At one point in Jean Luc Godard’s hazy, splintered, and confounding new feature, Film Socialisme, which opens this year’s Dallas Video Festival, a young woman in a cute striped dress and aviator glasses leans up against a gas pump reading a book. The camera zooms in and we see she is reading Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine. A few moments later, the woman, nameless, like nearly all the “characters” in Godard’s loosely sketched meditation, yells from off screen: “If you make fun of Balzac, I will kill you!”

We have to take her on face value, I suppose, especially considering the character embodies the same steely and determined romantic intellectualism that made Godard’s films from the 1960s zing with a sexy, intelligent revolutionary urgency. We may also take her defense of Balzac as the director’s own. The French author’s Comédie, a series of novels and stories written in the aftermath Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, offers a kind of panorama of French life in the wake of a tumultuous cultural and political upheaval — a reshuffling of the deck. Godard’s own series of vignettes, Film Socialisme offers a collection of tiny stories and philosophical and historical ruminations. There is a parallel between our own time and Balzac’s, he suggests, and we are currently withstanding the same sense of uncertainty, confusion, fear, and anxiety.

Although Godard’s Film Socialisme is dark and difficult, it is the perfect opening night film for this year’s Dallas Video Festival, which brings together a number of films which are preoccupied with the precarious nature of our present time. Perhaps it is inevitable that this film festival, one Dallas’ oldest, and in my opinion, its best, finds itself mired in such topics. From its founding in the 1980s, Video Fest has wedded its content with its medium, beginning with videos at a time when there was still a clear delineation between what a “video” was and what wasn’t. Now the festival’s scope has expanded to visual technology in general.

Characteristic of the energetic, enthusiastic, and forward-grasping curiosity of the festival’s founder, Bart Weiss, this year’s fest will again include a number of programs and features that employ the latest intersections of new technologies and visual art. These include an iPhone app festival guide; workshops on creating film websites, mastering the latest version of digital editing software Final Cut Pro, and on creating child friendly apps; and the Stories of Dallas competition, which tapped Dallas residents to use the camera’s in their pockets – cell phones, flip cams – to capture their own stories.

But it is Godard’s take on Balzac, which perhaps more than technological innovations, adequately lends this festival a sense of thematic coherence. Concerned with the nature and fate of Europe’s cultural patrimony, the first act of Film Socialisme is set on a cruise ship which wanders from port to port in the Mediterranean. It is an arc-like metaphor for our lost world, saturated with information, technology, and diversion. It is a vision that is frustrated and confused, and yet remains faithful to the hope that through the production of images – from the caves of Lascaux, that most primal artistic urge – we might be able to scratch out a future, or at least a vision of one.

The Price of Sex

A number of the films I was able to screen in the run up to this year’s fest possess the same sense of urgency about our muddled times. One of the most powerful moments in The Price of Sex (Saturday, 5 p.m. Angelika), photojournalist Mimi Chakarova’s fearless exploration of Eastern European sex trafficking, comes when she asks a woman who founded a hotline for Moldavian sex slaves how to solve the problem. The challenges to ending sex slavery that the woman lists with a chilling, fatalistic smirk encompass all of the world’s essential incongruities: the gulf between rich and poor states, the hypocrisy of the west, the corruption of governments and police. The list is long and impossible, and it is supplement a little while later by a Greek police officer who wonders in an aside if in our civilized world, we can really call it “civilized” anymore. Chakarova’s images of Dubai nightclubs and Turkish red light districts populated with European, American, Arab, and Asian johns alike, indeed questions just what is the common denominator of our contemporary civilization.

Tony and Janina's American Wedding

This admonishing is not reserved to far off lands or foreign victims. The documentary Tony & Janina’s American Wedding (Saturday, 1:30 p.m. Angelika) tracks the struggle of a Polish couple, who, after 18 years living in the United States, are split apart when a 2007 immigration law forces Tony’s wife Janina to be departed. She takes their young, American-born son with them as the naturalized Tony fights to find a legal route to reunite the family. The issue of immigration is always most harrowing when seen in a close-up, and here we see individual lives destroyed as a result of legal technicalities and bureaucratic confusion. But the most nauseating moment in the movie by Ruth Leitman comes during a congressional hearing in which Tony tells his plight to lawmakers. A Republican congressman from Iowa reprimands Tony and a Navy war veteran from Mexico who is also on the panel for not explicitly mentioning that they love freedom or America in their testimonies, as if their years of struggle, service, hard work, or dedication don’t speak for themselves. Rarely do we see the pig-headed ideologies that sometimes drive public policy exposed so nakedly.

Where Soldiers Come From

Where Soldiers Come From (Thursday, 9 p.m. Angelika) is a documentary that follows a group of friends from Upper Peninsula Michigan who join the National Guard. The movie finds ample opportunity to address similar disillusionment with the state of contemporary American politics and the debt of human suffering ideological policies levy on the average American citizen, but the beautifully shot, melodic documentary is not a political advocacy piece. Rather, it carefully and artfully captures the impact of deployment on the lives of soldiers, their families, friends, and towns. If it were shown alongside last year’s Restrepo, the two movies could comprise a non-fiction version of The Deer Hunter.

Kumare

Perhaps the most enjoyable – and morally befuddling – movie I was able to see was Vikram Gandhi’s hilarious Kumare (Friday, 7 p.m., Angelika). Gandhi introduces his movie with an extended voiceover sequence that recaps the young man from New Jersey’s long and often uneasy fascination with religion. Disillusioned and increasingly perturbed by the Hindi and yogi preachers that seemingly dupe naïve American pupils for their own financial and sometimes sexual gain, Gandhi decides to explore the role of spiritual leaders by becoming one himself. He heads to Arizona where the movie takes a Borat-esque turn, as Gandhi’s created yogi master, Kumare, spouts gibberish and feigned wisdom yet nonetheless wins dozens of devoted pupils. While the movie offers a hilarious skewering of New Age spirituality, it also raises some serious questions about the nature of spiritual practice and the innate human need for community and transcendence. And though both Kumare’s deception and its wishy-washy religio-secular conclusions are dubious, the film initiates a potent conversation.

Connected

Ironically for the Dallas Video Festival, in the context of these numerous conversations about our own time’s spiritual wanderings, it is the film that proposes technology as a kind of existential savior that proves wholly unsatisfying. The movie is Webby Awards co-founder Tiffany Shlain’s Connected: An Autobiography about Love, Death, and Technology (Saturday, 7 p.m. Angelika), and it is one of the most infuriating movies I have seen in some time. I owe my inflamed reaction to Shlain’s indulgent, half-thought ruminations on the state of things in part to my recent viewing of Adam Curtis’ BBC Documentary “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” (highly recommended and available on YouTube). Lock-in-step with the Silicon Valley ideologues Curtis takes apart in his film, Shlain’s film is in part a pop-scientific redux of her father Leonard Shlain’s books, which try to link a dualistic vision of mental activity with an over-simplified reimagining of human history. The rest of Shlain’s film is an internet infomercial.

Lost and befuddled over the future of the human race, Shlain proposes that the interconnectivity of the internet will solve all of our problems because, in short, she believes more brains working on a problem will inevitably solve all problems. It is the inverse of Godard’s vision and his floating techno-saturated cruise ship. Shlain hopes the future will emerge as harmonious, tech-driven utopia. It is a sweet, though hardly convincing idea in light of the vision, proposed by Godard and supported by some of the festivals other films – a vision that we have already arrived in our new world, defined not by group think, but a deafening, Babel-like cacophony.