OPENING NIGHT SELECTION As the world discovered in 2008, the masters of the financial universe sit in anonymous offices in generic towers in lower Manhattan, staring at numbers that don’t add up. JC Chandor’s timely and terrifying dramatic exposé tackles twenty-four hours on an investment bank trading floor; a day that brings layer upon layer MORE

CLOSING NIGHT SELECTION Atafeh and Shireen, two young Iranian women, enjoy life in the shadow of the regime, going to parties and listening to forbidden music as they begin to explore their true feelings for each other. Atafeh’s brother Mehran, just released from drug rehab, comes home determined to turn the page on his past. MORE

The timeliness of Mohamed Diab’s Cairo 6,7,8 extends beyond its setting in contemporary Egypt; it reflects a broader Arab desire for personal empowerment and dignity. The intersecting narratives of three women of different social and economic status in Cairo converge in their collective desire to combat sexual harassment. Diab demonstrates that a wealthy young woman MORE

The great Jeanne Balibar gives a tour-de-force performance as Ellen, a stewardess who walks off the job just as the plane is ready for takeoff because she sees a leopard on the runway— or does she? At this point, Ellen is slightly unhinged: her husband has left her, she’s unable to be alone, she might MORE

In its irreverent use of (new) Nouvelle Vague, musical, melodrama, and nature documentary techniques, Attenberg symbolically visualizes a change in generation and perspective, as a father and daughter each negotiate their individual rites of passage. Marina’s father, a visionary architect of now dismal looking 1960s communal housing, has come home to die in the vanishing MORE

It’s been two weeks since her mother died, and Prudence is home alone: her father is overseas on business, and her older sister, stricken with grief, has absented herself. Sixteen going on seventeen, Prudence is failing to come to grips with the sudden loss of her mother and loses herself in antisocial behavior. Turning away MORE

From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, a group of Swedish journalists covered the Black Power movement in the United States and filmed all that they saw. Thirty years later this lush collection of 16mm footage was found in a basement. With the early support of co-producers Danny Glover and Joslyn Barnes, the footage has MORE

The glamorous idea of Copacabana is a dream in this proletarian town in northern France, where a daughter and her single mother—played by real life mother and daughter Isabelle Huppert and Lolita Chammah—have an uneasy relationship. Esmeralda is embarrassed by her mother, Babou, a sexy and flighty woman of a certain age with no visible MORE

In a rural Quebec town, a single father, Jean-François, supports his daughter, Julyvonne, by working days in a motel and nights at a bowling alley. To look at her, you’d think Julyvonne was a normal child, and she is—except that her father, out of fear that she could grow up as emotionally scarred as he MORE

Desperate to return to America years after his deportation, Ghanian Police Inspector Boniface Koomsin finds that his newly acquired counterfeit passport is missing, and embarks on a dangerous journey through modern Ghana to retrieve the stolen document. His own search is linked to a series of violent crimes, and he joins forces with a seasoned MORE

The title of writer-director Vladimir Kott’s deft, engrossing follow-up to The Fly (ND/NF 2009) comes from the name of the band in which the film’s protagonists played during their high-school days—briefly glimpsed in the film’s opening shots. Today, these three middle-aged men—a surgeon, police officer, and taxi driver—inhabit distinct levels of Moscow’s socio-economic structure. Aside MORE

Anne Sewitsky’s nimble directorial debut represents a rare achievement in independent film: an intelligent, adult comedy that is truly funny. Kaja and Erik are a 30-something couple with a young son, living a rather dull life in the Norwegian countryside. New neighbors move in next door, and at first glance they seem to be the MORE

This pull-no-punches portrait of the hell-and-back life of Patty Schemel, drummer for Courtney Love’s band Hole during its peak years, is no ordinary rockumentary. Told from the point of view of one band member, Hit So Hard takes an unprecedented inside look at one of the most crucial and controversial groups of the 1990s, with MORE

In the confines of downtown Tokyo, Kobayashi lives a quiet life with his wife and children above the small printing factory that he runs. The biggest drama in this neighborhood is the disappearance of the family’s pet parrot and the organization of a neighborhood watch committee. Into this mundane world comes Kawaga, who claims to MORE

In Montreal a handsome woman dies, and her will holds an astonishing request. She asks her grown children, fraternal twins, to deliver two sealed letters: one to their father, who they believed dead, and one to a brother they did not know existed. So begins an amazing journey across continents, into hearts of darkness, sectarian MORE

Mertkan (brilliantly portrayed by Bartu Küçükçag ̆ layan) slides through each day working as an office assistant for his father’s construction company—when he’s not gobbling burgers at the mall with his buddies. Then one day he meets Gül, a shy but charming Kurdish girl, and suddenly his demeanor begins to change: he becomes more confident MORE

When he’s not working in his cousin’s concrete business, college dropout Jawdat (Razi Shawahdeh), who lives in a quiet Palestinian town inside Israel, usually spends his free time looking for new women to chat up on his cell phone. But when his wireless flirting starts to extend into the West Bank, it catches the attention MORE

During the long days and soft breezes of summer, seven twenty-something friends come together in their hometown. Some have never left; others have created lives for themselves far away and see themselves as just passing through. Mikhaël Hers’s lovely Memory Lane is a film about characters caught “in between”—between city and country, friendship and love, MORE

Khaled (Egyptian heartthrob Khaled Abol Naga) returns to his hometown, Alexandria, restlessly searching for purpose beyond his relationships with his disinterested ex-girlfriend and an aging father from whom he feels permanently alienated. Wandering the streets of Alexandria, he happens upon a group of younger people making art and music. He stubbornly pursues them, and as MORE

Peruvian films are a growing presence at international film festivals, and Octubre is an excellent example of why this is so. Winner of the Jury Prize of the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes 2010, the film follows Clemente, a small-time money-lender living in a Lima barrio, who one day discovers a baby left on MORE

The march of New Romanian Cinema continues apace in this quietly gripping drama that steadily descends into a dog- eat-dog netherworld in which matter-of-fact exploitation and reflexive avarice are givens. Two years into a five-year prison sentence, Matilda is given a day pass to attend her mother’s funeral. In the 24 hours that follow, the MORE

If Alike, a sassy 17-year-old New Yorker, knows anything it’s that she’s gay and she badly wants a girlfriend. However, there’s a problem—namely her middle-class Brooklyn family. Her mother is a church-goer; her father, a detective, is absent most of the time; and her younger sister is, well, a younger sister. Alike and her best MORE

In 1987 two dudes from the Midwest, Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D, landed in San Francisco and rented a cheap apartment. They soon learned that they shared a paper-thin wall with Peter (Haskett), a gay man, and Raymond (Huffman), a homophobe, who drank and verbally abused each other—all night, every night. Within the confines MORE

Jesse (James Mercer) traverses Portland, Oregon, working a series of minimum-wage temp jobs in order to pay off a loan so that he can finish school. Dog shelter staffer Katrina (former Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein) films a video diary intended as a reality show audition tape. Camille (Renee Roman Nose) is employed sorting donations at MORE

The characters in Nicolás Pereda’s Summer of Goliath—a unique blend of documentary and fiction—seem to grow organically out of the green swampland they inhabit. In the rural town of Huilotepec, a woman is convinced her husband has left her for another woman; a military man is fantasizing about how he can get a machine gun MORE

Joseph, a widower, should be tethered. A lonely man with a violent temper, he gets into situations, particularly at pubs, that leave him and others bloody. He has a possible soft spot for a young boy who lives across the street with his feckless mother and her punk boyfriend. Joseph knows better than to seek MORE

Through the eyes of the night watchman, we enter into the world of “El Jardin,” a cemetery in the drug heartland of Mexico. Since the war on drugs began in 2007, the cemetery has doubled in size and some of its mausoleums have been built to resemble gaudy cathedrals, creating a skyline that looks like MORE

Li Hongqi’s third film is a deadpan comedy about four teenagers on the last day of the winter holiday in a small industrial town in northern China. Not much is happening and the bored kids hang around aimlessly, lacking the energy even to get into trouble. As the clock ticks away, the kids argue, debate, MORE