Neighborhoods denote classes, streets denote who you are. Man, depending on where you were born, your story is written even before it starts. These are the opening lines of The Twelve Labors, an earnest if naïve addition to the growing canon of Brazilian films taking the struggle of the country’s dark-skinned and lower classed citizens as its subject. Spoken in narration by 18 year-old protagonist Heracles, they prove a pitch-perfect example of the clunky hand with which first-time director Ricardo Elias’ handles the material. Recently released from a jail bid, the troubled but well-meaning Heracles joins his well-to-do cousin at a local courier as a motorcycle delivery boy. Heracles wants to go straight and the film posits his first day on this gig as the penultimate moment of his shot at redemption. As he sets out on errands, haggling with secretaries and wealthy citizens alike, the boy’s mettle is repeatedly tested under a pounding soundtrack and Brazilian sun.

Despite taking the Herculean myth as its inspiration, The Twelve Labors spins a narrative that neither elucidates nor clarifies the lives of its characters nor the world they live in. The aforementioned labors prove pedestrian, rising to the complexity of Heracles learning brotherhood by waiting five minutes with a fallen motorcyclist, or circumventing a snotty secretary by observing a fellow courier stamping his own invoice. Taken on their own, these accomplishments amount to the average kinks of the first day on a job. When wed to Heracles' painfully arched voice-over, however, they are cripplingly trite. Most damning of all is a shameless homage to The 400 Blows in which Mr. Elias ends his film with Heracles journeying a considerable distance to the coast of Brazil, walking out into the rising tide and looking back into the camera just as Antoine Doinel did in Truffaut’s masterwork. It would be one thing if the moment were earned and presented as an allusion to some metaphysical connection between the films’ protagonists, but such is not the case. Coming after so much purposeful intent wielded as a mask for narrative shortcomings, it is but the final in a series of letdowns in a film with a voice incapable of articulating its earnest ambitions.

In John Barker’s Bunny Chow, three South African comedians set out on a road trip to perform at Oppikoppi, South Africa’s bigger, badder, better version of Coachella. David Kibuuka, Kagiso Lediga, and Joey Rasdien all play versions of themselves, riffing off one another with a locker-room rancor honed on years of friendship. Kagiso is the funniest of the trio, a laid-back ladies man with a beautiful girlfriend despite his womanizing ways. Joey plays the Arsenio to Kagio’s Eddie, chiming in with sweet follow-up jabs when not stressing over his wayward devotion to his Muslim heritage. David plays the straight man to both, an aspiring comedian cum dishwasher with a heart of gold and the instincts of a tire iron. Slight on narrative but long on verve, the film represents the best of DIY filmmaking and homegrown cinema with its fuck-it-all video cinematography and frank depictions of sex, comedy and rock and roll. Moving from fidelity to interracial dating and the politics of post-Apartheid South Africa, Bunny Chow manages to be sincere, hilarious and engaging despite covering the seemingly superficial topic of stoners and their conquests to get laid.

To his credit, Mr. Barker never directly addresses the oddity of three black comedians performing for a snow-white crowd hundreds of miles away from the progressive city centers of his homeland. Rather than submit to the flagrant devices so readily available, he and his cohorts slip them into the corners of their scenario: As Kibuuka and his beautiful white muse screw in the back seat of his car with the rock fest booming around them, the woman asks, “Can I call you Dark David?” Kibuuka pauses everything to think this through as the haze of sex envelopes him. It’s in this moment that Bunny Chow states all it needs to in living up to it’s namesake, an allusion to a loaf of bread from which the inside is scooped out and filled with a melting pot of ingredients.

Steve Kurtz is an artist and educator who lost his wife (heart failure) and freedom (the FBI launches a terrorism case against him) on the same day. Strange Culture, the hybrid documentary by Lynn Hershman Leeson, retells Kurtz maddening experience in equally maddening fashion. At once a dramatic reenactment piece and alternately a straightforward news-style documentary, the film creates a formalistic rubric wherein the lines between life, art and journalism become indecipherably blurred. As Kurtz and his wife Hope, Thomas Jay Ryan and Tilda Swinton open the film as the couple arguing cautiously over breakfast. Twenty minutes later, the real-life Kurtz appears speaking as himself (and proceeds to narrate and reappear at random throughout). Ten minutes thereafter, Ms. Swinton and Mr. Ryan are glimpsed between takes, speaking as themselves and of themselves portraying and grappling with the Kurtz’s lives.

Lost in the muddle of so much formalism is the heartstring drama of Kurtz’s ordeal. By presenting the story in such intellectual fashion, Ms. Leeson (willfully, or inadvertently, it’s unclear) makes Strange Culture a purely intellectual endeavor. As such, it cultivates a language all its own, sacrificing the purity of experiencing Kurtz’ anguish in straight-ahead fashion for an analogous blend of the real life story’s pain and the heady anguish of embellishing it through dramatization. The film doesn’t always strike the balance necessary to pull it off but it strides more than it falters. Given the merits of Kurtz’ story and the difficulty of bringing any tale to the screen, there’s victory in that.

Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako is an African film of the sort grown common in recent years: financed jointly with European and American backing, the film is an earnest polemic on the savage blows the international community has felled upon the continent. The World Bank, the IMF, G8 and even Paul Wolfowitz all take their lashes in the form of testimony given in the film’s main through line, a show trial in which the plaintiff, “African society,” argues against exploitation by the aforementioned defendants. Rather than rely solely on the histrionics of trial procedural monologues, Mr. Sissako pairs his interview-style court scenes – shot plainly in an open-air courtyard, the plaintiffs speaking at length in fixed frame, un-broken takes – with a mystical blend of the mundane and the absurd. As the trial takes its course, the stories of a dissolving marriage, a bedridden invalid and the listless lives of the Malian plaintiffs fill the periphery in a blend of metaphors at once plain and profound. Even the intrusion of a slapstick western shootout can’t derail the mission of Bamako. From first frame to last, Mr. Sissako dispenses his infallible case for his home continent in seasoned fashion. A rejoinder on the mention of Mr. Sissako’s exclusion of trial procedural histrionics; the film does conclude with closing arguments. Speaking passionately on behalf of the Malians, a French prosecutor mentions the futility of tossing Paul Wolfowitz into the Niger, quipping in deadpan, “The caimans wouldn't want him.” In this screening, an uproarious mixture of laughter and applause rose from the crowd. Hopefully somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa Abderrahmane Sissako was smiling.