The latest entry in the year-round film festival that the San Francisco Film Society is programming at the Sundance Kabuki, The Forsaken Land, is set in war-torn Sri Lanka and won the prestigious Camera d’Or prize in Cannes in 2005.

This is exactly the kind of movie that the dedicated Film Society screen was intended for: a movie that received great acclaim on the world’s festival circuit that wasn’t picked up for broad release, but rewards viewers with its beauties that wouldn’t carry the same kind of weight on the small screen. The sensual long takes used in the telling of this tale about a family trying to live their complicated emotional lives during a time of civil war have been compared to the great Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky. (And some have described the lingering images of the Sri Lankan countryside as nature porn.) For the kind of film buffs that have been flocking to the Sundance Kabuki for the Society’s eclectic programming, there is no higher praise. -Meredith Brody