Parky at the Pictures (London Film Festival Special, Part Three)

The hope that Iranian New Wave cinema is akin to something like the Cinema of Anxiety that presaged the rise of Solidarity in Poland is continued by Mohammad Rasoulof's Goodbye and Abbas Kiarostami protégé Morteza Farshbaf's Mourning. Like Panahi, Rasoulof has been jailed for supposed anti-government activities and the story of pregnant Tehran lawyer Leyla Zareh's determined bid to flee abroad had to be clandestinely filmed. But it remains uncompromising in its theme and style, as does the debuting Farshbaf's tale of a young boy (Kiomars Gity) left behind in the north of the country with deaf relatives Sharareh Pasha and Amirhossein Maleki after his arguing parents disappear in the night.

The ongoing conflicts within Israeli society are also considered in a trio of provocative pictures. In Policeman, Nadav Lapid shows how fiercely macho patriot Yiftach Klein is forced to reassess his role within a crack anti-terrorist unit when radicals Michael Aloni and Yaara Pelzig take hostages at the wedding of a Jerusalem billionaire's daughter and his wife gives birth to his first child. A vein of dark wit creeps into this hard-hitting drama and the same wry humour informs Joseph Cedar's fourth feature Footnote, which centres on the tensions between father and son Shlomo Bar Aba and Lior Ashkenazi, as they prepare for a prize-giving ceremony to recognise their achievements as Talmudic scholars at the capital's Hebrew University. And the world of academe is further scrutinised by Eran Kolirin in The Exchange, as Tel Aviv physics tutor Rotem Keinan begins to neglect his students and wife Sharon Tal after returning home at an unfamiliar time of day and becoming so preoccupied with a milieu he has scarcely noticed before that he even begins to accept neighbour Dov Navon's suggestion that he might be invisible.

Kolirin won many friends with The Band's Visit (2007) and Lebanon's Nadine Labaki looks set to build on the good impression she made with the same year's Caramel with her second feature, Where Do We Go Now? Set in a Middle Eastern village where Christians and Muslims have always lived in harmony, this adroit updating of Aristophanes's comedy Lysistrata shows how the womenfolk attempt to distract their men from the news of the religious tensions that are becoming increasingly violent beyond their isolated backwater. Containing a dreamy song-and-dance routine, this genial satire contrasts starkly with another study of the female experience in the Arab world, Amr Salama's Asmaa. Starring Tunisian actress Hend Sabry, this inspiring fact-based drama follows an Egyptian widow as she comes to terms with her HIV diagnosis and the need to care for her ailing teenage son while being shunned by her ignorant and prejudicial neighbours.

Extolling Sabry's efforts to use her illness to educate others, this is the only picture from North Africa in LFF 2011. But while it's understandable that the Arab Spring would have had a deleterious effect on film-making in the Maghrebi region, the absence of any features whatsoever from Sub-Saharan Africa is dispiriting in the extreme and the continent's only other contribution to this year's festival is a pair of social dramas from South Africa.

Sara Blecher's Otelo Burning harks back to the end of the apartheid era in the late 1980s to focus on the friendship that develops between beach kid Sihle Xaba and a trio from the Lamontville township -16 year-old Jafta Mamabolo, best buddy Thomas Gumede and his younger brother Tshepang Mohlomi - when they start surfing the Durban waves and Xaba and Mamabolo become rivals for Gumede's sister, Nolwazi Shange. And sexual urges also drive the action in Oliver Hermanus's Beauty, an unflinching exposé of racism and homophobia in which fortysomething Afrikaaner father of two Deon Lotz becomes increasingly besotted with handsome Bloemfonteiner Charlie Keegan.

The Pacific Rim contingent is also dismaying small this year, even though few regions anywhere else in the world can match it for emerging filmic traditions. So make the most of Filipino Charliebebs Gohetia's The Natural Phenomenon of Madness and Thai Sivaroj Kongsakul's Eternity. The first owes much to the tough social dramas of Brillante Mendoza (which Gohetia edited) in chronicling the monochrome break up of the relationship between Jess Mendoza and the girl on whom he relies for sex and blood transfusions Opaline Santos. The second sees Kongsakul (who has assisted all the major figures in Thailand's New Wave) debut with a wistful, semi-autobiographical rite of passage that was inspired by the early death of his father and turns on a ghost's return to the countryside where he grew up and fell in love.

The tone is much harsher in Kim Kyung-Mook's Stateless Things, which uses an internet site to link the unhappy fates of illegal North Korean migrant Lee Paul, who turns to prostitution after he and fellow fugitive Kim Sae-byuk fall out with exploitative boss Kim Jeong-seok, and Yeom Hyun-joon, who resents his cosseted existence near the government buildings in Yeouido as the toy boy of married businessman Lim Hyung-kook. Seductions and rejections of a more comic kind inform Hang Sang-soo's latest dispatch from the battle of the sexes, The Day He Arrives, which borrows from the nouvelle vague and Harold Ramis's Groundhog Day (1993) in piecing together film-maker Yu Jun-sang's booze-filled return to Seoul and encounters with critic buddy Kim Sang-joong, cinema studies professor Song Sun-mi and his ex-girlfriend and her doppelgänger (both Kim Bok-yung) which might have taken place across three days or could just as easily have occurred within quirky repetitions of the same 24 hours.

Japan is better represented with six features, the pick of which is Takaski Miike's Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai. Revisiting the Yasuhiko Takiguchi story that was so brilliantly filmed by Masaki Kobayashi in 1962, the action is set during the 17th-century Shogunate when peace had left countless samurai with little option but to roam the countryside as impoverished ronin. However, in descending upon the house of feudal lord Koji Yakusho to request permission to commit ritual suicide within his grounds, Ebizô Ichikawa is not seeking to be bought out, but to avenge the death of his son-in-law, Eita. And a second classic provides the impetus for another vengeance saga, as Daisuke Tengan's Dendera presents a sequel to father Shohei Imamura's masterly 1983 adaptation of Shichiro Fukazawa's story The Ballad of Narayama in having the old lady sent into the Tohoku mountains to die in the original drama (now played by Ruriko Asaoka) awake to find herself in a settlement for similarly disowned women who simply refused to die and are now planning a bloody attack under the leadership of the pitiless Mitsuko Baishô.

Moving forward in time from this take on Yûya Satô's novel, Nobuhiro Yamashita's My Back Page reworks a reputedly autobiographical book by Saburo Kawamoto to trace rookie journalist Satoshi Tsumabuki's growing affinity with fearless student revolutionary Kenichi Matsuyama. If this throwback to the 1960s rigidly eschews nostalgia, Yuya Ishii plays with fond recollections (particularly of the cost characters in Yoji Yamada's long-running Tora-san series) in Mitsuko Delivers, as nine-month pregnant Riisa Naka decides against flying to California to join her baby's GI father and follows a cloud back to the alley where she grew up to help its working-class residents sort their lives out before hers changes forever.

Unvoiced wishes also play a key part in Hirokazu Koreeda's I Wish, in which brothers Koki Maeda and Ohshiro Maeda vow to reunite their estranged parents, despite the fact that the older is stuck in Kagoshima in the shadow of a rumbling volcano with his mother and grandparents and the younger is living with his rock musician father in Fukuoka. A story turning on the urban myth that wishes will come true for anyone witnessing the first north- and south-bound bullet trains passing on a newly opened rail network sounds like something from a kid-friendly anime and Makoto Shinkai produces an equally charming fable in Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below, which sees young Asuna and her cat Mimi have to stop a band of soldiers gaining entry to the underground realm of Agartha, which supposedly has properties that will bring people back from the dead.

Keeping undesirables out proves equally crucial in actor-director Jiang Wen's Let the Bullets Fly, a rousing 1920s Eastern starring Jiang, Chow Yun-Fat and Ge You as an unscrupulous trio competing for control of the lucrative settlement of Goose Town. With supporting turns from Carina Lau, Hu Jun and Chow as his own gormless lookalike, this recently became the country's biggest box-office hit of all time. However, Han Jie and producer Jia Zhangke aim a little lower with Mr Tree, which boasts a poignant eponymous performance by Wang Baoqiang, who emerges from the disastrous courtship of deaf-mute massage parlour girl Tan Zhuo with the gift for prophecy that helps the residents of the rundown town of Jilin on the border with North Korea resist the redevelopment plans of a soulless mining company.

Veteran Hong Kong auteur Ann Hui is no stranger to films about displaced persons, but she focuses on the one who stayed behind in A Simple Life, as middle-aged Andy Lau takes care of Deanie Ip (who had been the family maid for some six decades before they decamped to the United States) after she has a stroke and asks to retire to an old people's home. The film industry in the special administrative region has retained its distinctive voice since the 1997 handover and, despite the growing influence of the imported Han population, Tibetan cinema also continues to capture the local tone in pictures like Pema Tseden's Old Dog and Sonthar Gyal's The Sun-Beaten Path. The first reveals what happens when Drolma Kyab's shepherd father attempts to retrieve the family's nomad mastiff that his hard-drinking son had sold in the local town to prevent it being stolen by thieves. This lyrical blend of deft realism and unforced symbolism was photographed by Sonthar Gyal, who makes his directorial debut with an unconventional road movie that accompanies returning pilgrim Yeshe Lhadruk after he disembarks from the bus that is travelling too fast between Lhasa and his remote Golmud home and tries to resist the well-intentioned solicitude of elderly Lo Kyi, as he seeks to deal with a recent traffic tragedy.

This Tibetan twosome has proved popular in festivals across Asia, as has Sanjeewa Pushpakumara's Flying Fish, which interweaves vignettes relating to Sri Lanka's civil war that link the fates of a Tamil girl impregnated and deserted by her enemy soldier lover, a mother who sleeps with a shopkeeper to feed her eight children and a schoolgirl whose parents have to raise a ransom to prevent her from being conscripted by the Tamil Tigers. Aged Indian couple Salim Kumar and Zarina Wahab also have to raise a large sum in a hurry to go on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in debutant Salim Ahamed's Abu, Son of Adam, which not only captures the rhythms of daily life in the southern state of Kerala, but also its detachment from the modern world and the influence that faith, superstition and ancient custom still have on its touchingly trusting people.

The difficulty of adapting to changing ways is further considered by Mani Kaul protégé Gurvinder Singh in Alms of the Blind Horse, which contrasts the efforts of Punjabi couple Mal Singh and Dharminder Kaur to resist the efforts of a powerful landlord to demolish their village and the struggle of their rickshaw puller son Samuel Sikander John to make a living in the nearby city of Bathinda. Another rickshaw driver (and Bruce Lee obsessive), Joyraj Bhattacharjee, sets wannabe rapper Anubrata Basu on a downward spiral as Kaushik `Q' Mukherjee takes a more abrasive approach to urban living in the hardcore monochrome melodrama Asshole. However, in fleeing the Kolkata flat he shares with mother Kamalika and her bullying lover Shilajit, Joyraj becomes increasingly hooked on drugs, visions of the goddess Kali and the body of hooker Rii.

There is a notable absence of Bengali thrash metal from Suman Ghosh's The Nobel Thief, which marks the 150th anniversary of the great Rabindranath Tagore with a droll state of the nation comedy that riffs on the 2004 theft of the writer's Nobel medal by having poor farmer Mithun Chakroborty discover the stolen prize and debate whether to sell it to feed his family or follow schoolteacher Soumitra Chatterjee's advice and take it to Kolkata and become a cultural hero. Fittingly, a Tagore tale provides the inspiration for Rituparno Ghosh's Nouka Dubi, which is set at the turn of the last century and centres on law student Jishhu Sengupta's decision to obey his aristocratic father and ditch heiress Raima Sen in Kolkata and return to his country estate to marry Riya Sen, the illiterate daughter of an unfortunate widow. However, a boating accident, a guilty secret and a case of mistaken identity change the trio's destinies forever.

If India still boasts the world's largest film industry in Bollywood, there's little doubt that the most exciting cinema of the past decade has come from Latin America and LFF 55 suggests that Argentinian film in particular is continuing to thrive.

We start, however, in the Mexican border town of Baja, as Stephanie Sigman leaves for Tijuana with her best friend in the hope of winning a beauty contest. However, as Gerardo Naranjo reveals in Miss Bala, her ambitions are soon determined by gangster Noe Hernandez, who not only takes a perverse shine to her, but also realises that she could help him in his bid to assassinate general Miguel Couturier. Runaway Colombian wife Ángela Carrizosa plays another innocent in trouble and a long way from home in Karen Cries on the Bus, Gabriel Rojas Vera's reworking of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, which unflinchingly depicts Carrizosa's resort to begging after fleeing complacent businessman husband Edgar Alexen and moving into shabby digs with younger hairdresser Mara Anglica Snchez, whose affair with a married man provides her new friend with an unexpected second chance of happiness.

Helena Albergaria is also keen to start again in Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra's social realist chiller, Hard Labour. However, with middle-manager husband Marat Descartes struggling to find work after he's laid off in the recession, running a small grocery store in a rundown part of an anonymous Brazilian town is not made any easier by Albergaria's uneasy relationships with new nanny Naloana Lima and 7/11 employees Gilda Nomacce and Thiago Carreira. But what really makes life difficult are the mysterious occurrences that make her suspect that the shop harbours a malevolent presence. And sinister goings on also inform the first of the Argentinian sextet, Laura Citarella's Ostende, which wears its debts to Alfred Hitchcock and Eric Rohmer on its sleeve, as Laura Paredes checks into a coastal hotel for the holiday her film-maker boyfriend won in a radio contest and, while waiting for his arrival, becomes fascinated by a ménage involving a pair of nubile twentysomethings and older man Julio Citarella.

The debuting Gustavo Taretto is equally in thrall to Woody Allen for Medianeras, which replaces Manhattan with Buenos Aires for the story of nebbish web designer and games addict Javier Drolas's unexpected, but entirely adorable romance with architect Pilar López de Ayala, who is also recovering from a broken relationship and is similarly fixated with Where's Wally? books. A misfit of a much gruffer kind finds himself drawn to another burdened woman in Pablo Giorgelli's road movie Las Acasias, a touching example of the 'slow cinema' perfected by compatriot Lisandro Alonso, in which trucker Germán de Silva picks up young mother Hebe Duarte and her eight-month-old son while transporting a cargo of timber from Asunción del Paraguay to Buenos Aires.

The setting is more fixed and imposing for debutant Milagros Mumenthaler's affecting study of loss and self-discovery, Back to Stay, which contains echoes of Anton Chekhov and Lucrecia Martel in its story of three sisters - the industrious and studious María Canale, the vain and vapid Martina Juncadella and the languid Ailín Salas - who are left to fend for themselves when the grandmother who raised them dies suddenly. Esteban Lamothe discovers his own home truths in the more brutal world of university politics in onetime Pablo Trapero scenarist Santiago Mitre's acerbic allegory, The Student, as he juggles his predatory ambitions in the bed and the debating chamber under the watchful eye of cynical professor Ricardo Félix. But, finally, the hallowed halls of Buenos Aires couldn't be more different from the rough streets of Córdoba, as teenagers Bebo, Ricardo and Pata trudge across the city with a horse-drawn cart searching for cardboard to recycle. However, Hermes Paralluelo's documentary Yatasto is anything but a dispiriting experience, as the banter between the boys is often humorous and there is something uplifting about Ricardo's ambition to be a jockey and his sister Dámaris's hope to become a policewoman to care for their grandmother Chinina.