DESPITE its slender means and intense global competition, the Turin Film Festival remains a font of genuine creativity.

The festival has always had a name for showcasing the work of new-generation film-makers and so it proved with this year’s winner Keeper, a first film from the Belgian Guillaume Senez.

In this coming-of-age tale, (pictured) two 15-year-old lovers Maxime (Kacey Mottet Klein) and Melanie (Galatea Bellugi) are thrown into turmoil when she gets pregnant.

What ensues is direct, passionate and engaging as they struggle to come to terms with their life-changing situation, right up to an emotionally charged finale.

The programme provided a unique opportunity to survey the works of one of the most extraordinary Italian film-makers Tonino De Bernardi in Des Provinces Lointaines by Catherine Libert and Stefano Canapa.

From a poetic walk on the snowy peaks of Moncenisio to the hills of Casalborgone, passing through the No TAV garrison — set up to oppose the construction of a high-speed rail link — and the river Dora by night, De Bernardi and his disciple Alberto Moro converse about their encounter with cinema and how it became embedded in their lives. An astonishing road trip.

Marco Santarelli’s Duster, set in a prison library, pitches a group of Muslim inmates into a discussion about what the concept of a constitution means to them.

An intriguing journey inside and outside the prison walls, it reflects the hopes — and illusions — of those continuing to dream of a fairer world.

A sense of meditation on nature emerges in A Sud Di Pavese by Matteo Bellini, inspired by the experiences of the great Italian poet Cesare Pavese.

A communist and anti-fascist, Pavese was exiled from Turin in 1935 to the south of Italy and there, among Macedonian immigrants, he continued to write his lyric poems.

It’s a film which reveals a man who held fast to his principles in the harshest circumstances.

Another exceptional entry in the festival was Elisabetta Sgarbi’s Colpa del Comunismo, which focuses on three Romanian women living and working as carers in Italy.

Drawing on themes of solidarity, friendship, shared memories and the hybridised traditions of communities absorbed into Italy, Sgarbi’s third film, mixing documentary and fiction, is bang up to the minute.

Highly original, and masterfully written, Jose Luis Guerin’s The Academy of Muses follows a professor of philology who, after a confrontation with his wife, finds something has irreversibly changed in their relationship.

An engrossing journey into a life confronting conventions, it’s a masterpiece of screen poetry.