Winner of Best Queer Film at Reykjavík Film Festival last year, The Country Teacher’s elegiac camera work and subtle character motivations give it the sweeping feel of classic foreign cinema, while its bites of wit give it a sense of the modern that makes this coming out story one you surely haven’t seen before.

Pavel Liska plays a talented science teacher born to a legacy of amazing teachers in Prague. Unfortunately, his erudite school and established family are as attractive as they are repressive; their implied prejudices against his sexuality providing no comfort.

After a failed relationship, he flees to the country to teach elementary school science. In his off hours he meets Maria, a widow who regularly rejects the forward men of the town but welcomes the teacher in immediately. Maria’s teenaged son is an awkward but alluring herd hand whose exploration of his girlfriend is, to say the least, explicit. It must be torture for the teacher to watch him play doctor so heedlessly in bales of hay, in the bath, in clear and open view of his mother and neighbors. When his reckless ex comes to find him in his country idyll, the teacher is confronted by a kind of pleasure he’ll no longer settle for: he’s decided he won’t have sex without love. But with the teacher’s unsteady footing, love is a hard thing to see clearly. — SARA SCHIERON