Fresh off her star-making turn in the smash hit Gilda, Rita Hayworth was cast in another quintessential noir of the forties, this one directed by none other than her then husband Orson Welles. Screening 3/8.

Both an ingeniously plotted mystery and a profoundly disturbing tale of romantic obsession, Vertigo is an emotional experience like no other—an astonishment on the level of image, sound, and storytelling.

In this intricately improvised whatsit, Indonesian immigrants Asri and Hasan convene every day at twilight hour, in the heart of Taiwan’s oldest city. Director So Yo-hen in person!

Working from thousands of hours of footage catalogued in the vaults of Sweden’s national television service, archival chronicler Göran Hugo Olsson unspools a rigorously cool and steely account of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Director Olsson in person on 3/13.

Dominique Cabrera discovers that Chris Marker’s 1962 sci-fi film La Jetée, made the same year that Algeria gained independence from French colonial rule, might also be an inadvertent historical document of her own family. Screens 3/14.

On a Friday morning in 1992, eleven-year-old Lana (Ilincic) receives a phone call about a death in the family, a life-changing event in sync with the fracturing of Yugoslavian history and identity. Director Iva Radivojevic in person!

Shot on high-contrast black-and-white 16mm film and Super 16, this incandescent work weaves a rough, hallucinatory patchwork of encounters with women, old and young, solitary and collective. Director Brigid McCaffrey will appear in person.

A brooding young man (Bulgarian rapper Fyre) returns to his village in rural Bulgaria to clean out his late father’s flat. As he reconnects with old friends and relatives, he hears tales of his father, but he cannot square these stories of a fiercely protective, deeply loving man with the remote patriarch of his childhood.

Mixed media artist Zhou constructs mutating digital landscapes that confound classical notions of scale, composition, and visual realism. His latest sets us adrift in the desolate expanse of the Gobi Desert, where an amorphous infrastructure project of massive proportions is underway.

Displaying remarkable formal sophistication with a dazzling composite of film stocks, formats, and digital VFX, visual artist Deniz Eroglu’s provocative, surreal narrative triad screens at First Look on 3/15.

Moldovan journalist Lina receives a video message from her estranged father, a migrant worker in Italy, seeking help from his abusive employer. Equipping him with a hidden camera, Lina finds herself on a parallel journey of justice—uncovering a pattern of domestic violence that has plagued her family for generations.

Drifting through an ethereal Monaco during the eerie, emptied-out limbo of the Christmas holidays, a diffident young sex worker gradually forms a strange, tentative bond with a preadolescent whose parents, Chinese real estate developers, have left her in the charge of her Serbian babysitter.

In a beauty salon in Beirut, one client after another sits in Bouba's chair seeking cosmetic treatment. Omar Mismar’s uniquely mesmerizing film consists entirely of close-ups fixed on clients’ faces. A work of real-life body horror that’s also a tender portrait of communal defiance.

Filmed over two years in Ukraine, Zhurba’s epic depiction of her society under siege by Russia moves ineluctably from one grandly scaled, finely detailed scene of calamity to another, each designated by its degree of proximity to the front.

The many splendored avant-garde works here, all shot with artisanal precision on Super 8 or 16mm film, reveal the hidden abyss beneath the serenity and sensuality of our physical world in ominous signs and portents of personal or societal dissolution.

The latest immersive work from documentary master Claire Simon takes us into Makarenko, a public elementary school in the Parisian suburb Ivry-sur-Seine, over the course of a school year, staying attentive to the glorious unpredictability of human interaction and the revelations of learning.

When her troubled mother goes missing, Irish filmmaker Myrid Carten returns home to find her—at the risk of losing herself. Drawing upon previously captured footage, new interventions, and extraordinarily evocative visual experiments within their living spaces, Carten reinvents the “home movie” as an aching, active processing.

The latest from singular artist Sofia Bohdanowicz richly blends family history with archival research and gothic storytelling. Director Bohdanowicz and actors Melanie Scheiner and Rosa-Johan Uddoh in person.

Miguel Coyula and actor Lynn Cruz were subjected to various forms of control and intimidation while making their dystopian feature Corazón azul in Cuba in 2011. This defiant and entertaining work playfully uses recalls their Kafkaesque experiences. Screening 3/16.