With six decades under its belt, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen continues to present short form works that subvert and astonish. Nestled in the western corner of Germany, the quiet town of Oberhausen and its neighboring post-industrial cities in the Ruhr valley are referred to as the Detroit of Germany.

From an homage to Scottish physicist Michael Faraday’s teachings, to Icelandic landscapes graced by Auden and MacNeice’s epistolary wits, and her continued examination of landscape’s relationship to power structures, “Forces and Gazes,” a three-part program of Deborah Stratman’s films and videos, screened at Anthology Film Archives on July 22 and 23, and featured many of her rarely seen works.

From Jean-Marie Straub’s didactic elegies for Kafka and Orpheus to Michael Robinson’s A Line Describing Your Mom, and wacky new work by the late, great George Kuchar, there was much seriousness and much fun to be had at this year’s Views, which utilized the new venue to showcase more work than ever before.

Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul embarked on an adventure. He was inspired by A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a little book given to him by a monk who wrote about Boonmee, a certain visitor to his temple (who apparently resembles Apichatpong’s father, and Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien).

There are many niche film festivals in New York City. Be they region- or country-specific (the New York Polish Film Festival, the New York Asian Film Festival), neighborhood-friendly (the LES Film Festival, the Bushwick Film Fesival), thematic or cause-oriented (NewFest, Bicycle Film Festival), New Yorkers are both spoiled and overwhelmed by the cornucopia of fests this city has to offer.

As big as International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has become in the last four decades, it has maintained an air of egalitarianism apparent in the festival’s flouting of the red carpet tradition, and a deep dedication to innovation and breadth in its support of outlying cineastes.