The Forest for the Trees – Melanie (Eva Löbau) is a Plain Jane who ditches her family and long-term boyfriend to become a teacher in the big city. She lands a gig as a science teacher at a posh Stuttgart school full of spoiled brats. Though Melanie is full of fresh, exciting ideas, she has lots of trouble fitting in with both her unruly students and her teaching peers (aside from the slightly creepy Thorsten, played by a guy who could pass for Sports Illustrated’s Steve Rushin), which means lots of unraveling and even more lunches eaten alone in the closet.

Melanie’s personal life isn’t much better. She bends over backwards to make people happy (she "welcomed" herself into the neighborhood by giving homemade schnapps to her fellow apartment dwellers), but still can’t connect with anyone. That is, until Melanie begins a slightly stalker-ish relationship with Tina (Daniela Holtz) which turns Trees into a melange of Single White Female and the first act of any of those stupid Dangerous Minds-type films. All you can do is sit there and wait for the meltdown, and to see how many people Melanie takes out when she goes all Jeremy. Oh, right – we only have workplace shootings in the US. In Germany, they just climb into the backseat and wait for the madness to end.

This Discovery program offering from Maren Ade is notable for the performances from Löbau and Holtz (and even the Rushin clone, but not as much). It was shot on digital video, but can only be recommended for those looking for a fairly passable character study.

Cinévardaphoto – This one isn’t a film – it’s three documentary shorts from Agnes Varda, and the first and longest is Ydessa, The Bears and Etc…, a 44 minute look at Toronto artist Ydessa Hendele and her unusual collection of teddy bear art. Not, like, velvet paintings, or anything. No, Ydessa collected old black and white photographs of people and teddy bears. Lots of photographs. Enough to fill a pair of two-story rooms, floor to ceiling. The question Varda asks with this film is "why?" Is Ydessa capitalizing on people’s nostalgia? Is it really art? Or is Ydessa fueled by pure unbridled insanity? All I know is that she has enough rings on one of her hands to look like Witchblade (not to mention a mouth more crooked than Dick Cheney – literally, not figuratively). Well, that and the fact that I was constantly looking for a shot of a young C. Montgomery Burns and his beloved Bobo.

I couldn’t get into Ulysse – the 1982 short that won Varda a César Award – and slept through most of it. Salut les Cubains might have been much more interesting if you could read the gray subtitles on the black-and-white 1963 short. I still really dug it, though. It’s comprised of one big montage of around 1,500 photos taken 10 years after Castro’s revolution. The editing and music were both terrific, making me wonder why people don’t try the photo montage thing more often. Like on a very special episode of Will & Grace.

Innocence – I didn’t know Gaspar Noé and Innocence director Lucile Hadzihalilovic were tight until after I saw the film, but that didn’t stop me from taking notes about how similar its opening was to Noé’s Irreversible – backwards and creepy as shit. The rest of the picture plays out in normal order, but it becomes no less rattling. Innocence opens with a girl named Iris being plucked from a coffin (she’s alive) and taken into a very strange but tightly knit private school out in the woods. The students (all girls) are only allowed to take certain paths in the woods, and among their various and strange rituals and schedules, they’re told to never, ever attempt to leave the school’s grounds. The eldest girl from each of the five houses leaves each night, but never says where they go or what they do.

Sounds a little like The Village, doesn’t it? Innocence is ten times as unnerving and will keep even the most experienced filmgoers guessing until the very end. There’s no surprise ending, or anything. I just had no idea what it all meant, or where it was all going. And unlike The Village, there wasn’t that feeling of disappointment when the credits started rolling. Genuinely frightening stuff unraveled in a very untraditional way.

Days and Hours – The title alone should frighten away the weary festival patron who plans on sitting through five or six films a day (runner up to Gee, Doesn’t Your Ass Hurt, Loser?), but Pjer Žalica’s second picture clocks in at a relatively lean 96 minutes. It’s about a guy named Fuke (insert joke here) who pays a visit to his elderly aunt and uncle so he can fix their boiler. It might take a long time to get your bearings as the three discuss family members we don’t know – it’s like when your hetero life partner drags you to some family function and you have to really concentrate so you won’t confuse Big Tony with Little Big Tony.

More than just the boiler is broken, though. Nobody ever comes out and says it, but Idriz and Sabira are still reeling from the loss of their only son during the Balkans War. This, as you might imagine, puts a lot of strain on their relationship. As the pieces fall into place, Hours becomes more and more satisfying, especially when some of the relatives show up so we can put faces to names. We also get to see some of the wacky neighborhood folk, who aren’t really wacky enough to qualify as traditional wacky neighborhood folk. Recommendable for the acting, photography, and the fact that it’s a film about the effects of war that doesn’t mention war at all.

Moolaadé – A film about female castration that, thankfully, shows no female castration. That doesn’t make Moolaadé easy to watch, though. The picture is set in a West African village ruled by hardcore Muslim men. When a flock of little girls escape from their impending "salinde" ceremony where important bits of the bathing suit area are hacked off, they seek protection from Collé Ardo, the second wife of a town elder and the mother of the village’s only "bilakoro" (non-mutilated business) woman.

Despite the power wielded by the town’s men, Collé Ardo declares a "moolaadé," which somehow thwarts any attempt to wrestle the four frightened girls from her guard. It doesn’t go over well, despite the salinde ceremony having a mortality rate somewhere in the vicinity of Russian Roulette. The men, shallow dogs that they are, blame the influence of radio (like the women are picking up The Howard Stern Show) and the pussy hound of a travelling salesman, and eventually turn on each other in a form of chest-beating bullying I haven’t seen since I accidentally walked into the locker room after football practice in high school.