The images of Mexico hit you fast and hard at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival, and like the country itself, they’re often full of contradictions. You’ll see serene sand dunes cut through with metal border fences, beaten bodies lying in the back of a pickup truck, young teens clinging to the tops of rumbling trains, rich guys boarding a private jet, and cluttered country kitchens decorated with white twinkler lights.

Filmmakers have endless inspiration in the embattled but vibrant country, and they’re leading an exciting new wave of cinema on view at VIFF. The selection is as diverse as it gets: Heli is a brutal but artful look at a working-class family that accidently gets drawn into drug violence; Purgatorio: A Journey to the Heart of the Border is a poetic meditation on the surreal world of the U.S.–Mexico border lands; La jaula de oro is the gritty story of three Guatemalan kids fighting their way to El Norte; and We Are the Nobles is an over-the-top comedic satire of the upper class.

Sometimes these films aren’t easy to watch. In the case of Heli, the peaceful life of a hardworking family is thrown into blood-spattered chaos when the daughter takes up with a boyfriend who hides stolen cocaine on their rooftop. The atmospherically shot movie nabbed Amat Escalante the director’s award at Cannes, and Heli was just named Mexico’s foreign-film submission for the Oscars. But its high profile has drawn controversy; some of Escalante’s fellow Mexicans don’t want the police corruption and gang violence he portrays representing the country.

“Those criminals that are doing the things I’m showing—those people are the traitors,” Escalante says with a quiet passion from his home in Guanajuato, near the arid countryside where he shot Heli. “What’s happening in Mexico deserves all kinds of stories and deserves something deep to tell about the situation. For me, there should be even more stories told about this.

“I love the place where I am, and I suffer when I see things that are unfair, and you see that in my movie. But the movie is also not just about suffering,” he adds. “My movie even stays short of the horrors that go on that one reads about every day. What I try to do in my movie is focus on the people, and how would it affect this family.”

In his impressionistic Purgatorio, Rodrigo Reyes takes a more deliberately objective approach. His film is a stream of images and voices, of migrants standing by towering border fences and talking about their dreams; a southern U.S. coroner who attempts to identify the remains of the border hoppers he receives every week; and a U.S. “border angel” who leaves water and supplies for the people trying to cross the desert. With a tiny crew of three in a beat-up van (sometimes attracting the attention of curious border officials themselves), Reyes and his team collected images of the bizarre border landscape of abandoned buildings, endless car junk yards, rugged desert, protest rallies, and ominous fences.

“I think it just came from being in between both cultures,” says Reyes, speaking to the Straight from Merced, California, where he now lives. “I realized I had a connection to that space because my identity was connected to the border.”

“The point of the film is that there’s a deeper reality that goes beyond numbers. I knew I didn’t want to pick good guys and bad guys,” continues Reyes, who credits his nonjudgmental approach to his day job as a certified Spanish interpreter in California’s court system. “I wasn’t interested in picking a story about victims or people fighting adversity. I saw it almost as a stage for humanity, because, when you think of it, the border only exists because we imagined it.”

Although his approach is vastly different from those of the other Mexican filmmakers at VIFF this year, he shares a similar ethic: of trying to capture a complex human reality.

Still, that complexity makes him loathe to offer up solutions. “I did not make a film that would fix a problem,” Reyes explains. “I don’t think the border can be fixed.”