Monica Peña, Miami’s own boldly original experimenter, follows her fiction-doc hybrid debut Ectotherms with an equally beguiling and intriguingly structured tale of love and rot in the festering emotional swamp of The Magic City.

An attractive young couple spend an afternoon relaxing in the sanctuary of their garden, enjoying the sun-kissed delights of nature in repose and the lulling rhythms of their shared amorous pulse. Before long, however, they grow restless and uneasy as doubts, worries, bugs and other manifestations of the neurotic internal intermingle with the stifling humidity of their fecund and unruly external environment. Slowly but surely something wicked is worming its way into the couple’s precariously positioned bedrock.

Aided by a wildly evocative soundtrack from lead actor Brad Lovett (who moonlights as electronic musician Dim Past), Peña’s bracing vision pulls you along the fault lines of its emotional developments as the buoyancy of first love slackens. Deeply strange but also fiercely resonant, Hearts of Palm is an exhilarating reminder that stripping cinema down to its basic elements can sometimes penetrate primal feelings in ways that conventional narrative films rarely do. – Jaie Laplante

Hearts of Palm is also part of the Florida Focus film series.

This film is preceded by Swan Song of the Skunk Ape