While reading a novel by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf on the bus, Ali Sabzian strikes up a conversation with a pretty girl, Mahrokh Ahankhah. When she tells him her family admires Makhmalbaf’s work, Ali pretends to be the filmmaker to impress her. Becoming friendly with the Ahankhahs, Ali tells them he is preparing a new movie, but when they uncover his true identity, he is arrested for fraud. This film reenacts the true story of the incident, with Ali and the family playing themselves.

African-American documentary filmmaker Marlon Riggs was working on this final film as he died from AIDS-related complications in 1994; he addresses the camera from his hospital bed in several scenes. The film directly addresses sexism and homophobia within the black community, with snippets of misogynistic and anti-gay slurs from popular hip-hop songs juxtaposed with interviews with African-American intellectuals and political theorists, including Cornel West, bell hooks and Angela Davis.

Starring: Lili Taylor, Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra, Edie Falco

A vampiric doctoral student tries to follow the philosophy of a nocturnal comrade and control her thirst for blood.

Starring: María Mercedes Coroy, Sabrina De La Hoz, Margarita Kenéfic, Julio Diaz

Alma is murdered with her children during a military attack in Guatemala, but when the general who ordered the genocide is found not guilty 30 years later, Alma returns to the world of the living to torment the man.

Starring: Noé Hernández, María Evoli, Diego Gamaliel

After wandering a ruined city for years, two siblings enter a building and find a man who makes them a dangerous offer.

Starring: Alexis Díaz de Villegas, Jorge Molina, Andros Perugorría, Andrea Duro, Jazz Vilá, Eliecer Ramírez

When the dead rise and attack the living, Juan starts a zombie-killing business, until he has to save his small band from being eaten.

An up-close cinematic walkabout through the life of Gary Young, the original (and highly unlikely) drummer of indie rock royalty Pavement. His booze and drugs-fueled antics (on-stage handstands, gifting vegetables to fans) and haphazard production methods (accidentally helping launch the lo-fi aesthetic) were both a driving force of the band’s early rise and the cause of his eventual crash landing.

Leaving a wake of joy and/or destruction at every turn, Gary teeters the thin line between free-form self-expression and chaotic self-destruction. Thirty years on with scoliosis, blood clots, and a shriveled liver, Gary is still drumming with no regrets. Note: no puppets were harmed in the making of this film.

Starring: Mays Mustafa, Mohammed Al Ammari, Roger Assaf, Hanane Hajj Ali, Sophia Moussa Fitch, Ahmad Kaabour

U.S. premiere

Young Najwa and the musician Mansour cross the Lebanese border and reach Beirut. They follow smugglers to join a woman on the other side of the sea. The old lighthouse keeper tries to repair his neighborhood’s electricity.

Starring: Nobuko Otowa, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Kei Satô

While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins an affair with a neighbor who survived the war, Hachi (Kei Satô). The mother disapproves and, when she can’t steal Hachi for herself, tries to scare her daughter-in-law with a mysterious mask from a dead samurai.