San Francisco filmmaker Michael Jacobs was floored when his new film, “Audience of One,” was among 26 features from around the world selected for the 36th edition of the New Directors/New Films series, a leading international showcase for the work of emerging filmmakers that begins today. The 88-minute documentary is virtually unseen. It has had only one major public screening — at last week’s South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas — and is scheduled to show Thursday at the Museum of Modern Art, which co-produces the annual program with the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

“We really only just cleared the film a week ago,” said Mr. Jacobs, whose work had to compete with other contenders previously screened to large crowds of cinema insiders at trend-making festivals in Sundance and Toronto. “It’s so rewarding that the curators saw in it something they really liked, and wanted to include it in this amazing lineup.”

Of course, Mr. Jacobs’s pluck in getting a high-profile New Directors slot is nothing compared to that of his indefatigable subject, a Pentecostal minister named Richard Gazowsky, who claims to have been quietly instructed by God to direct a $50 million biblical science-fiction extravaganza. Mr. Jacobs, a contributing producer for Current TV, Al Gore’s “network for the people,” first heard about the preacher’s pipe dream in 2005. He began filming almost immediately, as Mr. Gazowsky led his flock to Italy for an almost incomprehensibly hapless week of shooting. The minister then leased a massive facility from the city of San Francisco — only to be evicted for failure to pay rent when a magical $200 million in financing failed to materialize.

Through it all, Mr. Gazowsky is an unsinkable optimist. The rotund cheerleader wants to be the D.W. Griffith of Jesus movies, and in his ambition (and eagerness to talk dizzyingly high-concept), could almost be any wannabe Jerry Bruckheimer, pitching the suits in Hollywood. “You couldn’t make this stuff up,” Mr. Jacobs, whose unimposing camera hovers like the proverbial fly on the wall, said. Before the film is over, Mr. Gazowsky is dead-broke but still aiming for the skies. And beyond. His ultimate goal: To colonize outer space.

Such moments are a key appeal of the New Directors series, which has a remarkable track record for exposing talent on the verge. Previous editions of the 36-year-old festival have introduced such names as Atom Egoyan, Richard Linklater, Pedro Almodóvar, Sally Potter, Barbet Schroeder, and Darren Aronofsky, among many other art house favorites and Oscar winners. One particular treat is the post-screening question-and-answer sessions, which allow audiences to pepper the directors with their thoughts. Sometimes, the chemistry can be so volatile that the postscript is as engaging (or indulgent) as the film itself, as when Vincent Gallo championed the psychotic extravagance of his “Buffalo ’66” at the 1998 festival.

This year’s participants include a trio of filmmakers from Argentina (Alexis Dos Santos’s Patagonian coming-of-age drama, “Glue,” is a hot ticket), as well as those from Switzerland, Italy, Russia, Belgium, Poland, Denmark, France, Iran, Britain, and Park Slope, Brooklyn — home to novelist and second-time director Paul Auster (“The Inner Life of Martin Frost”).

The international vibe is well defined by Julia Loktev, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, who attended film school at New York University and now lives in Brooklyn. Ms. Loktev’s new film, “Day Night Day Night,” marks her first full-length feature but her second time at New Directors/New Films. (Her 1998 documentary “Moment of Impact,” about her father’s debilitating brain injury, will be screened March 29, as part of the ND/NF classics sidebar.) Inspired by an article she read in a Russian newspaper, Ms. Loktev has imagined the day and night before a young female suicide bomber’s fateful visit to Times Square, and what happens after she gets there.

“The important thing is not what happens but how it happens,” said Ms. Loktev, who captures an astonishingly nuanced performance from an unknown actress (Luisa Williams) that evokes the cinematic memory of two different Joans of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer’s and Robert Bresson’s). The accumulation of odd details is drawn from Ms. Loktev’s obsessive consumption of the news. The director recalled reading an item about a suicide bomber who, en route to driving a truck loaded with dynamite into a military base, paused to buy bananas from a roadside vendor. It makes no sense, and yet it makes perfect sense.

The same logic prevails for Ms. Loktev’s fictional terrorist, who is of indeterminate ethnicity. “This girl has never been to New York before,” she said. “She’s very likely never been to any city. So she can’t help but be drawn in. Why wouldn’t she buy a pretzel?”

For Ms. Loktev, the New Directors/New Films festival provides a happy launch for a film that has already been lauded on the international festival circuit and will have its theatrical opening in May. “It’s an honor to be invited back,” she said, flashing on her first time at the event. “Coming out of nowhere, it was a dream for me.”

The New Directors/New Films Series runs through April 1 at the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater.