Brit Daniel Mulloy is an award-winning short filmmaker (over 80 fest awards folks) who belongs to both the extended Sundance filmmaking family and a celluloid loving family of his own -- we've featured his sister Lucy and her debut film, Una Noche which is headed off to Berlin next month. We've been keeping tabs on the helmer since 2006's "Antonio’s Breakfast," and it was last year where I got to speak to Mulloy about what should be the last of a string of shorts, before he embarks on the feature filmmaking portion of his career.

Gerardo Naranjo's savage, bullet riddled, all-encompassing torrid thriller featuring a full scale border-war demonstrates the prowess of an auteur filmmaker who up until 2011 was labeled as an art-house rebel with the low budget experimental "Drama/Mex," and French New Wave influenced Voy a explotar. In comparison with these previous entries, Miss Bala counts as a monumental shift way in aesthetic, shape and form. With a brilliantly choreographed outline, Naranjo borrows from fact, takes a piercing/critical stance and depicts a society that is held hostage via a symbolic lead figure, who at times emblematically represents the "route" nature of the drug trade.

We were thrilled to see Andrew Dosunmu’s latest film, Restless City, his first film since his 1999, Hot Irons, show up as part of the 2011’s AFI New Auteurs Program. Originally premiering at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Dosunmu’s latest is a vibrant story about an African immigrant living in New York City following his passion in music. Falling in love with a girl in trouble, the trajectory of his fate becomes tinged with tragedy.

Mark Jackson's directorial debut Without, premiered in Park City this year - not at Redford's biggie event, but Sundance's competing film festival. It won the Special Jury Award in Slamdance and when Jackson was named among Filmmaker Magazine's Top 25 New Faces, the minimalist/microscopic budgeted chilly and ambiguous psychological thriller found more international love with showings at international fest stops Locarno, BFI London, Deauville and the Hamptons.

Representing a monumental leap in poise and craft, it is also Bonello's most subtle work in terms of provocation and shocking or subversive imagery. I met up with Mr. Bonello after his film's North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, when we discussed his place in the New Extremity Movement, the mixed reception that his film has had with North American critics, and the research that went into the project, among other things.

You’d never known it back in the day when he was running around forests looking for "Blair Witches" and all that nonsense, but Joshua Leonard is a very smart guy. His directorial debut in scripted narrative The Lie, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival under NEXT is a study both of our contemporary culture and a sociological situation that has existed for a long time and won’t go away anytime soon.

Written by Leonard with the participation of Jess Weixler, Mark Webber and Jeff Feuerzeig (director of The Devil and Daniel Johnston and an upcoming Untitled Chuck Wepner Project), I see this as a modern telling of Elia Kazan's The Arrangement, but do not take that to mean Leonard is conjuring Kirk Douglas in any way.

Padilha starting out in documentaries, with his classic Bus 174, he found another story he wanted to tell. After trying to document the inner workings of BOPE, the police force at the center of both Elite Squad films, he decided that there as a rule of filmmaking they left out in film school. A prerequisite of making a film is that the director much not die.

We had no money, no resources, nothing. We were totally off the reservation but we persevered, I think, because we all believed we were making a new kind of movie, something that we'd never seen before and desperately wanted to see.

If the names aren't familiar, their films are...and will be. After film festival accolades for Afterschool (2008), Two Gates of Sleep (2010) and with the Campos' sophomore film Simon Killer in post and poised for another huge film festival premiere, it is the revelation at this year's Sundance Film Festival and association with Indie vet producer Ted Hope on the uniquely titled Martha Marcy May Marlene that has turned the spotlight inwards on a trio of film school friends who've united, branded and excelled in bringing about an evocative and refreshing new works on the American independent film scene.

Not surprisingly, Durkin won Best Director in Park City, Fox Searchlight picked up the rights during the fest and the quality speaks for itself as it was invited for its international premiere in the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes.

Playing a supporting character in Sean Durkin's brilliant film debut Martha Marcy May Marlene, actor Brady Corbet's "recruiter" character is the only player to cross into the feature from Durkin's previous short film, the linked, Cannes-winning Mary Last Seen. Corbet is in a rather interesting phase in his career.

Krause somehow combines middle-American blonde hair, blue eyes girl-next-door with a partly Asian background, giving her eyes you can’t, um, take your eyes off of. Thankfully she's been keeping it real on the indie track. Krause’s next two roles come in much anticipated films, Jason Reitman’s Young Adult and Liza Johnson’s Return.

Garner is 17-years-old with a powerful presence that she seems to not even be aware of. For Garner it’s obviously the hair. She has that kind of hair that she’ll be known forever for in her career. This is Garner’s first feature film, but she’s up for two roles coming up that are hush-hush at the time of this article.

"So as a filmmaker, you’re looking for topics and subjects that you think would be a good film, but also a topic that you are engaged in, so you can dedicate two or three years of your life to it."

A stylistic departure from his breakout international debut film Reprise, Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31st is a mature sophomore effort knee deep in the search for the meaning and purpose of life in contemporary Norway.

...three years later with the Directors' Fortnight selected Play, a newspaper headline-grabbing true story that took place in Sweden a couple of years back, he details the conflict between groups via a demo of the population who often must fiend for themselves the best way they know how and under minimal, but not totally absent supervision.

"But as time goes on where other people's perspective come in you just let go where it becomes a real movie at that point. I don't watch my films anymore where they become like ex-boyfriends where I loved them but also moved on."

We get mild criticism from both sides on this issue, too: some people say that we went too far in invading the tiler's privacy by making the movie at all, while others think that we didn't go far enough and should have staked out his house, presumably to catch him, throw him in a cage and put him on display.

Thumbsucker director Mike Mills' deeply touching representation on how the past, present and future offer oblique guides to defining the cycle of life and the father-son rapport, this just interpretation of what it looks like to commence a new chapter in one's life is a wonderfully constructed, highly personal and honest reflection that demonstrates how life and film can be calibrated to incorporate comedy in drama and drama in comedy.