The Melbourne International Film Festival has plenty to offer in its second week, with some films screening for the first time, repeat screenings of others and an ongoing series of lectures, master classes, panel discussions and other industry-related events.

There are a number of provocative films in the International Panorama section including Maryam Keshavarz’s Circumstance.

This Iranian American co-production explores the deepening friendship between two teenage girls from Tehran. A window into affluent middle-class Iranian life, the film is a trenchant critique of the many ways in which women’s lives remain circumscribed in contemporary Iranian society. Well-written, beautifully acted and with a telling denouement, it is definitely worth catching.

Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus (pictured above) is an equally compelling drama, and an interesting counterpart to Keshavarz’s film. Both deal with the vicissitudes of being female in a specific time and place. Based on the true story of South African-born Saartjie Baartman, the so-called ‘‘Hottentot Venus’’, Kechiche’s film details the devastating events of her short, exploited 19th-century life. An uncompromising indictment of Baartman’s treatment, Kechiche’s film explores 19th-century attitudes to sex and gender, ethnicity and race, class, nation and empire with clear implications for contemporary audiences.

Finally, MIFF’s perennially strong programming of Asian films is again in evidence this year with Accent on Asia dominated by contributions from South Korea. Of the films from that country, Journals of Musan is a must-see. A melancholic but unsentimental examination of a North Korean defector’s attempt to make a new life for himself in South Korea, the film depicts Seoul in a very different light. Rather than the popularly received images of a high tech paradise, director Park Jung-bum paints the city as an inhospitable, alienating world that ironically, for North Korean refugees, feels more inhumane than their oppressive, communist homeland.