With a dragon tattoo blazoned across her left arm, Kim Hye-Yoon plays the headstrong heroine who, after her dad falls into a coma following a suspicious accident, doggedly seeks answers despite mounting resistance from a variety of corrupt forces. Faced with the additional pressures of tending to her father’s restaurant, taking care of her younger brother, and completing mandatory work training following a short prison stay, our heroine is forced to grow up fast. Simultaneously a vehicle for social critique, a coming-of-age story, and a gripping thriller, The Girl on a Bulldozer is driven by Kim’s visceral, charismatic performance, which won her the 2022 Screen International Rising Star Award at the New York Asian Film Festival.

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Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Golden Eye award for best documentary, All That Breathes chronicles the story of two brothers who form a makeshift bird hospital to care for the thousands of black kite—the species of bird they have both fallen in love with—that drop daily due to New Delhi’s heavily polluted skies. Through this specific story, the film paints an unflinching but tender portrait of the city—and of India in general, which has experienced political unrest since the country’s recent turn toward Hindu majoritarianism—as a fraught ecology in which humans, animals, and environments of various kinds are deeply interconnected.

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Wearing radiant orange and a photogenic smile, our protagonist is a successful influencer promoting a product line called “Happiness”—an emotion supposedly guaranteed for the women consumers she is targeting. That said, blissfully composed exteriors belie a brutal reality of abuse, in not just her own home but that of her newlywed daughter. Winner of the Panorama Audience Award for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival, Askar Uzbayev’s searing, chilling portrait of domestic violence confronts viewers with the systemic misogyny in contemporary Kazakhstan.

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