Keeping secrets can be a dangerous game, but sometimes hiding in the shadows is the only option. These five powerful short dramas from international filmmakers explore the emotional earthquakes that rumble through the lives of people suddenly forced to confront — or flee — shadowy secrets revealed in the world around them, by loved ones…or in themselves.

In An Exchange, a conservative family man finds comfort in a hotel room massage, while the masseur and the audience find out something rather less comforting. Meanwhile, at Dawn, two strangers in the subway have a dangerous, racist encounter, but may have more in common than they thought. Jason’s Dad kept secrets that he didn’t intend young Jason to discover, but which the grieving lad feels compelled to uncover. In the political thriller O.V.O., French filmmaker Alban Sapin creates a dystopian world that looks disturbingly like our own were an extreme neo-Fascist party to take power and target Jews, immigrants, and homosexuals; Laurent and his targeted friends must decide how to confront the O.V.O. party’s secret, menacing agenda. And finally, in contemporary Copenhagen’s cruisy underground, handsome Christian struggles to pick up the pieces of his shattered life after the untimely death of his ex-lover, whose family blames Christian for keeping secrets not of his making, in the gritty, beautifully acted and emotionally powerful drama Nomansland.