Everyone spent the last two weeks arguing over who wore what on the Lido, and fair enough, the dresses earned every headline, but underneath all that taffeta an actual film festival was happening, one that handed its top prizes to work strange and sharp enough to be worth clearing an actual Friday night for. Here are the four titles that walked away with Venice’s blessing this year, and exactly why each one is worth the ticket.

Woman Unknown (Leone d’Oro)

Denmark’s May el-Toukhy took the festival’s top prize with this one, and it earns every inch of it. Set in Copenhagen in the summer of 1945, it follows Marie, a former housemaid one wedding away from a comfortable life with a wealthy widower, until her wartime romance with a German soldier starts clawing its way back into the light. Mathilde Arcel won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actress for the role, playing a woman caught in the specific, merciless math of postwar reckoning, where surviving an occupation and being punished for it can happen in the same breath. It’s the kind of history lesson your school skipped, going down easier than it has any right to.

Wild Horse Nine (Coppa Volpi, Best Actor)

Martin McDonagh built his name on pitch black comedy, In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, and Wild Horse Nine might be his funniest, meanest work yet. John Malkovich won the Coppa Volpi playing Charlie, a dying, morphine fogged former CIA assassin who drags his partner Lee, played by Sam Rockwell, to Easter Island in 1973 to make peace with a career built on other people’s coups. Steve Buscemi and Parker Posey round out a cast having entirely too much fun with dialogue this quotable. It hits theaters November 6.

Possible Love (Leone d’Argento, Grand Jury Prize)

After eight years away, Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong, Burning, Poetry, returned to Venice with Possible Love and walked off with the Leone d’Argento plus a six minute standing ovation proving the wait was worth it. The film follows two married couples whose lives tangle together once a documentary filmmaker starts interviewing laid off workers, and the closer his camera gets, the more everyone’s careful arrangements start to crack. Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu lead a cast handling heartbreak the way only Lee Chang-dong movies do, quietly, and devastatingly. It premieres on Netflix November 6, after a brief theatrical run in October.

A Place to Heal (Marcello Mastroianni Award)

French director Cedric Kahn set this one, titled 15/18 at the festival, inside an adolescent psychiatric ward, and rather than mining the setting for cheap devastation, he finds something closer to tenderness. The story follows Lucia, seventeen, newly admitted and reconnecting with an old friend, building fragile alliances with fellow patients and an attentive medical team while a new arrival quietly upends the ward’s delicate balance. Newcomer Malou Khebizi won the Premio Marcello Mastroianni for her performance, becoming exactly the kind of discovery festivals exist to produce. There’s no US release date yet, but this is exactly the sort of film worth tracking down at your nearest arthouse the second it