ROTTERDAM Film Festival is a key event for the independent film industry internationally, particularly from Asia and the Global South. Appropriately, the Tiger Award top prize went to the Indian film Pebbles.

Set in a rural village in southern India, Pebbles follows an alcoholic and abusive father and his young son as they embark on an eight-mile walk under scorching sun in a bid to reunite with his wife, who has fled his violence.

The feature debut of director Vinothraj PS, it has a a non-professional Tamil-speaking cast and, despite its grim subject matter, is a captivating and warm-hearted tale imbued with beauty and humour.

The Big Screen award went to The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, an experimental black-and-white feature from Argentine director Ana Katz.

A midlife coming-of-age comedy-drama, it turns on 30s-something Sebastian who, devoted to his loyal dog, navigates love, loss and fatherhood and, in telling an ordinary story in an extraordinary way, is a reminder that we always need less than we think.

Two special jury awards went to I Comete: A Corsican Summer by French film-maker Pascal Tagnati, a coming-of-age tale set over a summer in a Mediterranean resort, and Looking For Venera by Norika Sefa, the story of a taciturn teenager who lives with three generations of her family, with virtually no privacy, in a small Kosovan village.

Both films share the struggles of the quest to discover the young self and they’re likeable for their honest and open-minded aspirations.

Among other titles that grabbed the attention is the brilliant debut Madalena by Madiano Moretti, which centres on the death of a rural trans woman. It makes a powerful point about an ongoing tragedy in Brazil, which has the highest rate of murders of trans people of any country in the world.

Equally well crafted is Ismael and Youssef Chebbi’s Tunisian femme fatale thriller Black Medusa, in which the young woman Nada leads a double life.

By day she’s quiet and reserved but after dark she plunges into the nightlife of Tunis to seduce men in order to brutally kill them. The directors sketch a portrait of a city that combines cold, faceless office buildings with exuberant night life and they emerge as new, original  voices in North African cinema, to be discovered and celebrated.

Landscapes of Resistance, a documentary by Marta Papivoda, explores the tensions between memory and everyday life. It focuses on the antifascist and feminist potential in the Yugoslav socialist project in the shape of Sonja Vujanovic, a lifelong communist, partisan fighter and Auschwitz survivor.  

In what’s a very personal and painful tale, Vujanovic is arrested, beaten and tortured and sent from Belgrade to Auschwitz as a political prisoner in what’s an unflinching portrait of a fight against all odds.

A powerful documentary with a stunning impact.