Highlights of the Venice Film Festival

Films to watch out for at the Venice Film Festival, which focuses heavily on Middle Eastern and Indian movies.

Michael Keaton, left, and Edward Norton in Birdman. Courtesy Fox Searchlight

Films from the Middle East and India feature prominently at this year’s Venice Film Festival, which looks set to be marked by a vein of bruising realism.

This tone was first suggested when François Truffaut's The 400 Blows was revealed to be the inspiration for the poster for the festival's 71st edition.

Stories of economic woe, war, religious exploration and existential strife will reflect our troubled times, in a line-up that’s likely to provoke heated passions, debate and, possibly, a touch of controversy.

Among the films of particular interest to Middle East audiences are:

• Tales, from Iran's socially conscious Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, follows the lives of seven everyday characters to create a gritty, present-day snapshot of her country and the social and administrative problems afflicting it. It is one of 20 titles competing for The Golden Lion, the festival's prestigious top prize.

• The financial crisis looms large in the Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes, which is also in the running for The Golden Lion. An American production, co-written by Amir Naderi and Bahareh Azimi-Khoie, the independent drama stars Spider-Man's Andrew Garfield as a man who attempts to get his home back by becoming a kind of devil's apprentice to the corrupt, gun-toting real-estate agent (Michael Shannon) who evicted him.

• Iranian filmmakers aren't just making their presence felt in the main competition. Guillermo Arriaga's portmanteau feature, Words with Gods, which is screening out of competition, includes a section by Iran's Bahman Ghobadi – which is billed as a "tragic-comic tale of lust and faith" – as well as a contribution from the New York-based Indian director Mira Nair, among others.

• Sticking with Iranian filmmakers, Mohsen Makhmalbaf's The President, a European co-production about a coup d'état in a fictitious Caucasus country, and Nima Javidi's Melbourne, in which a young couple's plan to visit the eponymous Australian city coincides with a tragic event, have been selected to open the festival's Horizons and Critics' Week threads, respectively.

• Horizons also features: Theeb, Naji Abu Nowar's UAE/Jordan/Qatar/UK co-production, a period drama that explores the effect the First World War has on the life of a young Bedouin boy in Hejaz Province in 1916. (Check out Tuesday's Arts&Life for our interview with Nowar); Court, a film about India's judicial system, from Chaitanya Tamhane; and shorts from Italy/Iran, Israel and Jordan/Palestine. If there were a prize awarded for courage, then the crowd-funded documentary, On the Bride's Side, in which a Palestinian poet and an Italian journalist risk being arrested for human trafficking as they try to help Syrian refugees reach Sweden by faking a wedding, would surely be a contender.

• The Critics' Week entry Villa Touma – a melodrama set in Ramallah during the early days of the Israeli occupation, directed and produced by the Arab-Israeli screenwriter of The Syrian Bride and Lemon Tree, Suha Arraf – could be one of the hottest tickets at the festival. Weeks before the festival began, the film was already stirring up controversy when its producers objected to its billing. Although Arraf submitted the film from Palestine, it turns out more than two-thirds of the funding came from Israel.

• The Bengali-language film Labour of Love, featuring Ritwick Chakraborty (also the film's director) and Basabdutta Chatterjee, will play in the independent Venice Days sidebar.

• The festival opens with Birdman or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Directed by Mexico's Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel), the bonkers-looking black-comedy features the former Batman star Michael Keaton as a former action-hero actor who found fame playing a superhero bidding to be taken seriously by staging a Broadway play. According to Kent Jones, the director of the New York Film Festival: "Birdman is a knockout ... consistently surprising and ­inventive".

• Andrew Niccol's The Good Kill reunites the director with his Gatacca star Ethan Hawke, for a tale about a drone operator who begins to question the ethics of his job, and there are also new works from Fatih Akin, David Gordon Green, Abel Ferrara, Barry Levinson, Joe Dante, Lisa Cholodenko and James Franco.

• Joshua Oppenheimer continues to plumb the subject of massacre, following up his disturbing, Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing with The Look of Silence. One of a handful of non-fiction features selected for presentation at Venice, the film is about a family living with the legacy of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965 to 1966.

The 71st Venice Film Festival opens on Wednesday and runs until September 6.