It’s the most wonderful time of the year — for international cinema enthusiasts, anyway. The Cannes Film Festival kicks off next week, and we’ve spent the past months poring over the lineup announcement, squealing with glee over a stacked Jury, getting psyched for the Critics Week and Directors’ Fortnight sidebars, and gazing out the window while wondering what a three-hour 3-D porno from Gaspar Noé could possibly look like. Shortly after the original programming announcement, we collected all available trailers for films slated to run at Cannes, either in Competition or one of the many parallel sections. But that was nearly a month ago, and much has transpired since then. While folks actually attending the festival have spent the past few days running around stocking up on sunscreen and fashionable sunglasses, we grubby Internet mole-people have been scouring the Web for the latest trailers and allowing the fleshy husks we once brashly called bodies to turn ever-more ghastly shades of pale.

And so it is with great pleasure that we once again swing open the gate to the Cannes Trailer Park. Enjoy these tantalizing morsels of movies that might play for two days at the far-flung arthouse theater in your nearest major metropolis a year from now!

The Other Side

With The Other Side, Roberto Minervini makes his triumphant return to Cannes after his Stop The Pounding Heart enjoyed a special screening during 2013’s proceedings. That film tracked the little tragedies and triumphs of a goat farmer’s daughter living in Texas, but for his new feature, Minervini moves one state eastward. The Other Side’s alternate title is Louisiana, and the English-language film accordingly chronicles life on the bayou for ordinary Louisianians. With a cast including “retired war veterans, uncommunicative teens, and drug addicts looking for a way out of their addiction through love,” Louisiana looks more rapturously beautiful, albeit slightly less fun, than The Princess And The Frog.

The Measure Of A Man

Without subtitles, the trailer doesn’t offer much in the way of clarification. (Though perhaps any Francophone commenters would be decent enough to clue the rest of us in.) It certainly looks very French, as it displays a decently good-looking guy with a respectable job who is still stricken by existential ennui regardless. Director Stéphane Brizé has amassed a great deal of respect in his native France, his films usual suspects at France’s César Awards. But with The Measure Of A Man, he may carry that admiration into the global stage.

Rams

An Icelandic import, Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams tells the story of two brothers who live and work as sheep breeders a stone’s throw from one another, and yet who have not spoken in 40 years. When a disease threatens their livestock livelihood—they call it “scrapie,” though it’s known in the States as a sheep-specific strain of mad cow disease—they have no choice but to put aside their conflict in order to save both of their flocks. The film features the natural beauties of Iceland, and does not feature the musical stylings of Bjork or Sigur Ros or Of Monsters and Men, which constitutes the sum total of my knowledge of Icelandic culture.

Taklub

In 2009, Brillante Mendoza made history and brought his nation immense pride by becoming the first Filipino filmmaker to take home the Best Director prize at Cannes. That film, Kinatay, told the brutally bleak story of a student in the Philippines forced into untold acts of depravity in order to provide for his family. Mendoza has not softened in the six years since Kinatay, turning his gaze now on the families torn asunder by the devastation of typhoon Haiyan in 2013. Taklub, Tagalog for ‘trap,’ sorts through issues of loss, desperation, and lapsed faith in the wake of trauma at the personal and global level. At the risk of sounding obvious, this film looks extremely sad. 

La Tierra Y La Sombra (via Indiewire)

Colombian filmmaker César Augusto Acevedo makes his Cannes debut with La Tierra Y La Sombra (Land And Shade, for those of you who snoozed through high-school Spanish). A first-time director, Acevedo brought no shortage of ambition to his picture, tackling big national themes on his first go. Hey, nobody gets into Cannes without knowing how to make an entrance. It’s a somber but visually striking film, with the fields ablaze in flame evoking memories of Kalatozov’s legendary Soy Cuba. The working underclass in Colombia have found a new champion in Acevedo.

This Is Orson Welles

I’ve heard good things about this “Orson Welles” character! He directed some good movies back in the ’40s and ’50s, I guess? Something about reshaping the face of American cinema, popularizing the notion of a film as an expression of a singular artistic vision? What ever happened to that guy, I wonder? Several very famous faces will non-rhetorically answer that rhetorical question in This Is Orson Welles, a new documentary about the famed entertainer of screen and radio. The trailer alone feature Welles’ daughter Chris, as well as Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich, whose 1992 book of interviews with Welles lends the film its title. (Note: This film is not to be confused with Magician, a different documentary about the life and times of Orson Welles released this year.)