, his words voiced by Vlad Ivanov, star of such Romanian New Wave titles as Police, Adjective and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days—but also ironic, with a bit of black humor thrown in. What makes this extraordinary documentary even more compelling is its strong visual style: Damian uses handdrawn, cutout, and collage animation techniques to create a strikingly memorable film.

In his latest film, celebrated Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof creates a dramatic and tense tale set in Tehran, where a young woman is desperately attempting to acquire a visa to leave the country. The beautifully shot film uses the confinement of space to cinematically express claustrophobia; its precise framing catches every subtle expression on the face of the astonishing Leyla Zareh, who plays disbarred human rights lawyer Noora. With her husband exiled to the desert for his political journalism, Noora’s personal isolation and desperation reach unbearable heights when she must make a difficult decision regarding her pregnancy as part of a complex scheme to leave the country.

David France’s immersive moving-image document chronicling the rise of AIDS activism shows a movement though the lenses of those who captured it firsthand. Desperate people leveraged the skills they had—some wrote, some lobbied, many marched, and all mobilized— to fight a plague that vast swaths of society saw as just punishment for immoral actions. In calling attention to the hypocrisy and murderous naïveté of such beliefs, the men and women who formed ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group) began a political and medical struggle that has resulted in AIDS becoming a manageable condition for those who can access treatment. Unflinching and powerfully told, the film is a blueprint for activists on many fronts. A Sundance Selects Release.

A Polish village virtually cut off from civilization and seemingly on the verge of dissolution serves as the setting for this brooding, almost wordless drama. The rough and impassive Pawel makes a living scavenging for scrap metal. There’s bad blood between him and the “community” (a more spiteful collection of individuals would be hard to imagine), and when he goes AWOL not long after his girlfriend moves in, the locals begin to loot and vandalize his home. What if he returns? Suffused with an atmosphere of torpor and malignancy, yet punctuated by images of bucolic beauty, It Looks Pretty from a Distance may well have an allegorical dimension, but the camera keeps its distance and all exposition is withheld. Quietly mesmerizing, Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal’s bleak and unflinching vision of a world in an advanced state of entropy is hard to shake.

In his playful first feature, Lee Kwang-kuk (previously assistant director to Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo) expertly weaves several narrative strands into an elegant web and a meditation on storytelling. Viewers find themselves down the rabbit hole in this tale of a filmmaker in search of a story; the intertwined narratives confound and displace expectations, to the point where it seems the film might be narrated by a dead character—but never mind. Lee is in full control, starting the roller coaster with a young, self-possessed barmaid in a remote inn who, in lieu of payment, recalls the time she met a suicidal guy called Romance Joe.