CANNES, France – “It takes great courage to embrace a leper,” Sister Agnes (Silvia Monfort) says in Robert Bresson’s sublime first feature, “Les Anges du Peche” (1943), which screened in a digitally restored print at the Salle Bunuel on Tuesday afternoon as part of the Cannes Classics series. Bresson’s was the third of five films I saw within a 24-hour period. The most astonishing spectacle I witnessed during that time occurred in the queue outside the Bunuel: The untouchables and near pariahs of the press caste system at Cannes were allowed to assemble with the fourth estate Brahmins.

Forgoing the contemporary offerings from around the world to see this 62-year-old gem felt downright naughty. But the past is prologue: Sister Anne-Marie (Renee Faure), the protagonist of “Les Anges,” makes a felicitous pairing with Grace of Lars von Trier’s “Manderlay,” which screened just the day before. Both Anne-Marie and Grace are ladies of privilege who want to minister to the less fortunate. Jettisoning her bourgeois bibelots before donning her nun’s habit, Anne-Marie awaits “a wonderful life with my outcast sisters.” Both films, with varying degrees of success, expose the pride of those who claim to be selfless.

A young woman is cast out into the night by her mother in Niki Karimi’s accomplished debut, “Yek Shab” (“One Night”), screening as part of Un Certain Regard. Negar passes the wee hours in Tehran in the passenger seat of cars driven by three different men: a brawny lecher, a gentle physician, and a silently seething graphic artist. Ms. Karimi’s first feature complements work by her Iranian compatriots Abbas Kiarostami (“Ten”) and Jafar Panahi (“The Circle”); all three films are quietly corrosive looks at sexual inequality.

While “Yek Shab” never registers louder than the hushed sounds of late night confessions, Shinji Aoyama’s “Eli, Eli, Lema Sabachtani?” also screening in Un Certain Regard, is an aural attack. The year is 2015 and an apocalyptic virus is spreading, causing those infected to kill themselves, victims of “lemming syndrome.” (Is this the cinematic year of the suicidal rodent? “EELS” is the second film in the festival, after Dominik Moll’s “Lemming,” to name-check the furry creature.) I’m still not sure what to make of Mr. Aoyama’s wall of sound blitz, but the amped up pounding and thrashing jolted me awake far more effectively than the many cafe cremes I had slurped down that afternoon.

I certainly couldn’t swallow Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu’s “Peindre ou Faire L’Amour” (“To Paint or Make Love”), a Gallic, witless “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.” “I’m fed up with still lifes,” restless Sunday painter Madeleine (Sabine Azema) complains to her retired husband. The pun fails, for nothing is more stagnant than this complacent tale of home renovating, mushroom picking, and partner swapping.

After sunset on Tuesday, I returned to my studio and discovered there was no electricity, the result of an early evening thunderstorm (and, I imagine, a wiring system installed when the Lumiere brothers were still in short pants). But maybe this was just what my eyes, besotted by a day of nonstop viewing, needed: nothing to look at but the flicker of a candle.