At dusk, the sun’s golden light casts an eerie glow on a vast collection of extravagant mausoleums where some of Mexico’s notorious drug lords have been laid to rest. Through the confines of the cemetery, El Velador reflects on a community besieged by violence.

This beautiful work of fiction begins with an aging shepherd in a medieval Calabrian village who tends his herd of goats. A lush visual portrait, Le Quattro Volte offers four meditations on the soul of a man journeying through his natural habitat.

Koyaanisqatsi is a ravishing visual symphony that explores the reaches of modern decay. Glorious cinematography that captures the beauty of uninhabited landscapes before plunging into the frenetic constructions of contemporary life is set to an original score by Philip Glass.

On the coast of the Araya Peninsula in Venezuela, the sun beats down on the sea, sand, and men below. Salt is the central resource of this land where nothing grows, and a community exists by extracting it manually day and night.

This work of science fiction unspools the mysterious story of a man haunted by an image from his childhood. Composed of black-and-white still photographs, La Jetée presents a dystopian future where scientists conduct time-travel experiments on prisoners.

The filmmaker embarks on a collective storytelling process, asking participants to embellish a narrative from the point where the last person stopped. The construction of the story becomes a catalyst for revealing deeper truths as details about the tellers’ own lives emerge.

In this poetic essay about race, class, and gentrification in London, a fictional letter from a woman to her mother is interwoven with interviews with journalists and historians to reveal a city where people live alongside one another but in very different worlds.