A stray Chabrol, the next Juno and more Toni Servillo brilliance are among this year's hidden gems on the festival circuit. Hunt them down now before they're buried for ever

Home festivaling is one of the few perks of losing mobility through a back injury. What better way to cover 300+ screen events across the UK for Empire Online's Festivals & Seasons page than letting them come to you? Much festival fare falls squarely into the three-star category. But, every now and then, a disc arrives in the post containing a gem that leaves you wondering how the distributors missed it. So here's a personal selection of the festival favourites that have either failed to secure a UK release in 2009 or are not currently on the schedule for next year.

10) Let's Dance (dir. Noémie Lvovsky, France)

Festivals are invariably stuffed with quirky ensemble pieces, with Laís Bodanzky's superbly choreographed The Ballroom and Ivy Ho's intricately structured Claustrophobia among this year's best. But nothing compares to Noémie Lvovsky's audaciously frantic celebration of late-life exuberance, which is all the more remarkable as it succeeds in being hilariously offbeat about Alzheimer's and the Holocaust. The ever-reliable Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi excels as the dutiful Jewish daughter concerned about parents Jean-Pierre Marielle and Bulle Ogier, who have lived apart for 25 years while remaining married. But it's Marielle's romance with kooky teacher Sabine Azéma that ensures the action keeps veering off in wholly unexpected directions.

9) Constantin and Elena (dir. Andrei Dascalescu, Romania)

Sharing a sense of bucolic melancholy with Slovakian Marko Skop's Osadné, Andrei Dascalescu's profile of his grandparents captures a passing lifestyle with respect rather than regret. Together for 55 years, Constantin and Elena potter around their Edenic garden in a picture-book village in north-eastern Romania. He belts out tunes that sustained wartime morale, while she trills the hymns learned at her childhood convent. They are the epitome of soulmates, and while they wish they had more time ahead of them, they view what they have achieved on behalf of their community and family with a quiet pride that is deeply moving.

8) Ballast (dir. Lance Hammer, USA)

When it came to hardscrabble landscapes, only Hungarian newcomer Csaba Bollok's Iska's Journey and Russia documentarist Oleg Morozov's Until the Next Resurrection could match the waterlogged expanses of the Mississippi Delta captured by British cinematographer Lol Crawley for Lance Hammer's directorial debut. This grindingly rigorous and austerely authentic tale of an African-American shopkeeper trying to reconnect with his family is superbly enacted by the non-professional cast, while Kent Sparling's inspired sound design saps the spirit with each squelching footstep and doleful car journey along a characterless backwater highway. Simultaneously beautiful and bleak, warm and sombre, this is what slice-of-life cinema should look and feel like.

7) Bellamy (dir. Claude Chabrol, France)

It's inconceivable that Claude Chabrol's first collaboration with Gérard Depardieu won't eventually find a distributor. The study of a Maigret-like police inspector who can't resist investigating an insurance scam while holidaying in Provence with wife Marie Bunel, this is as much a domestic drama as a policier. With Edouard Serra's camera prowling around locations in Nimes and Sète, this is a typically atmospheric Chabrol outing that delves into his recurring themes of bourgeois hypocrisy and the unfathomable logic of love. Dedicated to Georges Simenon and Brassens, this cryptic treatise on ambiguous motivation and flawed perception could easily give rise to a sequel.

6) Everyone Else (dir. Maren Ade, Germany)

Birgit Minichmayr won the Best Actress prize at Berlin for her superb performance in Maren Ade's sophomore feature, as a vulnerable eccentric whose spikiness makes her duel with introspective architect Lars Eidinger so compelling and excruciating. Recalling Giulieta Masina in Nights of Cabiria (1957) and Johanna Wokalek in Barefoot (2005), Minichmayr is a bundle of contradictions and provocations. But it's the courageous way that Ade sustains the emotional intensity and dares to risk such an unconventional denouement that puts this on a par with Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage (1973) as a study of the inexplicable dynamics of togetherness.

5) Dear Lemon, Lima (dir. Suzi Yoonessi, USA)

The debuting Suzi Yoonessi ably remains the right side of twee in turning her adolescent journal into a delightful misfit comedy. Taking her cues from Ghost World (2001) and Juno (2007), she treats the darker moments with due gravity. But she also uses fond nostalgia and gentle lampoon to explore identity, peer pressure and belonging without ever patronising her protagonists or the audience. Drolly designed to temper the kitsch of 13 year-old Savanah Wiltfong's pastel-coloured imagination with the rougher realities of her Alaskan existence, this rousing celebration of heritage and diversity culminates in Wiltfong's team of no-hopers triumphing in the school's Snowstorm Survivor competition.

4) The Girl By the Lake (dir. Andrea Molaioli, Italy)

Relocating Karin Fossum's novel, Don't Look Back, from Norway to the Friulian Dolomites, Andrea Molaioli's cerebral whodunit won 10 Donatello Awards in its native Italy. Having mischievously trailed a red-herring case of child abduction, Molaioli springs the murder of a vicacious babysitter and begins to reveal the dark secrets lurking behind the locale's postcard façade. Ramiro Civita's cinematography superbly conveys the chill beneath the surface tranquility. But it's Toni Servillo's mercurial detective that leaves the deepest impression, as he combines the impassivity familiar from his collaborations with Paolo Sorrentino with a Maigret-like inscrutability that depends as much upon reading character as unearthing clues.

3) Snow Prince (dir. Joji Matsuoka, Japan)

In my opinion, the best kidpix usually emanate from northern Europe. But in relocating Ouida's much-loved 1872 novel, The Dog of Flanders, to Japan in the mid-1930s, director Joji Matsuoka and Departures scribe Kundo Koyama have produced the most beautiful children's film of the year. Everything about this poignant account of bourgeois Marino Kuwajima's adolescent friendship with impoverished artist Shintaro Morimoto is exquisite. The photography and period design are impeccable, while the script deftly acquaints younger viewers with the good that can still emerge from the harsher realities of life. This is the kind of family entertainment that Hollywood has long forgotten how to make.

2) The Yellow House (dir. Amor Hakkar, Algeria)

Among the many films about middle-aged males struggling to retain their niche and dignity in the face of drastic social change, Hajime Kadoi's Vacation and Rashid Masharawi's Laila's Birthday were bettered only by Amor Hakkar's charmingly understated drama. Hakkar also stars as an Algerian vegetable farmer, who trundles across country on his Lambretta tricycle to collect the body of the son killed on national service before returning to devote himself to rekindling grieving wife Tounes Ait Ali's love for life. Indebted to Iranian and Kurdish cinema, as well as David Lynch's The Straight Story (1999), this is screen humanism at its most elegiac and sanguine.

1) The Portuguese Nun (dir. Eugène Green, Portugal)

Strewn with long silences and even longer takes, this is a deadpan reverie on love and faith, film and life. Yet it's also impishly poetic and singularly moving and would form a fine double bill with Michael Whyte's No Greater Love. In Lisbon to shoot De Guilleragues's Letters of a Portuguese Nun, atheist actress Leonor Baldaque has an epiphany after encountering Sister Ana Moreira in a backstreet church. Some will bridle at Eugène Green's highly stylised minimalism, the self-reflexive friskiness, the surfeit of literary and cinematic references and the extended fado interludes. But for all its idiosyncratic charm, this is a deceptively passionate and poignant picture.