Edward Yang’s second feature is a mournful anatomy of a city caught between the past and the present. Taipei Story chronicles the growing estrangement between a washed-up baseball player (Hou Hsiao-hsien) working in his family’s textile business and his girlfriend (pop star Tsai Chin), who clings to the upward mobility of her career in property development.

François Truffaut’s first feature is also his most personal. Told from the point of view of Truffaut’s cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), The 400 Blows sensitively re-creates the trials of Truffaut’s own childhood.

An amateur entomologist leaves Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle found in a vast desert. When he misses his bus back to the city, he is persuaded of spending the night with a young widow in her hut by a sand dune, who is forced to constantly clear the sands that threaten to engulf it. One of cinema’s most unnerving and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday life as a Sisyphean struggle.