A scene from A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers (DOC NYC)

Three Asian films at the DOC NYC festival reveal spaces we rarely see and people we are unlikely to meet, even in a globalized, connected world. These outwardly calm works contain unpredictable emotions, immense risks, and power games sometimes unseen, sometimes thrust into the open.

“We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” The sinister conundrum perfectly describes the ominous march of progress in the tiny Chinese town of Gulu, center of On the Rim of the Sky, directed by Xu Hongjie. Located in southwestern China, Gulu clings to the top of dizzyingly tall, steep mountain peaks, aloft in utter isolation for hundreds of years. Its inhabitants live in close harmony with nature far away from TV, computers, or even electricity. The film examines what happens when the modern world heads up the mountain after a 2008 earthquake. Conflict arises. So does a larger question: Whether improvements really count as improvements when they sow distrust and rancor in a small community.

Two flawed figures from the old and new orders face-off over the fate of the village school, a grubby place where a slab of raw concrete serves as a ping-pong table and the net is a pile of rocks. Local teacher Shen has been running the classroom in yeoman one-man-band fashion for more than 20 years. He bristles when young volunteer teacher and city slicker Bao saunters into town with big plans and an attitude. Shen insists that he’s paid his dues, but he is rigid, self-pitying, and distinctly short on qualifications, with only a middle school degree. Bao harbors conceited fantasies of himself as a visionary modernizer and Che Guevara–style guerrilla. These two were born to despise each other, and soon the whole village is pulled into their ruthless struggle for the school’s fate.

On the Rim of the Sky balances the majestic beauty of its natural setting with the poverty of the hardscrabble village and seething anger barely controlled. The film handles charged material with admirable formal control, first expertly framing group shots of dutiful Chinese children in peacetime and then plunging cameras deep into the angry melees of grown-up plotting and groupthink that grow shriller as the conflict escalates.

The film refuses to take sides. It’s obvious who the losers are in the fight; the winner remains less clear, but the struggle has taken a toll no one imagined. The hills have eyes, indeed.

A squad of women in riot police uniforms brandish shields against other officers who are throwing paper cups. The women don’t look especially fit, and their advance against the attackers—themselves rather listless—feels tentative. Uh oh, you think. I know this is only a drill, but I’m worried about this crew.

Written and directed by Geeta Gambhir and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers documents a unit of policewomen from Bangladesh dispatched to Haiti on a peacekeeping mission after the 2010 earthquake and follows them into a danger zone far away from home. Their mandate is a daunting one from the start.

As they prepare to leave their families for a whole year, five of the women explain their motivations for the mission: a sense of national pride, the impetus to work, a desire to fulfill a family legacy. And they share their worries about being gone so long. While the Bangladeshi milieu is colorful and the revelations heartfelt, too much time is spent on cheery group pep talks and singalongs before departure, and the mood feels a little earnest and slow.

When the unit arrives in Haiti, filmmakers stop showing and start telling, and that’s when things start to get interesting. If you were concerned that the women’s training barely prepared them to handle a pillow fight, you were right to be. It‘s scarily clear that the unit is not ready for Port-au-Prince’s hungry, angry crowds. The women need to up their game fast if they want to get out alive, let alone make a difference. How they face the task and make their way home takes up the rest of the film, where pride and a sense of loss vie to be the dominant endnote. Throughout, the women’s dignity and courage are an uplifting sight in a dispiriting mission.

A side observation: The film appears to be making a goodwill attempt to build cultural bridges between East and West by showing middle-class Bangladeshi women sharing the same burdens as their Western sisters: child care issues, money problems, the balance between career and family. But a handful of chilling scenes undercut the comparisons. When a woman lies in a Bangladesh hospital horribly burned by her husband and a squad member’s Islamist son disdainfully issues dogmatic judgments against his kind, brave mom, we are reminded that male supremacy casts a darker shadow in some places than in others.

A rebel painter has fled the repressive police state of North Korea. His art and life are in peril. In I Am Sun Mu, the artist speaks, but director Adam Sjoberg films him from the back or blur his features to preserve his anonymity, although everyone around him seems to know full well who he is. Is the technique a necessary precaution or coy act of hype? This is just one of the gnawing questions that hold back this worthy, decorously paced film from striking the blows for artistic freedom that it aims for.

I Am Sun Mu leads up to the painter’s first exhibit in Beijing, the first unauthorized show by a North Korean. Sun Mu’s work mocks North Korea’s notoriously kitschy, hysterical state propaganda, and he’s afraid that his too-sharp satire could antagonize the Chinese regime. His bold and graphic images of dictators and lookalike Young Pioneers don’t seem that different from the agitprop they satirize. Is the send up too broad? Not biting enough? It’s hard to tell.

The filmmakers capture him at home, painting, conferring with his gallerist and colleague, and recalling his escape from the Hermit Kingdom. A dangerous undertaking that usually takes other defectors months to plan was apparently a spur-of-the-moment impulse for him. The artist is soft-spoken, given to holding forth about the cosmos. He shies from naming any artistic influence, deflecting the question with “Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il are my only influences. That’s funny!” For all his provocation of authority, there is something essentially hidden and enigmatic about this man. Gentle free spirit or evasive poseur? We don’t know.

I Am Sun Mu may artificially gin up suspense as the date approaches for the art opening, but the story’s ending mutely confirms what the film has been implying all along. We and Sun Mu can’t see state power, but it’s lurking out there, waiting for the right moment to pounce.