Once again it’s late March and with the opening salvos of the 09’ festival circuit already fired in Park City, Berlin and Austin, our friends at some of Midtown’s most venerable arts institutions have picked what they see as the cream of the fresh, young crop for their yearly survey of “new” filmmaking. But what’s so “new” about New Directors/New Films, MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s customary selection of a couple dozen features and a half dozen shorts by recently emergent filmmakers, which opened Wednesday night with Cherien Dabis’ Amreeka, a earnest multi-cultural drama about a woman from Ramallah who moves to middle America with her son and ends up working at White Castle? Yes, this is what you crave, you midtown Manhattan cinephiles, you wine and cheese pasties. Amreeka has quickly won a reputation among the cinerati as reeking, for better or worse, rightly or wrongly, of the Sundance Lab and its liberal indie realist orthodoxy,  which might provoke some to dismiss it. I won’t hold it against you.

Neither will one be remiss to point out that Sophie Barthes’ by all accounts fascinating and dense Cold Souls plays like a movie written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Olivier Assayas (now that I think of it, what a neat combo) or that Bob Byington’s Harmony and Me, for this humble author the festival’s low point, is somewhere between the dreaded M word and an overlong episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Or that Esther Kots’ impressive Can Go Through Skin suggests a hallucinatory take on the techniques of Lodge Kerrigan and Ronald Bronstein visiting a singularly imposed-upon and hyperparanoid Dutch woman, or that Pascal-Alex Vincent’s Give Me Your Hand, a tale of brothers, traveling through the French countryside to their mother’s Spanish funeral, has at least a minor debt to Bergman.

Daniel Hernandez’s Ordinary Boys and Zhang Chi’s The Shaft both have their merits, but verite-ish immediacy is their only visual stock and trade, a tempered and modernized proletarian realism their only worldview. Meanwhile, popular docs from Sundance, such as the powerful incursion into the murky world of Japanese dolphin fishing The Cove, and Ondi Timoner’s fascinating look at Internet pioneer and downtown party boy Josh Harris in We Live in Public, the last minute replacement for closing night film, are both quite extraordinary, but they break little aesthetic ground. Public, which replaced Lee Daniels‘ recently renamed Sundance winner Precious as closing night film due to an ongoing legal battle between The Weinstein Company and Lionsgate over the distribution rights to that particular bit of flashy negro miserablism, is the more conventional of the two docs, but Harris’ story proves to be a valuable lens through which to view our increasingly mediated interaction with others people through electronic media. Same story with two narrative features recently seen at other festivals, So Young Kim’s Treeless Mountain and Alexis Dos Santos’ Unmade Beds: both terrific films, both synthesizing methods and themes we’ve seen before to fantastic new ends.

That said, there is no shortage of cinema on display at the Walter Reade and the Titus I over the next twelve days –– even if just in bits and parts among the films listed above and in full force in the two movies discussed below –– upon which the adjective “new” could hover and feel at home, even if the weight and ecstasy of influence bears heavily on those films as well.

Aptly titled then, Frenchwoman Ursula Meier’s Home, shot by Agnes Godard with the gorgeous immediacy and restraint she brings to Claire Denis’ films, centers on a rural French family whose lives are upended when a long in-construction freeway which rests just feet from their home finally opens to floods of traffic. The film’s tricky tone rests on the incredible performances from Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet as a couple who are unwilling to yield, even for their daughters’ benefit and their own sanity, to move. As Meier’s film veers between absurd architectural comedy worthy of Jacques Tati and overwhelming familial despair that is reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent, one begins to suspect she won’t be able to satisfy the demands of the film’s many conceits, but she delivers an appropriate and none too optimistic ending to the affair that left me floored.

The Berlinale winner The Milk of Sorrows, set in a rough-hewn mountain settlement on the outskirts modern day Lima, concerns a young Peruvian woman who, having contracted a mysterious disease passed on, via breast milk, to the daughters of the rape victims taken by Peru’s deposed terrorist regime, sets out to bury her newly deceased mother. Her uncle, with whom she lives, is about to marry off his rather bone-headed and carefree daughter and wants no part of paying for a burial, suggesting they just bury the woman in the backyard. In the single oddest scene in any film in the entire festival, he tries to explain to a doctor the folkloric disease which afflicts his daughter, only to have the man rebuff him, claiming that the real problem involves potatoes and the young woman’s vagina having some sort of unfortunate contact.

The young woman, who is prone to nose bleeds, muteness and bouts of fainting from the disease, begins to work for a wealthy, blonde classical pianist in the city. The woman treats her dismissively, but notes her powerful singing. This allows the movie to toy with the notion that something may come of her hauntingly beautiful and profanely lyrical singing with the help of her employer, but after a simple yet horrifying act of cruelty late in the film, we are reminded that her voice and that of women like her, essentially silenced in this class and sex-consumed caste system, are the only way in which these women have to cope with the memory of torture which haunts the proceedings. Through the lens of their relationship we get a elliptical glimpse at the strict caste structure of Peruvian society and its myriad points of fracture. Suggesting some sort of weird re-imagining of Todd Haynes’ Safe set amidst an altogether more troubled milieu, The Milk of Sorrows will get under your skin. A potent and unforgettable film, The Milk of Sorrows is a little a hard to enjoy and might be accused of being obtuse, but you’ve never seen anything else like it. Although former Sundance head and newly named Tribeca Chief Creative Officer Geoff Gilmore reiterated his stance this past January that Sundance, at least during his tenure, was a festival that embraced “a broad range of aesthetics,” I doubt you’ll find anything as difficult but rewarding as The Milk of Sorrows in their World Cinema Competition anytime soon. That’s a pity.