The digital revolution has brought cheap filmmaking to the people, and the result is a flood of auteurist movies, most of them unspeakably bad. But the Pioneer Theater has become something of a curator for this deluge, presenting the best of these handmade films, which would never have reached screens 15 years ago. Even if the movies themselves aren’t entirely successful, their programming always picks talent that’s worth watching.

Their most recent discovery is “Wool 100%” the feature-film debut of the Japanese animator and maker of short films Mai Tominaga. It’s not a perfect film, and it’s certainly got its share of problems, but it comes from her heart and as such is more interesting than anything else that opens this week.

Told as quietly and gently as a rustle, Ms. Tominaga’s fairy tale concerns Ume and Kame, two crazy old ladies with matching space-helmet hairdos, living in a house encrusted with the junk they’ve rescued from the garbage over the years. The sudden arrival of an unnamed young woman, furiously knitting her own gnarled and knotty red sweater dress, throws everything into turmoil. Gradually the backstory emerges, events are set into motion, and as is common in these types of movies, everything ends in a cleansing fire.

Animation runs through this flick like veins of electricity, telling the story of these two sisters not in dialogue but in a dense and private language of symbols that is gradually taught to the audience until they’re fluent in heartbreak. “Wool 100%” may not have the most car chases, or the best special effects, or the biggest explosions, but it’s 100% personal, and 100% real.

The elderly professor peers curiously out from the crackly, static-filled black-and-white film stock and asks, “Are you interested in sex?” So begins Dušan Makavejev’s “Love Affair: Or, The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator” and, in case you were wondering, Mr. Makavejev is very interested in sex.

Mr. Makavejev’s film is part of BAM’s “Yugoslavian Black Wave” retrospective, running from September 12 to September 23, presenting a fistful of politically aware, artistically experimental movies shot in Yugoslavia in the ’60s that were the product of a cinema culture fed on the best Western of film and given a free hand with the sex, as long as they stayed away from the politics. Later they were denounced in a manifesto by good Communist party artists as a “black wave” of pornography, tragically obsessed with “religious darkness and mysticism, false humanism and mystical philosophy, great-Serbian nationalism, the false left and anarchistic calls for rebellion” created by “Communists who have lost political orientation.” Purges followed.

Yugoslavian art cinema sounds like the butt of a Monty Python sketch, and certainly there’s nothing in the shorts program by Karpo Godina that would convince you otherwise. Despite the presence of collaborators like Miloš Forman and Buck Henry, Mr. Godina’s shorts are a parody of bad European art films, some of them consisting of nothing more than interminable footage of soldiers marching through mountains set to ’60s folk rock.

But Mr. Makavejev’s movies are an eruption of infected brain tissue, a molten splatter of art, politics, and sexual subversion that still stings today. By keeping his eyes firmly focused on the more fleshy aspects of the revolution, he’s cooked up a batch of movies that have stood the test of time. Shot without official permission, his first film, “Man is Not a Bird,” is a biopsy of Yugoslavian small town life, caked with mud and shot through with sexual tension as model workers swing mighty sledgehammers in the steel mills and gold mines by day and terrorize their wives and girlfriends by night.

“Love Affair: Or, The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator” is a Dr. Jekyll narrative about a switchboard operator and her sanitation inspector boyfriend that keeps transforming into a snarling Mr. Hyde of an art film, assaulting the narrative with lectures on sex and poems about rat swarms. If David Lynch had been born in Yugoslavia and wasn’t scared of sex, this is what “Eraserhead” might have looked like. But Mr. Makavejev’s real masterpiece is “W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism,” the 1971 film that someone, somewhere in the world had to make.

Beginning as a documentary about Wilhelm Reich, it shatters into a swirling kaleidoscope of sex and politics, proclaiming, “The October Revolution was ruined when it rejected free love!” Two comely young workers, Milena and Jagoda, speak in revolutionary proclamations (“Comrades, make love sweetly and without fear.”) while romancing a Soviet skater, and the whole strange brew is peppered with footage shot in the offices of “Screw” magazine and of Andy Warhol superstar, Jackie Curtis, cruising through Times Square.

It’s a weapons-grade blast of pure orgasmic energy fired directly at the sexually retarded establishment, which ultimately backfired and came close to destroying Makavejev’s career — too funny for the intellectuals overseas who championed his work, too dirty for the establishment. But 30 years later its talking decapitated heads, casual sex, hilariously edited found footage of Stalin, and surreal death by ice skates is the kind of vaccinating brew that everyone needs to consume once.