What began as Sjol’s half-serious remarks about wanting to adapt a work of academic theory—a minefield of untapped “IP” in an era dominated by it, he joked—gave way to Goldhaber’s mental images of kids struggling with a bomb in the middle of a desert.

Recently rediscovered, Mohammad Reza Aslani’s 1976 feature Chess of the Wind teeters on the precipice between the traditional and the modern, pulling from both Iranian and European pictorial traditions to deliver a series of politically charged, even revolutionary tableaux.

Russian Sci-fi authors Boris and Arkady Strugatsky owe much of their renown in the United States, to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979). Despite mixed reviews upon release, the film has cemented itself in the world cinema canon, and brought its source material, the brothers’s Roadside Picnic, along with it.