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Palestine, 1936. As villages across Mandatory Palestine rise against British colonial rule, Yusuf drifts between his rural home and the restless energy of Jerusalem, longing for a future beyond the growing unrest. Director Annemarie Jacir moves her story forward at pace, balancing plot lines, tones and character motivations against shaping forces of economics, politics and identity.

Set during the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, the great Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s pitch-black absurdist tale concerns an idealistic government-appointed prosecutor who sets out to expose the mistreatment of a dissident Bolshevik writer who has been jailed and tortured without evidence of wrongdoing. Loznitsa constructs his story with a patient yet unmistakable sense of mounting dread, focusing on the devastating minutiae that allows fascism to function in our world.

As both director and cinematographer, debut filmmaker Brittany Shyne immerses the viewer in the absorbing rhythms and intimate materiality of African-American farm life in Georgia. As government support for Black farmers dwindles, exquisite black-and-white imagery lovingly captures the rough-worn hands, faces and tools-of-trade of octogenarian patriarchs fighting to preserve their family legacies and century-old homesteads.

Musical prodigy, admired and beloved by his many collaborators (not the least of which dubbed him “the fifth Beatle”), keyboardist and songwriter Billy Preston was also troubled, underrecognized and elusive — a closeted gay man raised in a Black church community that stridently condemned homosexuality (or pretended it didn’t exist). Electrifying footage and moving interviews bring the maestro front and center.