Aparna Sen’s first feature is a well-tuned Indian melodrama about the relationships that define and change us as a tender-hearted teacher lends her apartment to an ex-student and her boyfriend.

A donkey becomes both a gift and a nuisance in an Indian village, as this stirring Tamil film makes pointed observations about the irrational anxieties and delusions of the religiously reliant.

A significant work of Malayalam cinema, Aravindan’s work, by turns exuberant and elegiac, about a circus act coming to a rural Indian village teases out the hypnotic and exhibitionistic qualities of performative art in ways that challenge our unquestioned spectatorship.

Featuring finely-tuned performances, this Sundance winner breaks taboos in quietly restrained ways, about an Indian girl in a Himalayan boarding school who discovers love and sex amid a repressive patriarchal order.