Two highlights from this year's edition of NDNF:

El Futuro perfecto (The Future Perfect), Argentina
Winner of the Best First Feature prize at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival, Nele Wohlatz’s assured debut is a playful, exceptionally idea-rich work of fiction with documentary fragments. Seventeen-year-old Xiaobin arrives in Argentina from China unable to speak Spanish. Employed at a Chinese grocery store, she saves up enough money to pay for language classes, and enters into a secret romance with a young Indian man, Vijay. As she begins to grasp the Spanish language’s conditional tense, she imagines a constellation of possible futures.

Pendular, Brazil/Argentina/France
A male sculptor and a female dancer live and work together in their big, barren loft, a mere strip of orange tape serving as the boundary between his atelier and her studio. Here, the stage is set for a low-key psychosexual drama centered around the couple’s erotic, artistic, and everyday rituals. This absorbingly intimate third feature by Julia Murat is a moving portrait of a couple caught between rivalry and the desire to build a future with each other.

New York: March 15 - 26. Full lineup and details here.