This multilayered, poetic film in three chapters, like a musical triptych, reflects a range of fundamental human feelings and mental states that war invokes without showing one image of violence.

This portrait of Russian village life is at once tender and harsh. It was the international breakthrough for Victor Kossakovsky and won him both the IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary and the IDFA Audience Award in 1993.

Although boredom sets the tone, a sense of foreboding hangs over the sweltering summer days spent by two branches of the same family at a country house in the provinces. Voted the greatest Argentine feature film of all time by film professionals.

Swiss ski jumper Walter Steiner achieved distances that were previously considered impossible. Werner Herzog portrays him as a disciplined athlete, but also as a vulnerable human being.

Artavazd Peleshyan’s meditation on the beginning of life has no words, but shows only the face of a young woman in childbirth, set to music and the rhythm of a heartbeat.

Artavazd Pelechian delivers an urgent work rooted in his own unique film idiom, using found footage sequences of volcanic eruptions, floods, and windstorms to shake us from the illusion that humanity can control nature.

Schoolyard playtime: 15 minutes in which children make their own laws—navigating violence, betrayal, and empathy without adult intervention. Filmed by Claire Simon in the early 1990s in her daughter’s schoolyard.

A reclusive community in the Armenian Highlands demonstrates the pure art of survival over the course of the four seasons. A stunningly beautiful, bittersweet symphony of human existence.

Seven-year-old Ana wanders between fantasy and reality in her rural Spanish village in 1940 after seeing the horror film Frankenstein. A magical glimpse into a child’s inner world.

An irresistible glimpse into a French village school where children of all ages are taught by the same teacher. Mr. Lopez is a model of patience and compassion within this close-knit but fragile rural community.

Virtually without dialogue, this film shows how people living on Mexico’s arid high plateau survive in this bone-dry region by hunting birds, snakes, and rodents. An indictment of their forgotten poverty, but also a tribute to their vitality.

In the emergency room of a hospital in Paris, Depardon delicately films the distressing conversations between the staff and people who have run amuck in the anonymous big city and who cannot or can hardly hold out.