THE TORONTO International Film Festival is mega — over 300 films were screened this year — and among them were debut features and documentaries that caught the eye, among them Workforce from 29-year-old Mexican director David Zonana.

Highlighting the catastrophic consequences of class inequality and the violation of workers’ rights, it tells the story of young construction worker Francesco, who seeks justice when his brother dies in front of him on a luxury-home building site.

His widowed sister-in-law is told she will get no compensation from the accident and the tragedy is the starting point for a fierce and meticulous examination of cycles of economic abuse in what's a heartbreaking and hard-hitting human story.

Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden, an adaptation of Jack London’s 1909 novel, speaks urgently to the ways poverty and free-market capitalism clear a path for demagoguery and hypocritical libertarian thinking.

Based on the true life story of Eden, a young working-class sailor who decides to improve himself and become a writer, it’s a film in which Marcello masterfully builds a tribute to an artist who does what few care to do — attempt to grasp, rather than capitalise on, the fraught humanity and circumstances that lead to self-defeating political ideologies.

Another debut feature was Lebanese director Oualid Mouaness’s 1982, based on his memories as a child during the Lebanese conflict following Israeli invasion that year. As it encroaches upon a school, the tension ramps up, and the world becomes filled with peril.

This film is a real gem — deeply moving and full of humanity, it has a huge emotional impact.

Yet another first film was Manele Labidis’s Arabic Night, which offers a fascinating window on modern Tunisia, a country at a crossroads — on the one hand wanting to embrace more modernity but still holding on to conservative values.

Among other notable films was Alexander Nanau’s documentary Collective, which follows a team of Romanian journalists as they chase down the scandal around a Bucharest nightclub fire that claimed the lives of 64 people.

An accurate reconstruction of events, it’s marked by an acute sense of observation and rigorous political engagement.

From Britain, Coky Giedroyc’s How to Build a Girl is a rock’n’roll rom com about a poor girl from a bad postcode making something beautiful out of herself.

Beanie Feldstein stars as the irrepressible teenaged girl from a working-class family who breaks into the snooty boys’ club of English rock criticism, loses her soul and then gains it back again in what’s a witty and heartfelt story.