Taking place in Cox’s Bazar, a coastal city in southern Bangladesh, the documentary Bangla Surf Girls shares the harrowing story of a girls surf club struggling to overcome the cultural taboo of women surfing. Documentarian Elizabeth D. Costa follows the lives of Shobe, Aisha and Suma, three teenage girls who are determined to surf despite complicated family dynamics and the restraints of poverty. The oppressive measures waged against these young women create social conditions that are like wading through rubble just to catch the perfect wave.

Bangla Surf Girls isn’t a spectacle of poverty or misogyny or culture. It shows the incredible lives of Suma, Shobe and Aisha in their normal backdrop. It's tempting to pity the girls, as the little grace they have slides past them, but Suma doesn’t dwell on tragedy. After all, they were out traveling and exploring, which is the important takeaway. We all have a soft spot for a coming-of-age story, but unlike genre classics, Bangla Surf Girls leaves the story with frayed ends. Without pushing any righteousness, the documentary shows the honest, sometimes devastating, sometimes inspiring, story of teenage girls navigating the ebbs and flows of their personal dynamics and the Bay of Bengal.

Scientists have proven that the human brain develops more rapidly from birth to the age of 5 than it does at any other time in one’s life. And yet when it comes to movies, there’s probably no other period harder to depict on screen. Films like Look Who’s Talking and The Boss Baby have certainly tried and, to an extent, succeeded in capturing the joys and chaos of infancy and toddlerhood. But they rarely manage to channel that age’s sense of discovery, mystery and terror.

In the charming new French animation flick Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (Amélie et la métaphysique des tubes), those feelings are front and center in a story that favors sensations over storytelling, plunging the viewer into the brain of a child waking up to the world around her for the first time. The twist, so to speak, in Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s feature debut, is that the child in question is a Belgian girl growing up in rural Japan in the 1960s — a place filled with countless natural wonders, but also marked by the scars of a major war that haven’t quite healed.

Adapted from the autobiographical novel by Amélie Nothomb (Fear and Trembling), the film feels at times like Terrence Malick meets Hayao Miyazaki for tykes, combining playful subjectivity with surreal flights of fancy. But it also maintains a narrative throughline that’s simple enough for any kid to follow, showing how its titular heroine literally emerges from her bubble to discover the pleasures and dangers of real life.