This year’s Brighton Film Festival boasted a strong and varied selection of international films. The opening night featured an energetic explosion of French cinema. Established by works such as Delicatessen and Amelie, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet returns to screens with Micmacs, a vibrantly idiosyncratic slice of cinematic indulgence. With nods to classic Hollywood cinema, Jeunet drenches his own lively work in fantastical reverie; the tall stories and heightened, intense characters bear traces of those vintage films, invigorated by a colourful, frantic charm. His new creation focuses on an unfortunate video rental shop assistant called Bazil. Caught in unexpected gun fire, he survives with a bullet lodged in his brain, but loses his job and flat. He finds shelter with a group of outsiders, who with warmth and humour help him to exact revenge on the arms manufacturers that made the bullet. There was an excited buzz at the Duke of York’s as the audience was lit up by this acrobatic, visual feast.

A late showing on Friday night featured Jim Jarmusch’s new film The Limits Of Control. It was a challenging slot for such a contemplative film, with a few viewers nodding in and out of sleep while Jarmusch’s protagonist the Lone Man - played with cool, determined stealth by Isaach de Bankolé - undertook his journey through the dusty towns of Spain. But the beauty of the cinematography burned a deep impression into those who resisted the urge to slumber in that midnight hour.

I’m Gonna Explode was a burst of vivacious Mexican cinema, following the story of two young teenagers Maru and Roman as they break free of parental control and hide out together. The visceral style of the camera work and the strong soundtrack expresses the passionate sense of rebellion and intense experience of first love. Fuelled by a deep, indefinable anger that often surges through adolescence, Gerardo Naranjo’s film is a potent, sensuous evocation of a desire to feel alive.

Providing the festival with squirming laughs was Humpday. Director Lynn Shelton cast one of the forerunners of the mumblecore genre (a collection of low budget films about people in their 20s, awkwardly navigating through relationships and life with uncertainty and dry humour) Mark Duplass to lead as Ben, alongside Joshua Leonard (himself a star of The Blair Witch Project, so no stranger to lo-fi, improvisational work) as Ben’s old college friend Andrew. Andrew unceremoniously rolls back into Ben’s now suburban, married life and draws him into his bohemian lifestyle; which results in a drunken pact to make a film for the local porn festival – featuring themselves in an act of ‘art’ that would be ‘beyond gay’. Shelton sensitively and humorously explores notions of identity and public image, or the void between the two, while exposing the dynamics between the characters with wince-inducing perception.

Greek film Dogtooth was an enormous hit at the packed out Sallis Benney Theatre. It’s a twisted family affair in which the three children, now grown-up, have been kept inside the grounds of their home on the edge of a city for their entire lives, trained like dogs and grossly mis-educated about the outside world under their father’s dogma. The film swung between hilarious scenes of strange games the siblings had invented, generally involving bizarre acts of endurance, and grotesquely violent shocks. Having employed Christine, a co-worker, to visit the house to fulfil his son’s sexual needs, the father becomes livid when he discovers she has given one of his daughters a video of Rocky. Visiting Christine at her home, he leaps up and attacks her with a DVD player, pausing in the doorway as he leaves to damningly curse: “I hope your children have bad personalities.” Tacky ornaments and a sickly pastel decor intensify the stagnant claustrophobia of the bleak family house - a muted prison that is echoed in shots of regimented industrial buildings.

The final weekend featured a matinee screening of A Moment In June, a fascinating and beautifully shot Thai film by director O.Napathon, who currently lives in Brighton. A Moment In June develops a complex, absorbing network of relationships spanning decades, drifting between a fictionalised love story and the coincidentally linked personal lives of the play’s writer and the director. The shifting narratives explore love, loss and regret in a way that converge and separate with a tender and captivating rhythm.

A Prophet, the closing film, provided an outstanding finale for the festival. French director Jacques Audiard’s (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) new feature is an engrossing, masterfully constructed film following the experiences of Malik El Djebena who, sentenced to prison for six years, adapts to and rises within the criminal networks. With a striking soundtrack and intricate layers of narrative progression, it’s little surprise this has been titled film of the year by Sight & Sound magazine.

Sophie Brown