The first-produced screenwriters shaking up this year’s Miami Film Festival

In an age where fact-based news has become increasingly compromised by social media, counter-knowledge and the cult of personality, this feature debut from rapper, deejay and director Tomás Alzamora feels piercingly del momento. The protagonist of Little White Lie is a journalist struggling to maintain a career in a small Chilean town. Worrying that he’s on the verge of losing his job, he fabricates a story—a “little white lie”—that turns into a very big deal, transforming him into a hugely popular local celebrity. Should our humble hero confess his peccadillo or sacrifice his integrity at the altar of fame? Find out in one of the wittiest debuts of this or any other year.

Stories can imbue our lives with meaning and order; they can also be our undoing. Fenton, a promising young writer, is reeling from the latter effect: he lost his girlfriend Jessie after The New Yorker published his thinly veiled story about her family. And when Fenton returns to New York after a year away he finds that time hasn’t healed the wound in his favour: Jessie is engaged to another man.With its crack cast of newcomers and veterans—among them Chris Noth, Shiloh Fernandez and Mary-Louise Parker—Miami director Xavier Manrique’s feature debut navigates numerous emotional geometries with sophistication, wit and understated wisdom.

Land surveyor Eric, alienated from urban existence and those who love him, travels to a remote and unnamed Irish woodland to assess its suitability for a dubious development project. Intangible elements are at play in this ethereal environment. The place seems to be imbued by an intelligence of sorts. A silhouette flits between trees. The place fascinates the fragmenting Eric as much as it disturbs him. Following in the psychonautic footsteps of the mysterious Devoy, Eric attempts to communicate with his surroundings, but risks becoming a prisoner of a place Without Name.

Ladji lives hand-to-mouth selling bus tickets on the streets of Bamako. With no opportunity for advancement, Ladji decides to take on a more profitable—and far more precarious—vocation. Ladji finds fast success as a drug trafficker, but with that success comes uneasy alliances with the upper echelons of the underworld, Mali’s military, and even Al-Qaeda.

An inspired fusion of fact and fiction, Stéphanie di Giusto’s debut takes as its subject the life and work of the underappreciated American dancer Loïe Fuller. The Dancer follows Fuller (alluringly portrayed by the singer Soko) as she makes her way from America to Belle époque Europe, where her innovations in movement, costume and lighting dazzle audiences and bring her into contact—and some friction—with the likes of Isadora Duncan (played by Lily-Rose Depp). Based on Giovanni Lista’s novel about Fuller, The Dancer is a bio-pic buoyed with conjecture—which is another way of saying that this is history transformed into rapturous, visually breathtaking cinema, reminding us of the legacy of one of America’s forgotten artistic pioneers.

David is a riot cop; he’s shot a bullet into the eyes of two protestors already this year. Lidia is David’s foodie wife; she’s invited their friend Sandra for dinner. Sandra brings along her boyfriend, Ignasi—who just happens to be wearing an eye-patch.Based on his own play, Catalan writer-director Marc Crehuet’s feature debut synthesizes sundry aspects of post-financial crisis Spanish life into a wickedly comic satire. When Lidia walks out on him, David winds up soliciting advice from Ignasi—which he interprets as a prompt to kidnap a politician. Rife with twists and resisting easy polemics, The One-Eyed King burns with ideas and savage dramatics.

In Inner Mongolia in the early 1990s, 12-year-old Xiaolei looks forward to his long-awaited summer vacation, free of homework, with his father, who works at a film studio, and his education-minded mother. But life is rapidly changing, as stable jobs at state-owned companies disappear. His parents, seemingly calm in the blazing sunshine, seeth with inner anxiety. Xiaolei has a feeling that a revolution is quietly taking place.

Jeffrey is only 12-years-old, but he helps put food on his family’s table by working as a Santo Domingo windshield washer—and he helps feed his spirit by composing and recording music with his big brother Jeyson. Director Yanillys Perez sensitively contrasts her loveable subject’s dreams of making it big as a reguetón singer with the complex reality of life on the streets of the Dominican Republic’s teeming capital, a place as marked by poverty as it is by beauty. Jeffrey is a tribute to the resilience of youthful aspiration even in the most daunting circumstances.

Handyman José lives with his family in La Soledad, a ramshackle villa located in what was once among Caracas’ most affluent neighborhoods. After learning that the villa’s owners are planning to sell the estate, José seeks any solution that might keep his six-year-old daughter from growing up in Caracas’ crime-sodden slums. Might that fabled treasure supposedly hidden in La Soledad’s walls offer José’s family a chance at a better life? Jorge Thielen Armand’s feature debut carves fiction from reality: La Soledad was once his family’s home; this story is true, acted out by the people who lived it. La Soledad is a magnificent feat of real-life storytelling—and a profound fusion of creativity and compassion.

Among the various services that form the backdrop of life in Los Angeles, none is perhaps more simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible as the parking valet. Writer-director Heidi Saman’s feature debut smartly centers on one such figure, a young Egyptian-American who over the course of Namour gradually succumbs to a nervous breakdown.

A pizzeria may seem a modest venture, but for the three enterprising habaneros at the center of Cuban filmmaker Patricia Ramos’ winsome feature debut, success in the pizza business holds the promise of prosperity, purpose and, just maybe, love and happiness. A deliciously off-beat romantic comedy, On the Roof offers an impeccable balance of colloquial charm and universal appeal. Ramos and her excellent cast have crafted highly relatable characters with varying degrees of ambition, ingenuity and quirk. Some current Cuban films seek to correct sweeping social ailments; by contrast, Ramos and her collaborators understand that sometimes the world is changed one dream at a time.

After losing his job, his girlfriend, and his apartment in a single day, a young man attempts to restart his life, but is diverted when he meets a woman who shares his strangest habit, an inclination for eating hair.