As in previous years the VIFF brings the best of Cannes to Vancouver. Here are some highlights before the full 30th anniversary program hits the street next Wednesday (September 7):

Julia Leigh’s debut feature Sleeping Beauty concerns a student who takes a job as an unconscious fetish object for dirty old somnophiliacs (yep, you should Google it).

Michael by Markus Schleinzer is about a pedophile and the boy he holds hostage. Wait, come back! Screen Daily writes, "Look beyond the subject matter to the film itself and you will discover a rigorously responsible, endlessly disquieting piece of work, acutely sensitive to issues of exploitation."

Another challenging film, Eva Ionesco’s My Little Princess stars Isabelle Huppert as Ionesco’s mom Irina, whose nude photographs of her young daughter prompted a brief vogue for pre-adolescent erotica in the ‘70s.

This Is Not a Film is Iranian master Jafar Panahi’s latest. Panahi was banned from filmmaking and put under house arrest after he criticized president Mahmoud. Ahmadinejad. Didn’t stop him from making this, though (with co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)

Mexico’s Miss Bala takes a beauty pageant winner and drops her in the middle the narco-hell on Mexico’s northern border. Variety called it a “blistering firecracker”.

Leave the sprogs at home for Eric Khoo’s animated feature Tatsumi, a tribute to gekiga pioneer Tastumi Yoshihiro that mixes biography with five of his most famous stories.

Pedro Almodóvar and Antonio Banderas have re-teame after two decades for The Skin I Live In, about a plastic surgeon obsessively experimenting on a woman held hostage in his mansion. The press release describes it Hitchcockian, but I’m calling Bava meets Franju in this beautiful trailer.

According to VIFF, Swedish film Play “sees five black immigrants employing sadistic, Michael Haneke-worthy mind games to shake down three well-heeled white kids.” A butt-clenchingly good time, then!