Melanie Shatzky

Shot in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and bound by elements of fiction, this unexpected documentary short is a glimpse into faith-based sentiment and inexplicable loss. While a man searches for his kitchen appliances in the bushes, elsewhere a grinning preacher takes souvenir snapshots for his congregation, and a woman with a disability journeys to a quieter place.

Francine is released from prison and settles down in a small town. She is unable to regain a foothold in society and turns to animals for comfort.

Bathed in the uncanny glow of late afternoon sun and set against a noisy highway, Interchange depicts the melancholy and isolation of a small working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Montreal.

Part lyrical document, part farce, Animals Under Anaesthesia: Speculations On the Dreamlife of Beasts explores the imaginary unconscious minds of animals. Images of sex, death and the natural world are made manifest in the murky and disquieting dreams of a dog, a cat, a pig and a rabbit.

A precarious highway carries an unnamed protagonist to a series of doctors' appointments, where it is unclear what ails her. She speaks to no one and expresses nothing. The Delaware Project centers around a young woman's fledgling sense of connection in a landscape that is undergoing rapid development. More a tone poem than a traditional narrative, this film defies linear convention in an attempt to show the unceremonious demise of person and place.

Pushing at the limits of non-fiction cinema, A Man Imagined is a bracingly intimate and hallucinatory portrait of a man with schizophrenia surviving amidst urban detritus and decay. Made in close collaboration with 67-year-old Lloyd, this immersive documentary fable follows the jagged path of a decades-long street survivor, across harsh winters and blistering summers, as he sells discarded items to motorists, sleeps in junkyards and lapses into near-psychedelic reveries.

Laced with black humor, The Patron Saints is an unorthodox documentary about a home for the aged and disabled. By turns lyrical and unsettling, the directors eschew more traditional approaches to the subject, opting for a mesmerizing atmospheric treatment and turning narration over to the home's youngest patient and his candid confessions.