This year’s AFI FEST is certainly bringing festival-goers some of the year’s biggest titles, with world premieres of Hitchcock and Lincoln, not to mention favorites from this year’s festivals like Silver Linings Playbook and Amour, and yet, when I finally sat down to begin putting together my festival schedule, it seemed to be the smaller films that caught my eye and ended up on my personal must-see list. Certainly, films I have heard about from colleagues who have caught screenings of them at other festivals are accounted for here, but my tendency to gravitate toward lesser-known titles has led me to discover some amazing little gems such as films from director Ava DuVernay (I caught her film I Will Follow at AFI FEST back in 2010 and enjoyed her latest Middle of Nowhere during the LA Film Festival this year) and, of course, my love for music-focused stories always cause those films to get top billing from me. Check out the five films I am most looking forward to seeing during this year’s AFI FEST and let me know if you are also looking forward to any these films or if hearing about them here has piqued your interest enough to add them to your own most anticipated lists!

Here in the U.S. a lot of casual hate gets aimed at the French. The jokes are usually about surrendering during wars, hairy ladies, or what have you—the lame jokes aren’t important—it’s the “what have you done for me lately” attitude they reveal that’s important. Sure, the French gave us the Statue of Liberty all those years ago, but what have those cheese nibblers done for us lately? Turns out, quite a lot. And probably the three best things they’ve given us over the course of the last half decade or so are screenings of Jacques Audiard’s Un Prophète, Marion Cotillard’s stunning face, and M83’s stellar last few albums. For these things we should be grateful, and because the trailer for Rust & Bone reveals to us a new Audiard movie that contains both the music of M83 and the luminous face of Cotillard, we should be ecstatic. Pretty music and pretty faces aren’t the only thing Rust & Bone has to offer either, turns out it’s got a pretty crazy-sounding story as well. Though the new trailer for the film is a little abstract, and completely without dialogue, we already know that the plot details the life of a whale trainer (Cotillard) who loses her legs and then falls into a relationship with an underground fighter (Matthias Schoenaerts). Which, you know, is nothing if not unique.

Rust and Bone could well have failed. In many other hands the story of a killer whale trainer who loses her legs but finds strength and her resurrection in an unlikely relationship with an underworld bare knuckle boxer with a good heart…well, it could have been a monstrous amalgamation of Rocky meets Free Willy with the contrived over-sentimentality of Steel Magnolias. But in the hands of Un Prophet‘s excellent helmer Jacques Audiard, the film swerves the “cancer story”/Oscar baiting stigma that some will accuse it of thanks to a simple but engaging central story and two award-worthy performances from its central actors. Marion Cotillard plays said whale trainer – Stephanie – who loses her legs after a performance accident, and who regresses rapidly to a self-destructive stagnating state, but who finds hope and the capacity for her own resurrection through a relationship with Matthias Schoenaerts‘ bare-knuckle boxer Ali, who lives hand to mouth by any means before his underworld fights offer him and his son some opportunities for a slightly better life. Having briefly met Stephanie before her accident, Alain helps her to find herself again not through pandering or pity, but simply by offering his help and his company, and you have to give credit to Audiard that his story never strays towards saccharine, made-for-TV style sentimentality.