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Christian Petzold's The State I Am In (2000) and Christoph Hochhäusler's The City Below (2010) will be showing in September and October, 2017 on Mubi in most countries around the world.Christian Petzold (left) and Christoph Hochhäusler (right) on the set of Dreileben. Photo by Felix von Böhm.We meet in Christian Petzold’s office in Berlin-Kreuzberg. A giant wall of whispering books, almost like a Borgesian brain of fiction, encircles the table at which Christoph Hochhäusler, myself and the owner take place to discuss their films. The idea of the interview was to get Petzold’s take on Hochhäusler’s The City Below (2010) and Hochhäusler’s take on Petzold’s The State I Am In (2000). In the end, both filmmakers ended up talking about a lot more, as cinema for them has always been something that shines most brightly when remembering it, discussing it and loving it. The fictions proposed...

Tracks director John Curran on Mia Wasikowska as Robyn Davidson: "She was pretty immediate about her enthusiasm." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

John Curran's astute and tender Tracks stars Mia Wasikowska as Robyn Davidson with Adam Driver as photographer Rick Smolan and Rainer Bock as camel rancher Kurt Posel. Bock miraculously combines his roles in Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and Christian Petzold's Dreileben: Beats Being Dead and Barbara, into an Outback brute able to compete in attention with the growling beasts.

In New York, Curran and I discussed Wasikowska coming to him after Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive "in a state she needed to work through", an unrealised F Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful And The Damned project with Keira Knightley, The Wizard Of Oz, Stardust Memories, basic survival and basic relationships.

Mia Wasikowska as Robyn Davidson in the...

Rotterdam this year has offered one certifiable giant discovery in international cinema: German filmmaker Dominik Graf, revealed in a simultaneously introductory and interventionist retrospective programmed by Christoph Huber and Olaf Möller. An incredibly prolific filmmaker beginning in the late 1970s, Graf has interwoven his cinema into the fabric of the German television industry, producing a body of work ranging from television episodes, made-for-tv films, essay movies, documentaries, and a handful of films intended for the cinema.

Yet despite Graf's prodigious output of nearly sixty works, its primarily creation for national television has meant that it has been essentially unavailable to English-speaking audiences prior to Rotterdam's 17 film retrospective. The first film of his I saw was Komm mir nicht nach (Don't Follow Me Around) in the middle of the Dreileben trilogy in 2010, notably another for-television project, but one which had festival and theatrical ambitions beyond German living rooms, perhaps due...

11. Zama – Dir. Lucretia Martel

Why This Makes Top 10: At number eleven we have Argentinean filmmaker Lucretia Martel’s latest film, her first since 2008’s The Headless Woman (a film that critics were slow to warm to, but ended up being on many a best end of year list in 2008/2009). Previous titles include her stunning debut, 2001’s La Cienega, along with 2004’s The Holy Girl. Her latest is a period piece based on the novel by Antonio de Benedetto and will be produced by Lita Stantic, El Deseo (the Almodovar Bros’ company), as well as a still to be named French producer. Martel is one of the most prolific names to come out the New Argentinean Wave and this looks to be a massively mounted period piece we’re eager to get a look at.

The Gist: Written in 1956, Zama is an existential novel about Don Diego de Zama, a...