Everyone knows about the gala premieres; Time Out’s Film team unearth the hidden gems screening at this year’s mammoth festival

Ajami (Mon 22 and Wed 24) sees Arabs, Christians and Jews live side by side in the Israeli city of Jaffa, where the urgent political realities underlie the individual dilemmas in this taut ensemble drama. Tribal feuds within the Arab community create their own violent trail, as does the drugs trade which crosses the religious divide, while the predominantly Jewish police force struggle to maintain neutrality when some of their officers are operating on their own embittered agenda. Absorbing in its complexity, increasingly gripping as we grasp the myriad connections ensnaring the put-upon characters, this joint venture between Israeli and Palestinian co-directors is impeccable in its balance, but razor sharp in its insights. Trevor Johnston

Around a Small Mountain (Apr 2) is, at 84 minutes, French New Waver Jacques Rivette’s shortest film. Essentially, the film revisits the themes of his masterpieces L’Amour Fou and Out 1 – the nexuses between scripting and improv, between theatre and life, between madness and sanity – in miniature, and it has the pleasing succinctness (if not the stature) of Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre in The Tempest. The story concerns an interloper (Sergio Castellitto) who helps a circus performer (Jane Birkin) recover from a past trauma, and the film simultaneously has the feel of a confession and of a master juggling with one hand. Ben Kenigsberg

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (Apr 2 and 5) worked – whether it was grace or pugnacity that won Frederick Wiseman his startling access to the Paris Opéra Ballet. We watch performances and rehearsals, meetings and a fraught interview between the artistic director and a nervous newbie, which ends ominously. There’s no commentary: like a dancer, Wiseman tells by showing. The dancing itself is breathtaking, but Wiseman doesn’t get carried away: there’s a sombre moment during a meeting about pensions – which start at age 40 for dancers – when the camera pans across this feast of glowing bodies, as if to warn of the toll their art invariably takes. Nina Caplan

Hadewijch (Sat 27 and Apr 4) represents a shocking departure for Bruno Dumont, who sheds the arthouse shock tactics of his earlier films (Humanité and Twentynine Palms) and makes a movie about human beings rather than rutting, asocial beasts. The director turns his gaze on a 20-ish girl (Julie Sokolowski) whose faith is so strong and disturbing that the nuns expel her from the convent, sending her home to Paris. Introducing her to a group of fundamentalist Muslims, Dumont tries to discern the line between belief and fanaticism. His ideas are ambiguous, but it’s the first time Dumont’s pretensions don’t get in the way of provocative, even beautiful filmmaking. BK

Lebanon (Apr 2 and 5), Samuel Maoz’s gruelling winner of Venice Golden Lion is a blood-, sweat- and soup-smeared purging of graphic personal memories from his stretch in the Israeli infantry during the catastrophic 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Innovatively capturing the lunacy and inscrutability of urban warfare, the story is told almost entirely from the soiled helm of a lumbering tank, as four beleaguered and naive young recruits frenetically react to orders barked at them from superiors while trying to maintain some semblance of hierarchy and sanity. This voyeuristic view of combat scores big for formal audaciousness but also carries an interesting (if hardly original) intellectual depth concerning the psychological brutalisation of ‘innocent’ soldiers. David Jenkins

Life During Wartime (Tue 23, Sat 27 and Wed 31) represents Todd Solondz’s most sincere, uncynical effort – still very much a black comedy, but somehow softer. This sequel to his 1998 Happiness stars a completely different cast of actors, all of them older but still haunted by the memories of a paedophilic patriarch. Bill Maplewood (here played by Ciarán Hinds) is released from jail and heads south to a harshly bright Florida to look up his unknowing family. Meanwhile, little Timmy is on the cusp of his bar mitzvah and hopes to take a more adult role in things. Through it all, Solondz has found his way to a handful of beautifully sympathetic performances. Joshua Rothkopf

She, a Chinese (Wed 24 and Fri 26) is a cinematic bildungsroman, with which novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo continues her examination of modern China. Li Mei (Lu Huang), who starts off never having travelled more than five miles from home, winds up in London via a series of unpleasant events. En route, she learns the many ways in which a pretty Chinese girl can be objectified, and the general untrustworthiness of most men. This would be depressing, except that Mei is a delight: a feisty, shrewd young woman, uneducated but intelligent and more than capable of surviving the brickbats life keeps throwing at her. NC

The HKIFF runs from Mar 21 to Apr 6 in various venues. Check out www.hkiff.org.hk for full programme details.